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The Identity Project

Monthly Archives: August 2025

Aug 11 2025

Flock expands pre-crime policing from air travel to road travel

New tools deployed and offered to law enforcement agencies by Flock Safety, the largest US aggregator of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data from both government and private cameras, are moving Flock from data mining into profiling and pre-crime predictive policing. This marks the expansion to road travel of the profiling and predictive policing that was developed and has until now been applied primarily to air travel.

Flock’s data warehouse  includes billions of monthly records, each of which links a unique vehicle identifier (license plate number) to a precise date, time, and location. Flock boasts that it is now using artificial intelligence (i.e., more complex algorithms) to identify patterns and “surface” evidence of suspicious activity.

This moves Flock from a surveillance company and provider of investigative tools to a provider of suspicion-generating and predictive tools for “pre-crime” policing. This makes  a quantitative difference in degree of intrusiveness and danger, of course, but there’s also a qualitative difference between an investigation based on a lawful pre-existing basis for suspicion, and dragnet surveillance intended to generate a basis for new suspicion (that can in turn be used as the basis for further surveillance, search, seizure, detention, etc.).

Thanks to Jay Stanley for calling attention to these new Flock tools in articles on the ACLU website and and in his own Free Future newsletter.

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Aug 05 2025

Higher fees for visitors to the US

Tourists and business visitors to the US from most of the world will have to pay additional fees or post bonds of from $250 to $15,000 per person — over and above the current $185 per person visa fee — under provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act enacted last month  and separate regulations under a preexisting law published today in the Federal Register.

The consequences for inbound international tourism as well as travel to meetings and conventions in the US from most of the world are likely to be devastating. Nobody is going to hold a meeting — conference, trade show, academic symposium, etc. —  in the US under these rules if they want global participation. If other countries reciprocate, as some probably will, US travelers could be hit with much higher fees when they travel abroad.

The biggest beneficiary of these changes to US laws and regulations is likely to be Mexico, where Cancun is by far the most obvious choice for meeting and convention planners looking for an alternative venue close to the US with more hotel rooms than anywhere in the Americas except Las Vegas, the busiest international airport in Latin America, and more welcoming entry and visa policies than the US for visitors from around the world.

Bonding companies and moneylenders from banks to informal lenders to loan sharks offering to underwrite loans and post bonds for would-be visitors who can’t afford to pay the US visa fees in full are also likely to profit from the new US rules. So will the bounty hunters they will hire to track down and collect from US visitors whose “visa bonds” (and whatever they put up as security for them) are forfeited because they can’t prove to the satisfaction of US authorities that they complied with all of the terms and conditions of entry to and departure from the US — or simply at the “discretion” of US visa officers.

The new US law and regulations establish a three-tier schedule of US fees for short-stay visitors, depending on the citizenship of the traveler:

  1. Citizens of the small number of most US-favored nations in the US Visa Waiver Program will remain eligible to enter the US, after completing an extensive online questionnaire including  a list of all their social media accounts, for only a $21 Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) e-visa fee.
  2. Citizens of countries that are neither especially favored nor disfavored by the US will be required to pay a visa integrity fee of at least $250 (in addition to the visa fee and other visa application requirements). The minimum of $250 is set by law, but the amount can be increased without limit at the discretion of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
  3. Citizens of disfavored countries will be required to post  a visa bond of $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000, with $10,000 as the default, before their visa can be issued.

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Aug 01 2025

Senate postpones hearing on TSA facial recognition and ID verification

Earlier this week the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation postponed  a scheduled hearing on a bill that would limit some uses of facial recognition by the  Transportation Security Administration (TSA), while authorizing the TSA to carry out “identity verification” of airline passengers and take mug shots of all those air travelers who don’t show an “approved identification document”.

The original version of the “Traveler Privacy Protection Act” as it was introduced in 2023 would have imposed a straightforward prohibition on use of facial recognition by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) without explicit Congressional authorization: “The Administrator [of the TSA] may not, for any purpose, use facial recognition technology or facial matching software in any airport unless such use is expressly authorized by an Act of Congress enacted after the date of the enactment of this Act.”

It is, of course, a sign of how far beyond its legal authority the TSA has already gone that Congress would need to consider a bill to explicitly prohibit the TSA from exceeding the authority it has been granted by Congress. But that’s the situation we’re in.

The revised version of the bill put forward in 2024 as an amendment to the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization act and reintroduced as a standalone bill in 2025 would authorize use of facial recognition by the TSA for “confirmation of the identity of a passenger before admittance to the sterile area of the airport,” provided travelers are given notice that being photographed is voluntary and that the TSA “does not subject passengers who choose the opt-out option to discriminatory treatment, additional screening requirements, less favorable screening conditions, or other unfavorable treatment.”

The revised bill would also mandate that the TSA, “for each passenger who chooses the opt-out option, performs identity verification using an approved identification document and without collecting any biometric information from such passenger… The [opt-out] option … does not apply with respect to a passenger— (i) who does not provide an acceptable form of identification at a security checkpoint; and (ii) whose identity the Administrator may need to verify through alternative measures to enter the sterile area.”

This bill would thus impose a new obligation on the TSA to carry out “identity verification”, leaving it ambiguous what (if anything) is required of travelers. But as we noted when this revised language was first introduced last year, despite the ambiguity in the bill,  it would for the first time create at least an arguable statutory basis for the TSA to claim — as it undoubtedly would claim, in a shift from its consistent admission to date in court that no law or regulation requires air travelers to show any ID — that airline passengers are required to identify themselves in some fashion, either through an approved ID document or facial recognition.

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