We’ve received and posted the latest installment in a continuing trickle of responses to a Freedom of Information Act request we made in 2014 for records related to Amtrak’s collaboration with US and foreign law enforcement and “border control” agencies. The most recent batch of records released by Amtrak consists mainly of email correspondence between […]
The encouraging disclosure in the latest installment of documents released by Amtrak in response to one of our Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests is that some travel agents resisted Amtrak demands that they collaborate in surveillance, profiling, and control of train travelers by entering passport or ID numbers and details in each reservation for cross-border Amtrak travel. […]
Since the start of the post-9/11 shift from case-by-case government access to travel reservations to dragnet surveillance of all reservations and pre-crime profiling of all travelers, the government has claimed repeatedly that the information to which it has demanded access was already “routinely” provided by travelers to airlines and other travel companies. We’ve recently received […]
The latest installment in Amtrak’s response to one of our FOIA requests confirms our suspicion that Amtrak has given US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) access to all Amtrak reservations including those for purely domestic passengers and trains — but in an additional and harder-to-track manner than we had previously been aware of. In October […]
Documents released to us by Amtrak suggest that since 2012, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has had direct access to Amtrak’s reservation system, possibly including access to reservations for Amtrak passengers traveling entirely within the USA. What do these documents show? And why would an immigration and border patrol agency want access to records […]
Amtrak has released a third batch of records (1st interim response, 2nd interim response) in response to our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information about Amtrak’s collection and “sharing” with the US and Canadian governments of information about Amtrak travelers on international routes between the US and Canada: Amtrak-FOIA-29OCT2014-signed.pdf (note that this file […]
Eight pages of command-line formats for users of Amtrak’s ARROW computerized reservation system have been made public in the second of a series of interim responses to our Freedom of Information Act request for records of Amtrak’s collaboration with police and other government agencies in the US and Canada in “dataveillance” of Amtrak passengers. The […]
The first “interim” release of documents responsive to our FOIA request for records of police and other government access to Amtrak reservation data show that Amtrak is not only giving police root access and a dedicated user interface to mine passenger data for general state and local law enforcement purposes, but also lying to passengers […]
Amtrak has admitted to profiling its passengers, while improperly withholding any mention of its transmission of railroad passenger reservation data to DHS for use in profiling and other activities. In response to a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request from the ACLU, Amtrak has disclosed profiling criteria that Amtrak staff are instructed to use as […]
On December 21, 2008, Amtrak police arrested a photographer taking pictures on a public platform at Penn Station in New York … in response to an Amtrak photo contest calling for the public to submit photos of Amtrak trains. We had heard about this story before, but now the Colbert Report has the story including […]