Amtrak has reportedly given the Transportation Security Administration several months of archives of Amtrak passenger reservations and frequent rider profiles. At Amtrak’s request, the TSA has used these records to test the TSA’s ability to extend to Amtrak passengers the ID-based profiling and blacklisting algorithms the TSA already applies to air travelers. If you aren’t […]
Buried in the final 500-page PDF file of redacted and munged e-mail messages released by Amtrak in December 2018 in response to a FOIA request we made in 2014, we got the first hint at an answer to one of the questions that originally prompted our request: What did Amtrak think was its legal basis […]
Changes in Greyhound business practices jeopardize the already-limited options for cross-country travel by people in the USA who don’t have, or don’t chose to show, government-issued ID credentials. For local transportation, undocumented people who want or need to travel further and/or faster than they can walk can ride bicycles (although there have been proposals in […]
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 […]