Playing out the endgame we predicted last year of a two-decade campaign by the US government to establish a global regime of government surveillance of air travelers, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has adopted an amendment to the Chicago Convention on Civil Aviation that will require each of the 193 state parties to that […]
Having successfully used the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as a vehicle for policy laundering on RFID transceivers in passports, the US government is making a new push toward its decade-old goal of getting ICAO to adopt a standard mandating (a) government access to Passenger Name Record (PNR) data and (b) the creation of airline […]
Invoking memes that we’ve seen and warned about before under both Democratic and Republican administrations, President Trump has attributed the latest version 3.0 of his “Muslim ban”announced today (proclamation, FAQ, explainer) with the need to comply with ICAO and INTERPOL standards for passport issuance, “identity management”, and data sharing about travelers — as though US immigration […]
In a speech to the Air Line Pilots Association earlier this week, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano made explicit the US government’s intentions to, as we have repeatedly predicted, use the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as its primary international policy-laundering forum to bypass and override national laws restricting surveillance and control of travel. […]
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has been holding another round of meetings this week at its headquarters in Montreal. As we predicted, the US delegation has been pressing its vision of an integrated and standardized global system of surveillance and control of air travel, in which government access would be built into airline reservation […]
News reports about recent diplomatic initiatives by the US Department of Homeland Security suggest that the DHS may once again be using the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as a vehicle for policy laundering. In the past, ICAO has been the focus of attention for its role in the imposition of RFID passports and the […]
National governments of all members of the United Nations are being pressured to implement new U.N. mandates for surveillance, profiling, and control of air travelers. These unprecedented mandates for the creation and deployment of new surveillance and “pre-crime” policing systems in every U.N. member state are the result of a successful twenty-year campaign carried out […]
During its online annual general meeting this week, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) rolled out a new proposal for an app-based system of control over air travel that IATA is proposing for use by its member international airlines and by governments. The scheme is being promoted as a response to the COVID-10 pandemic, but […]
The New York Times published a lengthy but deeply flawed report last week, “Airlines Refused to Collect Passenger Data That Could Aid Coronavirus Fight.” Here’s the lede: For 15 years, the U.S. government has been pressing airlines to prepare for a possible pandemic by collecting passengers’ contact information so that public-health authorities could track down […]
On March 26, 2020, the World Economic Forum published specifications and launched a new website for a project it has christened “Known Travel Digital Identity” (KTDI): World Economic Forum KTDI project page (with links and list of partners) KTDI.org March 2020 KTDI specifications 2019 KTDI video on Vimeo 2018 KTDI video on Youtube Marriot / […]