A press release last week from Unisys gives a disturbing glimpse into the extent to which border guards — possibly including US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other components of the US Department of Homeland Security — are making decisions on the basis of automated “pre-crime” predictions of future bad actions or bad intentions. […]
The European Parliament has approved (press release, breakdown of votes, text as adopted) a directive requiring each “member state” (country) in the European Union to: Establish or designate a new travel surveillance and control agency (“Passenger Information Unit”), Require all airlines operating flights to or from places outside the EU to transmit complete copies of […]
President Obama’s televised speech last Sunday included a smorgasbord of proposals (and endorsements for proposals already made by members of Congress) for more control and surveillance of travel. We’ll look first at the proposals for restrictions on travel by foreign visitors to the US, followed in our next post by some of those that would […]
Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson announced this morning that, with immediate effect and with no advance notice or warning, foreign citizens “seeking to travel to the United States from countries in our Visa Waiver Program (VWP) will be required to provide additional data fields of information in the travel application submitted via the Electronic […]
A Congressional hearing last week on the so-called “Secure Flight” system for “screening” domestic air travelers confirmed that the TSA has completed a shift from blacklist and whitelist matching to a comprehensive real-time pre-crime profiling system that assigns each air traveler a “risk assessment” score on the four-step scale we’ve previously described and which is […]
Since late last year, we’ve gotten several inquires from readers wondering why they got a boarding pass marked “TSA Pre-Check” or were sent through the “Pre-Check” lane at a TSA checkpoint even though they hadn’t participated in the “TSA Pre-Check Application Program”. The confusion stems from the TSA’s own misleading publicity about the program, which […]
According to an article in POLITICO based on interviews with unnamed “law enforcement officials,” the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is considering expanded use of airline reservation data to target travelers for more intrusive searches: The department could begin analyzing the travel patterns of suspected domestic extremists, monitor flights they book on short notice […]
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 […]
In the aftermath of the storming of the U.S. Capitol last week, there’s been a confused cacophony of calls to “put the rioters on the no-fly list.” At the same time, there have been equally confusing claims and denials that some people found out that they had already been “put on the no-fly list” when […]
While we were watching US election returns, our neighbors to the north were adopting new travel regulations that incorporate some of the worst aspects of the US system of surveillance and control of air travel, and in some respects go even further in the wrong direction. Canadian authorities don’t generally want to be seen as […]