The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has announced the formation and rebranding of new and existing DHS components into what it is now calling the DHS Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (“C3P” in milspeak). C3P is explicitly intended to be a “precrime” crime prevention agency, and to teach and promote “precrime” techniques for predicting […]
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 […]
Last week 404 Media published a report by Joseph Cox on how the New York Metropolitan Transit Agency’s website can be used as a remote stalking tool: anyone who knows a credit card number that was used to purchase or add value to an OMNY transit farecard could view a historical log of the last […]
[Florian Gutsche of the VVN-BdA: An embarrassment to Germany’s reputation? Or a credit to it? And does his black shirt prove that he’s dangerous?] On Friday, February 24th, Florian Gutsche, a German citizen and the national chair of the German Association of People Persecuted by the Nazi Regime – Association of Anti-Fascists (VVN-BdA), was intercepted […]
[CommuteAir routes operated as “United Express”] In news first reported by Mikael Thalen and David Covucci of of the Daily Dot, Swiss hacker maia arson crimew has found versions of the Transportation Security Administration’s “No-Fly” and “Selectee” lists dating from 2019 on insecure Amazon Web Services cloud servers used by the airline CommuteAir for software […]