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 […]
There are elections today in the USA. But we don’t need to know their outcome to predict many of the issues that the Identity Project and our supporters and allies will continue to face in the coming years. For what it’s worth, everything that was on our agenda for the first Obama Administration, following the […]
Citizens of the USA and some other most-favored nations have long been able to travel to many European countries for tourism or business without visas or prearrangements and with minimal border formalities, as long as they didn’t stay too long or seek local residence or employment. This is scheduled to change with the imposition of […]
US government travel blacklists (euphemistically described by the government as merely “watchlists”) are being used to restrict airline travel and target searches of electronic devices of organizers of protests against US support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza, according to a complaint filed this week in Federal court by attorneys for two blacklisted Palestinian-American US […]