Papers, Please!

The Identity Project

Category Archives: Cars, Buses, & Trains

Sep 30 2011

How would REAL-ID affect the right to travel?

In the latest step in the implementation of the REAL-ID Act and the establishment of a de facto national ID card and database, the Department of Homeland Security has requested OMB approval for the collection of additional information from states and individuals.

The public response to the DHS request, particularly these comments submitted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), highlight the important unanswered questions about how REAL-ID Act implementation will affect the right to travel:

EPIC’s comments focus on the widely-publicized recent case of  Lewis Brown, a former high school and college basketball star who died on a street in Southern California homeless, earlier this month:

EPIC writes today to draw the agency’s attention to the death of Lewis Brown, a former college basketball prodigy, who died on the streets of Los Angeles because he could not scrape together the money to obtain a state-issued identity document…. According to the New York Times, Brown, a basketball legend at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, planned to fly to visit his family in New York and could not. Homeless and destitute, living on the sidewalks of Hollywood, Brown had developed cancer and planned to go to the hospital. Brown’s mother learned about his condition and stated that she wanted to see him “before he died.” Brown’s sister, Anita, told him to visit New York. Brown told confidants that he lacked funds to qualify for a California identification card, and was taking donations and borrowing money.

Read More →

May 23 2011

Senator wants more ID-based controls on rail passengers

Earlier this month Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) proposed that the TSA’s “Secure Flight” system be extended to passengers on domestic Amtrak trains. That would mean that Amtrak would be required to send passenger information to the government, and receive a “cleared” message for each passenger before allowing them to board a train.

Summary denial of transport by a common carrier, much less a government-operated carrier like Amtrak, would violate both the First Amendment right to assemble and the right to freedom of movement guaranteed by Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

But extending “Secure Flight” to train travelers would be a stupid idea even if it were legal. Rail sabotage has often been a tactic of war, but it has rarely been carried out by passengers. Sabotage can be carried out anywhere along the tracks, or anywhere saboteurs can get access to rolling stock, including freight cars.

Even the Chicago Tribune, the conservative and usually hawkish newspaper-of-record of Amtrak’s main hub and the hub of America’s freight rail system, immediately responded to Schumer’s proposal with an editorial characterizing it as “security theater for Amtrak.”

Most press reports incorrectly characterized Schumer’s proposal as calling for the “creation” of a no-ride list for Amtrak trains.  That’s indicative of how little awareness there is of the scope of existing systems of ID-based prior restraint on common carrier travel, including international Amtrak trains.

Under the “Advance Passenger Information System” (APIS) used for international flights, passenger trains, and cruise ships, Amtrak already requires passengers on its international trains to and from Canada to provide personal information (beyond anything needed by Amtrak for operational purposes), and passes that information on to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for inclusion in the Automated Targeting System (ATS) which is used to decide whether or not to give each passenger government permission to travel. Read More →

Feb 04 2009

Amtrak police arrest participant in Amtrak photo contest

On December 21, 2008, Amtrak police arrested a photographer taking pictures on a public platform at Penn Station in New York … in response to an Amtrak photo contest calling for the public to submit photos of Amtrak trains.

We had heard about this story before, but now the Colbert Report has the story including an interview with the photographer, Duane Kerzic, and a reenactment of the incident, in the form of a great parody of the new Homeland Security USA “reality” show.   Kerzic’s own Web site includes his own description of what happened and actual photos before and after his arrest (including his injuries from the police).

Full episodes of the “real” Homeland Security USA are available in a peculiar streaming video format on the ABC television Web site.  (The player will only work if it thinks you are running Windows XP or Vista, but you can get it to work in Linux by using Firefox for Windows in the Wine environment.)

Episodes of the show broadcast to date, and available online, include such incidents as the warrantlesss “dump” of the data in a cell phone carried by a person trying to enter the U.S. from Canada, and their (and their companions’) being refused entry to the US based on a phone number in the cell phone believed to match a number associated with an entry for a different person on the no-fly list.  All without any hearing or involvement by a judge, of course, and without their being told anything about the data in the no-fly list entry used as the basis for refusing to allow them into the U.S.