Freedom To Travel – Page 11

Mar 11 2019

US government strategy for surveillance and control of travel

In December 2018, the White House announced that President Trump had sent Congress a classified “National Strategy to Combat Terrorist Travel”.

Two months later, in February 2019, the White House released both this “National Strategy to Combat Terrorist Travel” (supposedly as signed in December 2018, and with no indication that it had ever been classified) and a companion “National Strategy for Aviation Security” (also unclassified and dated December 2018).

Together, these two documents give an overview of both the extent and the manner in which the US government intends — and believes that it has the authority — to surveil all travelers, monitor and log all movement of persons in the US and worldwide, and exercise administrative prior restraint over all such travel based on extrajudicial “pre-crime” predictions.

Nowhere in either of these vision statements is there any mention of the First Amendment, the right of the people peaceably to assemble, the right to travel, or international human rights treaties.

Nor is there any mention of existing legal means for restricting movement through court orders (injunctions or restraining orders), of judicial review of administrative controls, or indeed of any role at all for the courts.

While these documents were signed by President Trump, they express goals that have been pursued by both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Here are some of the main themes in these road maps for government action: Read More →

Feb 08 2019

Government permission to travel: “Authority to Transport”

A white paper on the use of PNR and API data (airline reservations), published by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in January 2019, lays out more starkly than ever before the goal of governments around the world: a permission-based system of government control and prior restraint in which a common carrier must receive “Authority to Carry” (authority to transport) with respect to each passenger, before allowing them to board any flight.

We’ve talked about this sort of permission-based travel control before, including in this 2013 overview of the system of US government surveillance and control of travel. (See our slides from that presentation). But we’ve rarely seen governments spell out so explicitly their intent to convert travel from a right to a privilege which can be exercised only by permission of the police:

An iAPI system allows for a two-way communication in near real-time. The airlines transmit the API message on a per-person basis to the requesting authorities at the time of check-in, while law enforcement agencies have the opportunity to decide whether a certain person is allowed or not to board a plane by issuing a board/no-board message.

The OSCE document, brought to our attention by Statewatch and NoPNR, is the latest revision of a white paper on “the use of Advance Passenger Information (API) and Passenger Name Record (PNR)” data, revised following an OSCE seminar on “Passenger Data Exchange” with governments held in November 2018.

The diagram and description of the iAPI permission system and the mention of “Authority to Carry” — transforming the use of API and PNR from passive surveillance to active government control and prior restraint — have been added since the previous version of the white paper posted by OSCE in March 2018, less than a year ago.

Why the new openness about this government agenda? As the white paper and other recent international initiatives for surveillance and control of travel make clear, governments have been emboldened by their largely successful (to date) policy laundering efforts to get travel surveillance and control mandated by the UN Security Council in the name of the War On Terror and/or “aviation security” mandate.

This purported authority is of questionable validity, given that it contravenes rights to freedom of movement recognized by international treaties and the US Constitution. And the actual basis, if any, for declining to give “Authority to Carry” a particular disfavored individual often has nothing to do with terrorism, aviation security, or any crime.

But the willingness of governments such as the members of OSCE to talk openly about their travel control agenda reflects their belief that they have obtained all the legal authority they need, and no longer have to worry about public outrage at the idea that they think freedom of movement is a special privilege, not a right.

The OSCE white paper also includes this chilling map of the countries where governments already obtain copies of commercial information about air travelers, before their flights:

These travel surveillance and control systems rely on systems for identification of travelers, which are being developed and mandated in parallel. Those efforts will be the focus of the next annual symposium and exhibition on ICAO’s Traveller Identification Programme (TRIP) at ICAO headquarters in Montreal from June 25-28, 2019.

Only public expressions of outrage, and public acts of resistance, will get governments that want to control our movements to back down before this sort of permission-based control of our movements becomes, as they intend, the global norm.

Jan 23 2019

New US push for an ICAO air travel surveillance mandate

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 passenger surveillance and profiling units, in all ICAO member countries.

As first noticed by Statewatch, the US made a proposal to ICAO’s High-Level Conference on Aviation Security in late November 2018, “for ICAO to establish a Standard(s) regarding the collection, use and analysis of PNR data.” The US argued that:

Of urgent concern to combat would-be terrorists and terrorist activities, is the need to elevate the collection, use, processing and protection of Passenger Name Record (PNR) data to standards within Annex 9 and/or Annex 17.

To insure compliance with aviation safety norms, many countries’ laws require airlines to comply with ICAO standards. So elevating an ICAO “recommendation” to a “standard” amounts to making it a de facto international legal obligation for airlines — without the need for the potentially messy and public process of adopting new national laws or ratifying a new treaty.

The US proposal for an ICAO PNR standard also alludes to resolutions regarding government access to and use of PNR data, which the US has pushed through the UN Security Council in a parallel policy laundering campaign:

At the Tenth ICAO Facilitation Panel that took place in Montréal in September of 2018, the Panel noted that UNSCR 2396 had urged ICAO to work with its Member States to establish a Standard for the collection, use, processing and protection of PNR data. This issue was raised as one with some urgency to help address issues relating to the protection of such data and to help resolve the conflict of laws between requirements to disclose and to protect the data. Several States offered to support the Secretariat in working towards developing the Standard in question without which States cannot derive the full benefits of using PNR data.

What this really means is that requiring airlines to allow governments to use their commercial data about travelers for purposes of surveillance and control of air travel would violate national laws which can be overridden only by making this an obligation through an international treaty body such as ICAO.

The US proposal calls for restrictions on freedom of air travel based on “risk-based assessments” (i.e. pre-crime predictive profiling) and on “associations” between individuals (i.e. how and with whom individuals exercise rights of assembly and association protected in the US by the 1st Amendment to the Constitution) :

Effective border security incorporates analysis of secure electronic data, some of which is provided at the time a passenger buys a ticket and some that becomes known when a passenger boards an aircraft. Passenger identification controls must be applied before the arrival of the passenger in the country of destination, to enable relevant border agencies to perform risk-based assessments of passengers and the goods they are carrying. Analysis of this data can illuminate the hidden connections between known terrorists and their unknown associates.

The recommendations made by the 2018 High-Level Conference on Aviation Security will be considered by ICAO’s governing Council of member countries in 2019. There doesn’t yet appear to be a publicly-disclosed PNR standard ready for adoption, but it couldn’t be clearer that this is the goal toward which the US continues to push ICAO.

Jan 21 2019

“Refugees could travel to Europe or America by air. What’s stopping them?”

An article by Saad Hasan for TRT World (the English-language news service of Turkey’s national public broadcasting network) highlights a life-and-death issue for refugees: Why are thousands of asylum seekers who could afford to buy a plane ticket to Europe or the USA dying every year trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea or the Sonoran Desert to reach a country where they can find sanctuary from persecution?

The answer, as we told TRT World, is that, “These deaths of the asylum seekers during migration are a direct consequence of carrier sanctions. Sanctions imposed by governments on airlines for transporting unsuccessful asylum seekers are killing thousands of people a year directly around the world.”

The article notes that, “The Geneva Convention allows an asylum seeker to board a commercial flight even without a visa. But airlines face the risk of paying a fine if that person’s application is rejected and he has to be flown back.”

We’ve raised this issue repeatedly with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Just last week, we asked the UN Human Rights Committee to include it in its list of issues for the upcoming review of US implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:

An asylum claim cannot be made or adjudicated until after a claimant arrives in a country of refuge. Asylum seekers cannot be required to have any specific documents, and their inability to obtain travel documents from a government from which they arefleeing may be part of the evidence supporting their asylum claim.

A common carrier has an obligation to transport all passengers willing to pay the fare in its tariff.

But the U.S. imposes civil fines on airlines and other carriers that transport unsuccessful asylum seekers. These “carrier sanctions” turn inherently unqualified airline ticket sales and check-in clerks into de facto asylum judges of first and last resort, with a government-imposed financial incentive to err on the side of denial of transport. For asylum seekers, denial of air transportation either acts as a categorical bar to reaching U.S. territory to make a claim for asylum, or leads asylum seekers to use irregular and often fatally unsafe routes and modes of land or sea travel to reach the U.S.

Some other sources interviewed by TRT World suggested that the consequences of “carrier sanctions” could be mitigated by issuance of “humanitarian visas” for asylum seekers. But as we pointed out, “Foreign embassies and airports are closely watched by local police. If someone comes to the embassy seeking asylum and isn’t immediately given sanctuary then they can be subject to additional persecution.”

Solving the problem of deaths in transit doesn’t take a lengthy legislative process like introducing a humanitarian visa. Almost by definition, not everybody who applies will be given such a visa. And any visa will have to be applied for at a consulate or embassy in a country where an asylum seeker may be subject to retaliation for visiting such a consulate.

All it takes to reduce these deaths is a small change in administrative practice: Stop fining airlines when they bring people to a border or port of entry and the people are not admitted, and enforce their duty as common carriers to transport anyone willing to pay the fare in their tariff.

If the country and the airline don’t want the expense of returning failed applicants for asylum, airline regulations could require that an airline must transport passengers without visas if they have purchased a return ticket or a ticket onward to another country. This is already required for most visitors to the US or the European Union, even if they have visas. This would double the revenue to the airline for each such refugee. For legitimate refugees, most of those return tickets would expire unused, making them free money for the airline — but not risking the lives of refugees by denying them access to safe air transport.

It’s tempting to some people to think of freedom of movement as something “abstract” or important only to the “jet set”. But nothing could be further from the truth. Administrative restrictions like carrier sanctions, and failure to enforce the duties of common carriers, are a life-and-death matter for some of the world’s most destitute and deserving refugees, those who would qualify for asylum if they could only reach a country of refuge.

Jan 14 2019

Issues for the next UN review of human rights in the USA

Today the Identity Project submitted recommendation to the UN Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) for two issues to be included in the upcoming periodic review of US implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), including the provisions of the ICCPR recognizing the right to freedom of movement:

Lack of Remedies for Violations of the ICCPR by the USA (joint submission by the Identity Project and the US Human Rights Network)
Interference by the USA with Freedom of Movement (including violations of rights recognized in the ICCPR to freedom of movement, assembly, association, and privacy)

The Identity Project participated actively In the most recent previous periodic review of US compliance with the ICCPR, the fourth since the US ratified the ICCPR.

We reported to the UNHRC in 2013 on violations by the US government of rights recognized in the ICCPR, including the right to travel. A year later, as part of a delegation of nongovernmental organizations coordinated by the US Human Rights Network, we met with members of the UNHRC and with US officials before and during the two days of public questioning of the US by the UNHRC in Geneva in 2014.

At the conclusion of its review, the UNHRC called out the failure of the US to “effectuate” the ICCPR, leaving most victims of human rights violations by the US government with no means of legal redress. “There was no suggestion that any of those responsible for any of the past criminal violations of our Covenant [i.e. the ICCPR] would be brought to justice or that its victims would have access to their day in court,” the chair of the UNHRC noted at a press conference announcing the committee’s concluding observations.

The UNHRC recommended that, “The State party [i.e. the US] should … Taking into account its declaration that provisions of the Covenant are non-self-executing, ensure that effective remedies are available for violations of the Covenant, including those that do not, at the same time, constitute violations of U.S. domestic law, and undertake a review of such areas with a view to proposing to the Congress implementing legislation to fill any legislative gaps.”

In one of our submissions to the UNHRC today, we remind the committee of this recommendation, and point out that no action has been taken on it by the US in the five years since.

Together with the US Human Rights Network, we recommend that, “The U.S. should enact legislation implementing and effectuating the ICCPR by giving U.S. federal and state courts jurisdiction to hear cases arising under the ICCPR, and creating a federal cause of action for violations of the ICCPR.”

In our other submission today, we call attention to the ongoing and increasing surveillance and control of travelers being carried out by the US government.

We recommend that, “The U.S. should restrict travel by common carrier, including domestic or international air travel, only on the basis of judicial orders issued through adversary proceedings in which the right to freedom of movement is recognized, ” and that, “Personal information pertaining to the exercise of the right to freedom of movement, such as details of airline reservations, should be collected or retained only on the basis of individualized orders based on probable cause to suspect violations of law.”

This March, the UNHRC will adopt a list of issues that it will focus on its next review of the US. Following a report from the US government on those issues, the UNHRC will conduct its fifth review of US implementation of the ICCPR in Geneva in 2020 or 2021.

Jan 04 2019

Issues for the revitalized Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board

With its recent revival, the Federal government’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has a chance to take a fresh look at how far the USA has gone since 9/11 in implementing a combination of “pre-crime” policing (à la Minority Report) and “social credit scoring” integrated with commercial service providers (à la China) as a means of control of what people can and cannot do, and where they can and cannot go.

The PCLOB didn’t have a quorum since early 2017, and was down to only one member. But three new members were confirmed in October 2018. An Executive Director – who may end up with longer-term influence than the members of the Board, especially given that the new members weren’t appointed and confirmed until just three months before one of their terms is scheduled to end – is currently being hired. Civil libertarians able to obtain a security clearance and willing to relocate to DC are encouraged to apply.

>What should the PCLOB focus on, with its limited time and resources? The PCLOB is an advisory committee with neither legislative nor prosecutorial authority. The best use it can make of its limited mandate is to ask hard questions and raise issues that Federal agencies won’t otherwise acknowledge or address.

The TSA and DHS were created in haste after 9/11 without consideration of the privacy and civil liberties implications of their new activities, many of which have never been explicitly approved by Congress. The reactivation of the PCLOB after the latest hiatus is a chance to take a fresh look at the big picture of what these agencies are doing, and what this means for privacy and civil liberties. It might be tempting to focus on “emerging” threats, but the first priority should be to assess the DHS surveillance and control systems that are already in place:

Conversion of state licensing of motor vehicle operators into a national ID system. More than a decade after Congress enacted the REAL-ID Act of 2005, we are entering the endgame of DHS efforts to pressure states into participating in an outsourced, privately-operated, national ID database created to enable compliance with the REAL-ID Act. SPEXS already includes records sourced from states about more than 50 million Americans, but is not subject to any direct government control and has never been the subject of any publicly-disclosed review of its implications for privacy and civil liberties.
Mass surveillance and permission-based predictive control of movement and travel. Congress has never debated whether air travelers should be required to identify themselves,whether the government should keep histories of innocent citizens’ movements (compiled from commercial airline reservations for common carrier travel, license plate readers for travel by private vehicle, and facial recognition for pedestrian movement), or whether existing judicial mechanisms for restricting the right to travel and movement through injunctions or restraining orders should be replaced with secret, extrajudicial administrative prior restraint and similar orders. How has travel been transformed from a right to a privilege exercised only by government permission? How does this implicate the 1st Amendment right to assemble and the right of freedom of movement recognized by international human rights treaties? How widely, and with what implications for privacy and civil liberties, has the precedent set by real-time “pre-crime” predictive control of travel expanded to other activities and transactions?
Suspicionless dragnet administrative searches. Today, the most common hands-on interaction between a Federal agent and a person not suspected of any crime is a TSA pat-down. But there’s never been any comprehensive review of the legality or the implications for privacy and security of the proliferation of suspicionless administrative searches since the creation of the DHS and TSA: security theater in airports, warrantless searches at internal checkpoints (domestic airports, CBP roadblocks on roads that don’t cross the US border, and attempts to claim the right to impose searches on the public in other forms of transportation.

There’s much more that we and others could say about each of these issues, if the PCLOB choses to consider them. But the first challenge for the PCLOB is whether it will tackle these big-picture issues.

Jan 03 2019

Plaintiff in first no-fly trial wins another appeal on attorneys’ fees and government lawyers’ bad faith

Fourteen years to the day after she discovered she was on the no-fly list when she was arrested at SFO, and five years after her legal victory in the first trial of a challenge to a government no-fly order (a Pyrrhic victory as she has still been denied a visa to return to the US), Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim won a third decision in her favor in the same case in 9th Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday, this time en banc and on the issue of reimbursement by the government of Dr. Ibrahim’s attorneys’ fees and costs.

Dec 12 2018

The Department of “Mother, May I?”

[Federal Probation System Form PROB-37, “Permission To Travel”. Note that even as used for probationers, this form is illegal: It lacks the required OMB approval, OMB control number, and Paperwork Reduction Act notice.]

Have all travelers become convicted criminals subject to court supervision, who have to apply in advance for permission from the government every time they want to travel?

And does the US government have extraterritorial jurisdiction over travel worldwide?

Apparently so, at least in the eyes of the Department of Homeland Security.

Case in point: The National Vetting Center (NVC).

The NVC was established pursuant to President Trump’s February 2018 executive order NSPM-9. The “vetting” in the name is what President Trump has referred to as “extreme vetting” of immigrants and non-US citizens visiting or transiting the US. The first use of the NVC will be to “vet” citizens of countries in the US Visa Waiver Program applying for ESTA permits (online visas) to travel to the US.

The NVC is an inter-departmental body coordinated by a DHS component, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and this week the DHS has published a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) and released a redacted version of the Implementation Plan for the NVC.

Here’s how the DHS describes the purpose and role of the NVC:

Every day, the U.S. Government determines whether to permit individuals to travel to and enter the United States… and consider other actions…. The U.S. Government has developed several different processes and procedures to evaluate an individual’s suitability for access to the United States or other travel- or immigration- related benefits against information available to the U.S. Government (generally referred to as “vetting”)….Creating, maintaining, and facilitating the operation of that process is the primary mission of the NVC.

As even this summary self-description shows, the NVC is founded on a fundamental disregard for human and Constitutional rights.

Nov 14 2018

OIG confirms State Dept. broke its own rules when it seized US citizens’ passports

A report released earlier this month by the State Department’s Office of Inspector General confirms that, as we and others began reporting in 2013 and 2014, State Department staff “failed to comply with relevant procedures intended to safeguard the rights of U.S. citizens” when they summarily seized or retained the passports of US citizens who sought consular assistance at the US Embassy in Sana’a, Yemen.

Because of incomplete and inconsistent record-keeping and shifting stories told to OIG investigators by State Department staff, the OIG was unable to determine how many US citizens were improperly deprived of their passports, or for how long.

The consequences for these Yemeni-American US citizens were especially dire because many of them were seeking to leave Yemen to escape the escalating civil war and foreign military interventions in Yemen (some of which were backed by the US and its allies).

Without passports, these US citizens were unable to travel legally from Yemen to other countries, or to return to the US. They were forced either to remain in increasingly war-torn and dangerous Yemen, or use dangerous illegal means of transport to escape.

The de facto policy of the US Department of State as early as 2013 — even before the inclusion of Yemen in the 2017 Muslim ban executive orders — appears to have been to define anyone with Yemeni ancestry, regardless of citizenship, as an enemy of the US, and to use all available legal or illegal methods to deny them US passports. Typical tactics included putting applications by Yemeni-Americans for new or renewal passports into indefinite limbo, and indefinitely retaining US passports presented to consular officials at the US Embassy in Sana’a.

Typically, no formal decision that would be readily subject to judicial review was made. Even when a passport was revoked or an application for a passport was denied, the affected citizen often wasn’t notified until months or years later.

Several lawsuits were brought challenging the denials and delays in issuing, renewing, or returning passports. At least one case led to a court order for the return of a US passport seized in Sana’a. But the government was able to evade judicial review of most of its passport denials and seizures by reversing its decisions and dropping charges or issuing delayed passports once its victims lawyered up and made it to US courts.

Despite the fairly scathing report by the OIG, there’s no indication that any of the responsible State Department officials — either at the embassy in Yemen or making policy and directing practices from the US — have lost their jobs, much less been prosecuted, for conspiring to deprive US citizens of their fundamental rights, in circumstances where the ability to exercise those rights could be a matter of life and death.

Nov 02 2018

What China calls “social credit”, the US calls “risk assessment”

A viral video of an announcement on a Chinese high-speed train and a series of reports (here and here) on NPR have prompted a surge of interest this week in China’s “social credit” system:

Dear passengers: People who travel without a ticket, behave disorderly, or smoke in public areas will be punished according to regulations, and the behavior will be recorded in individual credit information system. To avoid a negative record of personal credit, please follow the relevant regulations and help with the orders on the train and at the station.

Despite unwarranted comparisons to US financial credit scores, “social credit” scoring in China is used by the government and para-statal entities, not just private companies, and not just for financial decision-making.

One of the NPR stories as well as a report last month by the Australian Broadcasting Co. include interviews with people who discovered they were barred by the Chinese government from travel on high-speed trains as a result of “social credit” scores, regardless of their ability to pay for tickets.

Dystopian? Yes.

Unjust? Yes?

“It can’t happen here?” No.

It already happens here, every day, to everyone who travels by airline or engages in bank or credit card transactions.

You may not realize it until you are mysteriously unable to obtain a boarding pass or complete a financial transaction, but each of these activities is already subject to secret, permission-based, extrajudicial prior restraint by the US government.

The default is “no”. Since a little over 10 years ago, US Federal regulations have forbidden any airline from issuing a boarding pass unless and until it has sent the would-be traveler’s itinerary and identifying information to the DHS and has received back an individualized, per-passenger, per-flight, permission-to-travel message from the DHS. The DHS generates a secret “risk score” for each passenger, which determines how closely they are searched and questioned, whether the airline is instructed to call the police when they try to check in, and other aspects of how they are treated.

Even before airlines or banks get to the point of consulting the government, “carrier sanctions” and similar sanctions against financial institutions give them a financial incentive to err on the side of saying “no”, not “yes”.

You don’t have to be on a government blacklist for your air travel or financial transactions to be blocked by the US government or by airlines or banks acting at the government’s behest. There are multiple air travel blacklists (euphemistically and inaccurately called “watchlists”), but no-fly and transaction-processing decisions are also made in real time, on the basis of algorithmic “pre-crime” predictions (euphemistically and misleadingly called “risk assessments”, despite the lack of any evidence of a correlation between these scores and actual “risk”).

What China calls “social credit scoring”, the US calls “risk-based screening”.

Government blacklists and real-time pre-crime policing are being applied to control a growing range of activities of daily life. But air travel and financial transactions are the areas where the US government already has a fully deployed and operational real-time “social credit” system in which private service providers are seamlessly integrated with government agencies to surveil and control our everyday activities.

The question isn’t whether the US should have a “social credit” system — it already does — but whether it should be expanded to more aspects of our lives, or rolled back.

It can happen here. It is happening here. It will continue to happen here until we stop it.

China’s social credit system provides a useful object lesson in the three essential preconditions for a system of ID-based surveillance and control. We can block or impede the expansion of such schemes by undermining any of these three legs of the tripod:

ID requirements to travel or engage in other transactions or activities — If you travel, pay, or act anonymously, your individualized “score” can’t be used to control you. China’s “social credit” system is enabled by requirements to show government-issued ID to open a bank or mobile payment account or purchase a SIM card. You can only rent a shared bicycle in China through an app, not by cash, and you can’t use the app without an ID-linked mobile phone and ID-linked payment account. So even if you travel around a Chinese city by shared bicycle, you can be tracked. Travel anonymously, and use cash or other anonymous forms of payment.
Collection of ID-linked transaction and position data — Chinese “social credit” scores and US “risk assessments” are based on travel, movement, and transaction histories. Some of this data is collected through biometric identification, primarily automated facial recognition. Other data is “ingested” by the government from commercial databases such as travel reservations and financial transactions. Private companies can and should resist requests for this data, but can’t be counted on to do so. No airline, for example, has ever challenged government demands for warrantless access to the entirety of their reservation database, including free-text derogatory internal comments by front-line reservation and customer-service staff that are imported directly into permanent DHS files used for “risk” scoring. Once personally identified or identifiable data is collected, it’s almost impossible to resist demands for government access made in the name of “security”. Any data that is collected about you can and will be used against you. The only real way to oppose this mass surveillance is #DoNotCollect. Just say no to requests for information, for consent to search, or for sharing of data with the government.
Government control of movement, activity, and transactions — A key step in the implementation of the “social credit” system for air travel was the installation (at a cost to the airline industry of at least US$2 billion) of the control lines that transformed a reporting (i.e. surveillance) system into a “pre-crime” control system. It’s critical to defend against having our Constitutional and human rights redefined as privileges to be exercised only by prior permission of the government — as the right to travel by common carrier has already been. Demand that restrictions on the exercise of rights be based on evidence-based court orders, not pre-crime fantasies.

As for the specific Chinese examples of travel by high-speed train, Amtrak, like the operators of Chinese trains, is a para-statal government-charterted corporation. In 2014, we made a FOIA request to Amtrak for records of Amtrak’s sharing of passenger data with the DHS and other law enforcement agencies. Amtrak has been releasing a trickle of responsive records, as we’ve been reporting. But Amtrak’s response remains incomplete, and this is now the oldest pending unanswered request in Amtrak’s FOIA queue.

Papers, Please!

The Identity Project