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The Identity Project

Category Archives: Freedom To Travel

Oct 24 2017

DHS blinks (again) on REAL-ID

The Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration have threatened to prevent citizens of many US states from being able to travel by air within the US, starting in January 2018, because their state governments won’t dump all their driver’s license and ID card information into a nationwide database. But these threats didn’t actually cause states to follow the TSA’s illegal orders. So rather than follow through on the threat, which would risk a legal challenge that would make it clear the threat is hollow, the DHS has again blinked. It just quietly deferred its deadline about when it claims it will enforce the REAL-ID Act against airline passengers.

Just over a week ago, when we testified before the California Department of Motor Vehicles about why the largest state in the union should not comply with the REAL-ID Act, and could not do so without violating its state constitution and its residents’ rights, the DHS website included California among 21 states “under review” by the DHS for possible Federal interference with their residents’ right to travel by air beginning as early as January 18, 2018.

Just days later, the DHS in its standardless discretion granted 15 of these 21 states, including California, another round of “extensions of time” to comply with the REAL-ID Act until October 20, 2018.

The states granted another round of arbitrary extensions until October 2018 included eight of the nine states singled out by signs in airports across the country as targeted for TSA harassment of their residents who travel by air beginning in January 2018:

The dates picked by the DHS are as arbitrary as the DHS choices of which states to threaten. The DHS has repeatedly amended its REAL-ID Act regulations to postpone its threatened “deadlines”, but neither January 18, 2018, nor October 20, 2018, are dates that appear anywhere in the law or the most recently revised regulations.

Read More →

Oct 23 2017

CBP Intelligence Records System (CIRS)

Today The Identity Project and eight other civil liberties and human rights organizations filed comments with the US Department of Homeland Security objecting to both the creation and the exemption from the Privacy Act of the latest DHS system of social media and travel surveillance records, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Intelligence Records System (CIRS).

Our comments were co-signed and submitted jointly on behalf of:

Members of the public (regardless of whether they are U.S. citizens or residents) can submit their own comments on these DHS proposals, including anonymous comments, until midnight tonight, Washington DC time, by using the official Web forms here and here at Regulations.gov.

In part, the proposed creation and exemption from the Privacy Act of CIRS is merely the latest episode in a DHS shell game in which some of the same DHS travel logs and surveillance records have been successively redefined as being part of the TECS records system, then the Automated Targeting System (the system used as the basis for algorithmic pre-crime scoring and blacklisting of international travelers), then the Analytical Framework for Analysis (the system used by Palantir’s data mining and profiling tools), and now CIRS.

DHS Privacy Act notices for these systems have often lagged years behind DHS operational practices, even though it’s a crime for a Federal agency to maintain a database of information about individuals without a specific sort of notice before it’s created.

What’s new about CIRS, aside from the new name, is that the categories of records in CIRS would be expanded to include “Articles, public-source data (including information from social media), and other published information on individuals and events of interest to CBP.” Additional sources of information for CIRS records would include “private sector entities and organizations, individuals, commercial data providers, and public sources such as social media, news media outlets, and the Internet.”

According to the comments we filed today along with other civil liberties and human rights organizations: Read More →

Oct 11 2017

Comments to the California DMV on the REAL-ID Act

As we noted a month ago, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is currently considering whether to amend state regulations on driver’s license and state ID cards to meet some, but not all, of the statutory criteria for “compliance” with the Federal REAL-ID Act of 2005.

States are not required to comply with this Federal law, but apparently the DMV hopes that if the state of California makes a show of partial compliance, the TSA and DHS won’t carry out some of their threats to unlawfully interfere with air travel by residents of California and other noncompliant states.

Comments on these proposals can be submitted to the DMV in writing until 5 p.m. Monday, October 16th, or in person at a public hearing on Monday at 10 a.m. in Sacramento. We encourage everyone concerned about ID demands and freedom to travel to submit written comments and/or come to the hearing.

We’ll be at the hearing on Monday to testify in person, and today we submitted more detailed written comments, which we introduce with the following summary: Read More →

Sep 24 2017

Muslim Ban 3.0 blaimed on ICAO passport standards and “ID management”

Invoking memes that we’ve seen and warned about before under both Democratic and Republican administrations, President Trump has attributed the latest version 3.0 of his “Muslim ban”announced today (proclamation, FAQ, explainer) with the need to comply with ICAO and INTERPOL standards for passport issuance, “identity management”, and data sharing about travelers — as though US immigration and asylum policy should be determined by an international technical body for aviation operations, as though such a body has the authority to override US treaty obligations to freedom of movement and “open skies“, and as though predictive pre-crime profiling based on “biographic and biometric data” can be substituted for judicial fact-finding as a basis for denial of the right to travel.

We hope that seeing the “Muslim Ban 3.0” blamed on ICAO standards will lead human rights advocates to pay more attention to ICAO’s standard-setting role and opaque decision-making process in non-aviation matters such as passports, identity management, and data sharing.

Read More →

Sep 19 2017

Amtrak lied to travel agents who questioned ID requirements

The encouraging disclosure in the latest installment of documents released by Amtrak in response to one of our Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests is that some travel agents resisted Amtrak demands that they collaborate in surveillance, profiling, and control of train travelers by entering passport or ID numbers and details in each reservation for cross-border Amtrak travel.

According to an email message to Amtrak from a product manager at Worldspan (one of the major computerized reservation systems), “We have one subscriber [i.e. a travel agency that uses Worldspan] that has checked the Federal Register and is quoting ‘chapter and verse’ that it is not mandated … to provide the data”:

Some travel agents pushed back repeatedly, read the official notices and instructions to travel agents about the rail API program carefully (and correctly), and made a travel agency “policy decision of non-provision” of ID data about their customers:

Kudos to the unnamed travel agencies that refused to help the government spy on their customers and called Amtrak on its lies that this was required.

Read More →

Sep 13 2017

Federal court can review the Constitutionality of Federal blacklists

A Federal judge has ruled that yes, he can review the Constitutionality of Federal blacklists (euphemistically but misleadingly labeled “watchlists”).

That should be an unsurprising finding. But “pre-crime” and predictive policing programs, including decisions to put people on blacklists that are used to control what they are and aren’t allowed to do, have largely operated in secrecy and outside the rule of law.

Rather than defending blacklisting programs or individual blacklisting decisions, the Federal government — under both Democratic and Republican administrations — has consistently argued that it should not be required to disclose, explain or defend these decisions, the identity of the decision-makers, the criteria for their decisions, or the “derogatory” information on which these decisions are purportedly based, either to the people who have been blacklisted or to the courts.

Too often, even sixteen years after 9/11/2001, courts still traumatized by memories and fears of 9/11 have acquiesced to these Executive-branch claims that the conduct of the “war on terror” is exempt from judicial review.

In this context, the decision last week by Judge Anthony Trenga of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Virginia, rejecting the government’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit by blacklisted Muslim Americans, is one of the most significant steps to date toward legal accountability for the DHS and its accomplices in the war at home against Americans secretly accused and extrajudicially sanctioned through Federal blacklisting.

The decision comes in a case brought by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on behalf of 24 individuals and as as a class action on behalf of all those who have suffered adverse consequences as a result of arbitrarily and without due process being named on Federal blacklists (“watchlists”) . As we reported when this case was filed last year, it’s the most fundamental challenge to date to the Constitutionality of the entire scheme of DHS and FBI pre-crime blacklists based on secret administrative procedures and algorithms rather than on court orders such as criminal convictions, injunctions, or restraining orders.

Read More →

Sep 11 2017

California DMV proposes to “comply” with the REAL-ID Act

On September 1, 2017, the California Department of Motor Vehicles quietly published a notice of proposed regulations that would purportedly allow the California DMV to issue drivers licenses and state ID cards that would be “compliant” with the Federal REAL-ID Act of 2005:

For many years, the California DMV has appeared intent on eventual “compliance” with the REAL-ID Act, regardless of whether that compliance was authorized by the legislature. The current DMV rulemaking proposal to bring California into “compliance” with the REAL-ID Act by administrative fiat is the latest and most significant step along that path, and a disturbing effort to bypass legislative debate.

We encourage all Californians who are concerned about freedom of movement, Federal commandeering of state agencies to function as agents for enforcing Federal restrictions on individual rights, and lack of transparency, oversight and accountability for biometric and ID databases to submit comments opposing the proposed regulations and, if you can make it to Sacramento, to testify at the hearing on October 16th.

Read More →

Sep 08 2017

No US passports for “terrorist sympathizers”?

Bills are moving forward in both houses of Congress which, if approved, would mandate the administrative, extra-judicial revocation, non-renewal, and refusal of issuance of a US passport to any US citizen, even if their citizenship is unquestioned and they have been accused of no crime, but “whom the Secretary [of State] has determined is a member of or is otherwise affiliated with an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization pursuant to section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1189).”

The proposed legislation would leverage administrative determinations related to immigration (which US courts have allowed to be largely exempted from judicial review insofar as they only affect foreigners who aren’t considered by the US to have the same human rights as US citizens) to impose a categorical ban on certain US citizens leaving or entering the US except at the (standardless, i.e. arbitrary) “discretion” of the Secretary of State.

Since June 1, 2009, US citizens have been forbidden by Federal law and regulations from crossing any border into or out of the US by any means (land, sea, or air) without a passport, passport card, or Federally-approved “enhanced” drivers license. Denial of a passport thus amounts to a categorical ban on leaving or returning to the US. As such,  it is a blatant violation of the rights of US citizens pursuant to the First Amendment “right of the people… peaceably to assemble” and their human rights pursuant to Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:

2. Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own….

4. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.

The proposed law would not define how, on what basis, according to what procedures, or using what standard of proof the Secretary of State would make determinations as to membership or other “affiliation” of a US citizen with a blacklisted organization.  To make matters worse, the bills proposing this travel ban for US citizens associated with blacklisted organizations contain no definition of “member” or “otherwise affiliated”.

If you don’t like the decision of the Secretary of State, the bill would provide you with a “Right of Review” entitling you to a hearing before … the  Secretary of State.

Substitute “Communist” for “terrorist” in the proposed legislation, and it becomes clear that these bills would recreate the worst of the guilt-by-association witch-hunting of the MyCarthyist and other Red Scares.

Commie sympathizer? No passport for you! Terrorist symp? No passport for you!

Read More →

Aug 01 2017

Biometric entry/exit tracking of US citizens

We were invited to a briefing session today at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) headquarters: “an information sharing session and open dialog …  with external privacy stakeholders” to discuss “recent enhancements to CBP’s biometric exit initiatives” and “CBP’s implementation plans for a biometric exit system“.

Although we weren’t able  to make it to Washington for today’s meeting, we have many questions about CBP’s ongoing (and illegal, as discussed below)  photographing of the faces of US citizens entering the US, and the agency’s plans to expand the current (also illegal) trials of exit photography to include most or all US citizens leaving the country.

We look forward to another chance to quiz CBP officials about these programs and their (lack of) legal basis. More importantly, we hope that members of Congress and the public will ask hard questions about these programs if regulations or legislation are proposed that would purport to authorize them.

We share the general concerns raised by others about the use of biometric information such as facial photos (mug shots) for suspicionless dragnet surveillance of any travelers. The right to leave any country is explicitly guaranteed by international treaty (Article 12 of the ICCPR) as a human right independent of citizenship.

But we find it especially objectionable — and likely to be illegal — that CBP is extending these surveillance schemes to US citizens. Here are some of the issues: Read More →