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The Identity Project

Category Archives: Freedom To Travel

Nov 16 2017

“Extreme Vetting” would be a #PreCrime #DigitalMuslimBan

Today The Identity Project joined 55 other civil rights, civil liberties, government accountability, human rights, immigrant rights, and privacy organizations in calling on the US Department of Homeland Security to abandon its Extreme Vetting Initiative.

The essential goal of the DHS Extreme Vetting Initiative is to extend the bogus “pre-crime” prediction algorithms and methods based on “big data” from suspicionless mass surveillance, already being used by the DHS and its partner agencies in the US and abroad to decide who is allowed to board airplanes, to a broader range of decisions about who is allowed to travel to, or reside or remain in, the US.

But the DHS doesn’t have any “pre-cogs”, human or robotic, to make these predictions. And prior restraint of our movements or other activities based on predictions of future criminality is not only impossible (and inherently subject to abuse by those who create the predictive and decision-making algorithms) but an affront to fundamental notions of justice, due process, and human rights.

According to a joint letter we sent today to the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, Elaine Duke:

We write to express our opposition to Immigration & Customs Enforcement’s proposed new Extreme Vetting Initiative, which aims to use automated decision-making, machine learning, and social media monitoring to assist in vetting of visa applicants and to generate leads for deportation. As it is described in ICE documents, this program would be ineffective and discriminatory. It would also pose a signal threat to freedom of speech and assembly, civil liberties, and civil and human rights. We urge the Department of Homeland Security to abandon this effort….

The goal of the Extreme Vetting Initiative is to “develop processes that determine and evaluate an applicant’s probability of becoming a positively contributing member of society as well as their ability to contribute to national interests,” using analytic capabilities including machine learning.  ICE also seeks to “develop a mechanism/methodology that allows [the agency] to assess whether an applicant intends to commit criminal or terrorist acts after entering the United States.”

In reality, as a group of prominent technologists advised in a recent letter, “no computational methods can provide reliable or objective assessments of the traits that ICE seeks to measure.” There is no definition anywhere in American law of what it means to be a “positively contributing member of society” or to “contribute to national interests,” posing a risk that ICE will exercise maximal latitude to discriminate beneath the cover of an unproven algorithm….

Confirming that ICE’s focus is on quantity rather than quality, the agency has announced that the winning vendor for the Extreme Vetting Initiative contract must “generate a minimum of 10,000 investigative leads annually” – without regard to how many leads are actually appropriate….

The Extreme Vetting Initiative will also undoubtedly chill free expression, contravening the First Amendment and international human rights, such as those contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for which the United States has registered official support, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the U.S. is a party… These risks are particularly acute in light of existing initiatives to ask travelers to identify all of their social media handles in order to obtain permission to travel to the United States….

Through the Extreme Vetting Initiative, ICE seeks to automate the process by which the U.S. government targets, finds, and forcibly removes people from our country…. But this system … risks hiding politicized, discriminatory decisions behind a veneer of objectivity – at great cost to freedom of speech, civil liberties, civil rights, and human rights.

Palantir Technologies has already become a target of criticism for its role in building tools for “extreme vetting”. (See our report from a protest outside the home of Palantir founder Peter Thiel earlier this year, and this recent 10-minute video, “Is Silicon Valley Building the Infrastructure for a Police State? New AI tools could empower the government to violate our civil liberties.“)  Now IBM, which attended a recent outreach day for Extreme Vetting Initiative contractors and has declined to distance itself from bidding to build the pre-crime program, is also being targeted by a petition asking IBM to “back up your verbal support of immigrants by publicly rejecting and denouncing the Extreme Vetting Initiative and pledge to not bid on any contract to build the tool.”

Nov 14 2017

Silicon Valley Is Building the Infrastructure for a Police State

The Identity Project is  featured along with our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the latest report from Reason.TV, Is Silicon Valley Building the Infrastructure for a Police State? New AI tools could empower the government to violate our civil liberties.

If you have ten minutes to watch the video, it’s a good introduction to Palantir, pre-crime policing, automated decision-making and control (“extreme vetting”), and the homeland-security industrial complex.

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.

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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.

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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.

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