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Category Archives: Freedom To Travel

Apr 05 2021

Can TSA checkpoints be used as a general law enforcement dragnet?

Airline travelers who were searched at Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint for cash and other items unrelated to any threat to aviation are entitled to their day in court, according to the first significant ruling by a Federal judge in Pittsburgh in a class action lawsuit filed a year ago.

The class action complaint in Brown v. TSA was brought by the Institute for Justice on behalf of all air travelers whose cash was seized at TSA checkpoints. It charges that searches at TSA checkpoints for “general law enforcement purposes” that aren’t limited to searches for weapons, explosives, and incendiaries that could pose a danger to aviation are (1) “ultra vires”,  that is, outside the scope of any authority granted by law to TSA checkpoint staff, and (2) unconstitutional as warrantless, unreasonable searches and seizures prohibited by the 4th Amendment.

The TSA and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) defendants tried to get the court to dismiss the complaint on such specious grounds as that the dozens of incidents of seizures of air travelers’ cash described in the complaint were merely “isolated incidents” unlikely to be repeated, and that a Federal law that has often frustrated judicial review of TSA actions, 49 U.S.C. § 46110, denies any Federal District Court jurisdiction to even consider such a complaint.

After review of initial recommendations by a Federal Magistrate, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Horan has denied most of the government’s motions to dismiss the class action complaint, allowing the case to move forward toward a decision on the merits.

As we noted when we first reported on the filing of this lawsuit, its importance extends well beyond the specific issues of searches and seizures of cash. This is one of two key pending lawsuits (along with one filed by Sai that’s pending in the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals with friend-of-the-court briefs due to be filed by the end of this week) challenging the TSA’s attempt to expand its checkpoints from limited special-purpose administrative searches for items posing a hazard to aviation to general law enforcement checkpoints like the “4th Amendment-free zones” at international borders and points of entry.

There have been, and continue to be, strong pressures from within the Department of Homeland Security and from other law enforcement agencies to use TSA checkpoints for an even wider range of general law enforcement purposes. That would create a new airport exception to the 4th Amendment, based on treating travel as presumptively grounds for suspicion (and thus subject to search and/or seizure) rather than the exercise of a right.

We are pleased to see this case go forward as an important test of the limits to the TSA’s authority, the meaning of the 4th Amendment, and the existence of a right to travel.

Mar 30 2021

Expanding travel policing beyond no-fly lists (and the Fourth Amendment)

According to an article in POLITICO based on interviews with unnamed “law enforcement officials,” the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is considering expanded use of airline reservation data  to target travelers  for more intrusive searches:

The department could begin analyzing the travel patterns of suspected domestic extremists, monitor flights they book on short notice and search their luggage for weapons, a senior law enforcement official told POLITICO. There have also been discussions about putting suspected domestic violent extremists — a category that includes white supremacists — on the FBI’s No Fly List, the official said. When suspected extremists travel internationally, officials may be more likely to question them before they pass through customs and to search their phones and laptops.

A second law enforcement official told POLITICO that conversations about monitoring domestic extremists’ travel have involved multiple federal agencies at the interagency level, including the FBI.

We’ve recently discussed what’s wrong with the no-fly lists (there are several, created and maintained by different, although interlocking, entities, for different ostensible purposes) and why they shouldn’t be used like this or in most of the other ways that they are now used.

As Gary Leff puts it in his View from  the Wing travel blog:

Denying the freedom of travel, without trial, is precisely the mob rule outside of the rule of law that we’re supposed to be pushing back on after the events of January 6th. Having the government ban travel on all airlines without judicial review is frightening in a democracy.

The latest article in POLITICO suggests tactics that go well beyond no-fly lists. It’s important to understand what’s being talked about, and how it would differ from previously-disclosed practices and exceed what is permitted by current law.

It’s crucial to recognize that, in this proposal, the DHS is testing the waters not for an expansion of existing authority, but an entirely new category of exception to the Fourth Amendment: a “pre-crime” search that is based on neither a warrant nor probable cause, but that — unlike an administrative search — targets individuals selectively.

Read More →

Feb 25 2021

Precog in a Box

[Flowchart of “goTravel” software package developed by the government of the Netherlands and offered to U.N. members through the Countering Terrorist Travel Programme of the U.N. Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT)]

National governments of all members of the United Nations are being pressured to implement new U.N. mandates for surveillance, profiling,  and control of air travelers.

These unprecedented mandates for the creation and deployment of new surveillance and “pre-crime” policing systems in every U.N. member state  are the result of a successful twenty-year campaign carried out by the US and its allies through the U.N. Security Council and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as policy laundering proxies.

This U.N. mandate is illegal: it contravenes provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which almost all U.N. members are parties. It’s immoral: it goes against basic principles of justice, including the presumption of innocence and punishment for criminal actions rather than for inferred criminal states of mind. And it’s wrong: it presumes the existence of human and/or robotic “precogs” that can predict future crimes.

U.N. members that haven’t yet set up “pre-crime” police agencies to surveil and profile air travelers are being pushed by Security Council and ICAO directives, and pulled by offers of  their choice of free “Precog in a Box” software and other training and support from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) through the World Customs Organization (WCO), or from the government of the Netherlands through the Countering Terrorist Travel Programme of the U.N. Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT).

But how did we get here? What’s going on? And what’s wrong with this picture?

Read More →

Feb 01 2021

CDC orders air travelers to unmask for government surveillance

Putting government surveillance and control of travelers ahead of what is supposed to be their mission of protecting of the public against infectious diseases, the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has ordered that, effective today, all air travelers must risk their lives by removing their face masks on demand of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint staff or airline ticketing or gate agents.

Until today, as we have noted previously, many state and local health orders issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic required everyone in public indoor spaces such as airports to wear face masks, without any exception that would have applied at TSA checkpoints. Although we are not aware of any litigation that ensued, air travelers could have asserted their right — and even their  duty — not to remove their face masks, under pain of criminal penalties for violating public health orders.

The CDC order effective today appears to be designed to preempt those state and local health orders, and open the door for the TSA, TSA contractors, and airline staff to endanger the lives of air travelers in the interest of surveillance and control (by the TSA) and “revenue protection” against transfers of nontransferable tickets  (by airlines):

The requirement to wear a mask shall not apply under the following circumstances: … When necessary to temporarily remove the mask to verify one’s identity such as during Transportation Security Administration screening or when asked to do so by the ticket or gate agent or any law enforcement official.

The CDC order aloows — and, in fact, requires — TSA and airline staff and contractors to leave their masks on. Only travelers’ lives are to be endangered.

It remains unclear, of course, whether it is “necessary .. to verify one’s identity” either to the TSA, its contractors, or airline staff, much less whether looking at faces is the way to do so. We think not. But whatever the legality of “ID verification”, the CDC officials responsible for this unmasking order should be ashamed of their betrayal of their medical mission and for promulgating an “insecure flight” requirement.

Jan 26 2021

First appellate-court ruling on COVID-19 travel restrictions

Last week, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston issued the first ruling by a Federal  Federal appellate court concerning restrictions on the right to travel imposed on the basis of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There have been other Federal District Court rulings on COVID-19 travel restrictions, as we have reported previously. But so far as we can tell, no other Federal appeals court has yet ruled on any of these cases. And while there have been other Federal appellate decisions concerning restrictions on gatherings and activities, they haven’t involved the right to travel.

The decision by a panel of the First Circuit came in the case of Bayley’s Campground v. Mills, which we mentioned before in a round-up of COVID-19 right-to-travel cases.

Bayley’s Camground v. Mills is a challenge by the owners and several frequent out-of-state guests of a campground in Maine to an Executive Order by Governor Janet Mills requiring 14 days self-quarantine by anyone entering the state of Maine, and prohibiting the operation of lodging services, including campgrounds, with limited exceptions.

Ruling on an interlocutory appeal of the denial of a motion for a preliminary injunction, the First Circuit panel upheld the District Court decision denying an injunction against enforcement of the Maine state order while the case is pending,  Most of the First Circuit opinion, however, is favorable to future challenges to state actions that encroach on the right to interstate travel.

First, the Court of Appeals found that it could consider the merits of the case, even though the challenged order was modified and partially rescinded while the case was pending:

A contrary ruling… would run the risk of insulating from judicial review an allegedly overly broad executive emergency response, so long as it is iteratively imposed for only relatively brief periods of time. Accordingly, we conclude that the plaintiffs’ request for injunctive relief from [the Executive Order’s] self-quarantine requirement is not moot,… and so we turn to the merits.

Second, the Court of Appeals accepted the District Court’s premise that there is a Constitutional right to interstate travel and that any state action which restricts the exercise of that right is subject to “strict scrutiny” including a requirement for the government to show that no less restrictive measure could adequately achieve the “compelling governmental interest” that is the goal of the restrictive measure.

The Court of Appeals  found that the state of Maine had produced sufficient evidence of the compelling need for the self-quarantine and other travel restrictions that the campground owners and would-be campers were unlikely to succeed on the merits. But the ruling concerns only the request for a temporary order while the case is pending.

Proceedings in the District Court were stayed pending the interlocutory appeal, but will now resume. No trial or final decision appears imminent.

Jan 19 2021

“Put them on the no-fly list!”

Flowchart of no-fly lists and the U.S. government's no-fly decision-making process.
[“How do you get on the no-fly list?” Larger image; PDF with legend.]

In the aftermath of the storming of the U.S. Capitol last week, there’s been a confused cacophony of calls to “put the rioters on the no-fly list.”

At the same time, there have been equally confusing claims and denials that some people found out that they had already been “put on the no-fly list” when they were denied boarding on flights home from Washington.

Are these people “on the no-fly list”? Could they be? Should they be? Is this legal?

More generally:

How do you get on the no-fly list? How do you know if you are on the list? How do you get off? What substantive and procedural legal standards apply?

The answers to all of these questions are much more complicated, and different, than many people seem to think — including the chairs of relevant Congressional committees, who ought to know better. The reality is that:

  1. There isn’t just one U.S. Federal government no-fly list — there are several, created by different agencies for different purposes.
  2. There are also non-list-based ways that real-time no-fly decisions can be made.
  3. No-fly decisions can be, and are, made independently, on the basis of different lists and other criteria, by multiple Federal agencies and by individual airlines.

So a better starting point for understanding what’s happening — before we can begin to assess whether it is legal or what should be happening — is to ask, “How can a would-be passenger be prevented from boarding a scheduled airline flight?”

The diagram above (larger version; PDF with legend of acronyms and color-coding) gives only a summary of the U.S. government’s no-fly decision-making process, not including individual airines’ no-fly decision-making practices. (We’ve published versions of the diagram before. The latest version above has been updated to include the Angel Watch Center, the CDC Do Not Board List and Lookout List, and the Watchlisting Advisory Council.)

As discussed in more detail below, no-fly decisions can be based on any of the following:

  • U.S. government no-fly orders:
  • Airline no-fly decisions, based on:
    • Airline conditions of carriage.
    • Airline no-fly lists (created and maintained separately by each airline).
    • Other non-list-based “rules” interpreted and enforced by airlines (most significantly the entry requirements described in the Timatic “travel information manual”).

How does all this work? Here are some FAQs about the no-fly list and no-fly orders:

Read More →

Dec 17 2020

Lawyers who challenged “no-fly” order finally get paid

Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim’s lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security came to a close this week with an order by Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissing Dr. Ibrahim’s complaint after the Federal government finally paid  out a settlement to Dr. Ibrahim’s lawyers for successfully representing her in more than a decade of litigation.

The dismissal come more than fifteen years after Dr. Ibrahim was denied boarding and wrongly arrested at San Francisco International Airport when she tried to board a flight to a conference in Hawaii where she was scheduled to present a paper related to her doctoral research in architecture at Stanford University. Dr. Ibrahim was recovering from an emergency hysterectomy and in a wheelchair, and needed assistance from paramedics while in the lockup at the airport before she was eventually released without charges.

Seven years ago, after two interlocutory appeals to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then the first and to date only trial in a case challenging a “no-fly” order by the US government, Judge Alsup ruled that Dr. Ibrahim’s rights had been violated by the government’s secret and wrongful blacklisting of her and denial of her right to travel, and ordered the government to remove Dr. Ibrahim from  its “no-fly” blacklist.

Before the trial, Attorney General Eric Holder signed an apparently perjured declaration certifying that it would cause grave harm to national security to disclose whether or why the government put Dr. Ibrahim on the no-fly list. But in his decision, Judge Alsup revealed what the government had known all along: The only reason Dr. Ibrahim was put on the no-fly list in the first place was that an FBI agent on the mosque-watching detail mistakenly filled out the blacklist and watchlist “nomination”  form incorrectly.

The government chose not to appeal Judge Alsup’s trial judgment, which became final.

But where does that leave Dr. Ibrahim, or her lawyers?

Read More →

Dec 10 2020

Old business for a new administration

What should the new Presidential administration do about the Department of Homeland Security and the associated laws, regulations, and homeland-security industrial complex?

Neither freedom of movement, other human rights, nor the DHS are among the self-described priorities of the incoming Biden Administration.

But for better or worse, it isn’t hard to come up with our short list of recommendations to the Biden transition team and to members of Congress who will be questioning nominees for Secretary of Homeland Security and other DHS leadership positions including the Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration.

The same agenda of unfinished business (PDF) that we called out in our submissions to Congress and the Obama transition team after the election twelve years ago still face the incoming administration today, three Presidential terms later.

These include actions that could have been taken by previous Presidents, and should be taken by the new President, by executive order or by promulgating regulations.

They also include legislation that could and should be taken up by Congress, as well as questions that Congress and the public should ask of nominees for the DHS.

We wish that some of this unfinished business had been attended to by previous administrations and members of Congress.  But it hasn’t. The problems with the DHS and the attacks on freedom of movement are bipartisan. Nothing has been done by either Republican or Democratic administrations or members of Congress to address them.

But we’re here, and we’re not going away. Ignoring these problems won’t make them disappear, or silence the critics of the DHS and the defenders of the right to travel.

It’s time for the President and Congress to act — and for the public to resist if they don’t.

Nov 25 2020

Airlines call for new app-based air travel controls

During  its online annual general meeting this week, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) rolled out a  new proposal for an app-based system of control over air travel that IATA is proposing for use by its member international airlines and by governments.

The scheme is being promoted as a response to the COVID-10 pandemic, but would institutionalize structures and practices with the potential for continuing and wider abuse.

IATA is calling its scheme the IATA Travel Pass. As described in these slides,  it would require would-be air travelers to enter both personally identifying information (most likely passport or other ID-card details) and records of tests and/or vaccinations into an IATA  smartphone app.  The data would  be processed by the algorithms of a “rules engine” to detemine whether to issue an “OK to travel” permission message. The output of this algorithmic decision would be available for use by both airlines and governments.

The intent of the IATA proposal is to create an infrastructure for sharing of data and travel permission decisions, at any point before or after the journey, with both airlines and governments, on the basis of an open-ended ruleset:

Of course IATA’s new proposal has all the defects of any smartphone-based travel surveillance or control regime that we discussed back in April when Hawaii tried out such a scheme. IATA is silent on what is to happen to  a traveler who doesn’t have a smartphone, charged-up and operable, with them when they try to travel.

And what about travelers without passport? No passport is currently required, even for international flights, within some free-movement zones such as within Mercosur, ECOWAS, or the European Union, or between the UK and Ireland.

But that’s not the worst aspect of the IATA proposal. Unlike Hawaii’s app-based location reporting system, the IATA app would go beyond surveillance to incorporate an algorithmic decision-making system for prior restraint of the right to travel.  Very disturbingly, there’s no mention in the IATA proposal of who would control the algorithmic ruleset, leaving it wide open to mission  creep and abuse by governments worldwide.  There’s no apparent way to restrict the nature of the rules or the purposes — blacklisting? discrimination? profiling? retaliation? — for which they could be used. Deployment of a general-purpose algorithmic travel control app for use worldwide would invite abuse.

Read More →

Nov 06 2020

Canada copies US “Secure Flight” air travel controls

While we were watching US election returns, our neighbors to the north were adopting new travel regulations that incorporate some of the worst aspects of the US system of surveillance and control of air travel, and in some respects go even further in the wrong direction.

Canadian authorities don’t generally want to be seen as imitating the US or capitulating to US pressure. There was no mention in the official analysis of the latest amendments to the Canadian regulations of the US models on which they are based. But according to the press release this week from Public Safety Canada, the latest version of the Canadian Secure Air Travel Regulations  which came into force this week for domestic flights within Canada as well as international flights to or from Canada include the following elements, each of which appears to be based on the US Secure Flight system:

  1. All air travelers will be required to show government-issued photo ID. The Canadian ID requirement to fly is now explicit, unlike the de facto ID requirement that the US Department of Homeland Security is attempting to impose and already wrongly enforcing, in some cases, without statutory or regulatory authority. The Canadian rules appear to reflect the authority to deny passage to air travelers without ID that the DHS has sought, but has not yet been granted, in the US.
  2. Fly/no-fly decision-making will be transferred from airlines (making binary fly/no-fly decisions on the basis of a no-fly list provided by the government) to a government agency. After receiving information about each passenger from the airline, Public Safety Canada will transmit a permission messages to the airline with respect to each would-be passenger on each flight,  with a default of “not permitted to board” if no message is received by the airline from the government. Exactly this change was made in the US through the Secure Flight regulations promulgated in 2008. This change serves two purposes for the government: (A) it provides a basis for building positive real-time government control over boarding pass issuance into airline IT infrastructure, converting every airline check-in kiosk or boarding-pass app into a virtual government checkpoint that can be used to control movement on any basis and for any reason that the government later chooses, and (B) it enables the switch from blacklist-based no-fly decision-making to more complex and opaque real-time algorithmic pre-crime profiling  based on a  larger number of factors.
  3. Air travelers in Canada will be required to provide the airline  with their full name, gender, and date of birth, as listed on government-issued ID, and airlines will be required to enter this data in each reservation and transmit it to the government 72 hours before the flight or as soon as the reservation is made, whichever comes first. All of this is exactly as has bene required for flights within the US since the coming into force of the DHS Secure Flight regulations. This additional information about each passenger enables the government to match passengers’ identities, in advance, to other commercial and government databases, and thus to incorporate a much wider range of surveillance and data mining into its profiling algorithms.
  4. Travelers will be able to apply to the government for a “Canadian Travel Number” which, if issued, they can enter in their reservations to distinguish themselves as whitelisted people from blacklisted people with similar names and/or other similar personal data.  This Canadian Travel Number is obviously modeled on the “redress number” incorporated in the US Secure Flight system. The goal of this “whitelist number” is to reduce the complaints and political embarrassment of the recurring incidents of innocent people with similar names, including  children, being mistakenly identified as blacklisted people, and denied boarding on Canadian flights. The problem, of course, is that this does nothing to help the innocent people who are correctly identified as having been blacklisted by the government, but who were wrongly blacklisted in the first place.

As our Canadian friends at the  International Civil Liberities Monitoring Group put it in a statement this week:

These regulations do not address the central, foundational problems that plague Canada’s No Fly List system and will continue to result in the undermining of individuals’ rights as they travel….

The Canadian government had a solution from the beginning, and they still do: abolish the No Fly List. If someone is a threat to airline travel or to those in the region they are traveling to, charge them under the criminal code and take them to court where they can defend themselves, in public.

It’s time to be done with secret security lists once and for all.