Papers, Please – Page 15 – Papers, Please!

Jan 07 2016

Minnesota Legislative Working Group on REAL-ID Act Compliance

We attended and testified at the first meeting of Minnesota’s “Legislative Working Group on REAL-ID Act Compliance” today in St. Paul. Like other states, Minnesota has been told (falsely) that it’s the only state that isn’t planning to “comply” with the Federal requests in the REAL-ID Act, and (also falsely) that Minnesota residents will be prevented from boarding domestic airline flights if the state doesn’t agree to “comply”.

You can watch the full meeting here (our testimony is at 1:37-1:40 of the video).

Here’s what we told Minnesota legislators (Download as PDF):

Jan 04 2016

DHS posts new lies about the REAL-ID Act

In response to a flurry of publicity kicked off by a story last week in the New York Times in which we were quoted, the DHS has posted several new or updated pages about the REAL-ID Act on its website, including a new page headed, “REAL ID and You: Rumor Control“.

Not surprisingly, the DHS is still lying about what the REAL-ID Act requires. According to the new “Rumor Control” page on DHS.gov:

Rumor: The Department of Homeland Security is trying to build a national database with all of our information

Fact: REAL ID does not build a national database nor does it grant the Federal Government or another state access to a state’s driver’s license data. States and territories will continue to … maintain its own records, and determine who may access those records

This is a lie. The text of the REAL-ID Act, Title II, Section 202(d)(12), is clear and unambiguous:

(d) To meet the requirements of this section, a State shall adopt the following practices in the issuance of drivers’ licenses and identification cards:…

(12) Provide electronic access to all other States to information contained in the motor vehicle database of the State.

(13) Maintain a State motor vehicle database that contains, at a minimum —

(A) all data fields printed on drivers’ licenses and identification cards issued by the State; and
(B) motor vehicle drivers’ histories, including motor vehicle violations, suspensions, and points on licenses.

The REAL-ID Act won’t require you to show ID to fly. But unless the REAL-ID Act is repealed by Congress, it will require states to grant all other states access to drivers license and state ID data or risk having the DHS try to harass residents of those states that don’t participate.

As we’ve discussed previously, the main point of the REAL-ID Act is to intimidate or otherwise induce state governments into creating a distributed national ID databases, through which a single query roted through a national “hub” (operated by a private contractor, the AAMVA) will be able to retrieve data, including standardized digital photographs, from the drivers’ license and ID databases of all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and US territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, etc.).

The DHS is lying about what the REAL-ID Act requires because it knows that the real point of the law is the distributed national database and its contents, and because most of the opposition to the law by individuals, civil liberties advocates, and state legislators and governors is based on opposition to this distributed but functionally integrated and national database.

Since the DHS has no authority to compel state governments to “comply” with the REAL-ID Act, the DHS is relying on threats — most of them empty. The latest official statements posted on DHS.gov send a clear message to state officials trying to decide what to do about the REAL-ID Act. That message is that the DHS lies about the REAL-ID Act.

If you want to know whether the REAL-ID Act (or any provision of Federal law or regulations) even purports to require anyone to show any ID to fly, read the law: It doesn’t.

If you want to know whether the REAL-ID Act would require states that want to “comply” to connect their state drivers’ license and ID databases to the national “hub” that gives all other states root access to that database, read the law: It does.

Don’t believe the DHS lies, and don’t take DHS threats at face value.

Dec 28 2015

You don’t have to show any ID to fly

We’re quoted in an article today in the New York Times about the Federal government’s efforts to use the threat of denial of air travel to scare state legislators into connecting their state drivers license and ID databases to the distributed national “REAL-ID” database through the REAL-ID “hub” operated by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA).

We welcome the Times’ coverage of this issue. But some readers might be misled by the Times’ headline, “T.S.A. Moves Closer to Rejecting Some State Driver’s Licenses for Travel“.

As Edward Hasbrouck of the Identity Project, who was quoted in the New York Times story, discussed in detail in this presentation earlier this year at the Cato Institute in Washington, the most important thing you need to know about this issue is that you do not — and you will not, regardless of how or when the TSA “implements” the REAL-ID Act — need to show any ID to fly. People fly, legally, every day, without showing any ID, and that will continue to be the case. You have a legal right to fly, and the REAL-ID Act does not and cannot deprive you of that right.

The TSA often lies in its public statements, including on its website and on signs at airports, and claims that airline passengers “must” or are “required” to have and to show government-issued photo ID. Currently, the page on TSA.gov headed “Identification” begins with the knowingly false and deliberately misleading statement, “Adult passengers 18 and over must show valid identification at the airport checkpoint in order to travel.” But the consistent official position of the TSA in court has been that no law, no TSA regulation, and no policy or practice of the TSA — not even the secret TSA “Standard Operating Procedures” (SOPs) and other secret TSA orders to its checkpoint staff and contractors — requires anyone to show any ID to pass through TSA checkpoints and travel by air.

Dec 15 2015

No Social Security number? No passport. Why?

When we reported last week on the passport provisions in the new “Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act”, we focused on the details of the rules for denial or revocation of US passports of citizens alleged to owe more than $50,000 in Federal taxes.

We should, perhaps, have put more emphasis on the other new basis we mentioned for the denial of a passport application: failure to provide a valid Social Security account number on the passport application form. This could affect more people than the linkage of passports to taxes.

While the shorthand title on our blog post referred to people who “don’t have” a Social Security number, the same fate could befall anyone who chooses not to disclose their Social Security number. The new law would authorize but not require the Secretary of State — at her standardless “discretion” — to deny any passport application that doesn’t contain a valid Social Security number.

There are probably more US citizens who don’t have a Social Security number than who owe more than $50,000 in taxes. And there are good reasons for even those citizens who do have a Social Security number not to want to disclose it to the State Department and to all the other government agencies (including the DHS) with which it shares passport data.

Federal law and IRS regulations already imposed a $500 civil penalty for applying for a passport without providing a Social Security number. This was a high price to pay for freedom from travel dataveillance based on Social Security number. But it wasn’t always enforced (more “discretion”), and it was not a basis for denial of a passport. Now it is.

Why would someone who has a Social security number not want to give it to the State Department? The answer is obvious once you reverse the question: Why does the State Department want to record the Social Security number of each passport holder? And how do the State Department, and the other agencies with which it shares this data, plan to use it?

There’s a separate legal requirement and required form, which includes the passport number, for reporting any international transportation of $10,000 or more in cash or “monetary instruments”, either as accompanied baggage or in an unaccompanied shipment. So the State Department doesn’t need Social Security numbers in passport files to know whether large sums of money are being taken in or out of the country by the holder of a particular passport.

The new law doesn’t just require that you show that you have a valid Social Security number before you can receive or renew your passport. You must provide your Social Security number to the State Department, so that it can be entered into the passport records database.

Nor is your Social Security number used only to check with the IRS whether you are suspected of owing back taxes. The principal routine users of this data outside the State Department are the DHS, “for border patrol, screening, and security purposes.” Screening is, of course, a euphemism for algorithmic profiling and profile-based search and control.

In other words, the real point of requiring each US passport applicant to supply their Social Security number is to enable all the financial records linked to that Social Security number to be combined with the travel records linked to the passport number in the DHS “Automated Targeting System” and included in the inputs to the pre-crime “black box” that decides whether to give airlines and other common carriers permission to transport each US citizen, and how intrusively to search and/or interrogate each US citizen who is allowed to travel.

DHS Automated Targeting System records include many identifiers and pointers that can be used to link them to other databases: timestamped IP addresses, cellphone numbers, passport numbers, credit card numbers, names of emergency contacts and traveling companions, etc. But they haven’t yet contained Social Security numbers, so far as we know. Now they will, or will be linked to a related database that does.

Government records indexed by Social Security number aren’t just tax records, but records of your worldwide assets and financial affairs. Records identified by Social Security Number (but not passport number, so they would otherwise be at least somewhat more difficult for DHS to use for this profiling), include not only US bank accounts but also foreign bank accounts (reported by Social Security number on the required annual FBAR form) and other foreign “financial assets” (a partially overlapping category) required to be reported each year on IRS Form 8938.

None of this has anything to do with citizenship, which should be the sole criterion of entitlement (not merely “eligibility” at the government’s “discretion”) to a US passport.

Dec 11 2015

More pre-crime profiling of visitors to the US?

President Obama’s televised speech last Sunday included a smorgasbord of proposals (and endorsements for proposals already made by members of Congress) for more control and surveillance of travel.

We’ll look first at the proposals for restrictions on travel by foreign visitors to the US, followed in our next post by some of those that would affect US citizens.

According to the President:

We should put in place stronger screening for those who come to America without a visa so that we can take a hard look at whether they’ve traveled to warzones. And we’re working with members of both parties in Congress to do exactly that.

What does “stronger screening” mean? And what’s a “warzone” [sic] when on the one hand there has been no declaration of war against anyone, anywhere, and on the other hand the government apparently believes that it has the authority to treat the entire planet as a battlefield on which to wage its “War on Terror”?

To understand what the President really means, let’s look at the proposed legislation. The President appears to have been referring to H.R.158, the so-called “Visa Waiver Program Improvement Act of 2015”, which passed the House this week and is pending in the Senate.

The “Visa Waiver Program” (VWP) is a scheme under which citizens of certain preferred countries are given US government permission through the “Electronic System for Travel Authorization” (ESTA) to board flights to the US — provided that they agree in advance that they when they arrive in the US, they can be denied admission for any or no reason, that they will not contest any denial of admission, and that they will bear their own costs of deportation if they aren’t admitted.

This isn’t based on reciprocity. Citizens of all other second-class countries must obtain paper visas, which require a much higher fee and an in-person interview at a US Embassy or Consulate, even for short visits as tourists or to change planes in the US in transit between e.g. Europe or Asia and Latin America.

Most of the countries that the US “allows” to participate in the VWP allow US citizens to enter as tourists, and sometimes for other purposes, without obtaining any permission or submitting any information to the destination government prior to their arrival.

An ESTA walks like a visa and quacks like a visa, except that it is issued electronically rather than stamped in a passport. To obtain an ESTA, a would-be foreign visitor must apply through a cumbersome CBP Web site, providing a variety of personal information to enable the application to be matched with the applicant’s “travel history” and other secret data in the CBP’s Automated Targeting System (the information required on the ESTA application was just increased last month) and pay a fee with a credit card so that the application can also be matched with any US government records about the applicant’s finances.

The travel industry reportedly wants the current euphemistic name of this program changed to the more Orwellian, “Secure Travel Partnership”, which gives a pretty accurate indication of the industry’s willingness to partner with governments in surveillance and control of travelers, as long as doing so doesn’t cost the industry money.

Any foreign citizen who “intends” to enter the US under the VWP is required to obtain an ESTA before CBP will give an airline permission to issue a boarding pass for a flight to the U S.

After operating the VWP/ESTA scheme for seven years under an “interim” rule, the DHS finalized the VWP/ESTA regulations and made them permanent earlier this year, dismissing our objections that the rules are unconstitutional, violate US obligations under international human rights treaties, and exceed the authority of CBP or the DHS.

How would any of this change if the bill endorsed by the President, H.R.158, becomes law?

Aside from reporting requirements, the only substantive change that would be made by the House bill would be to require that the secret pre-crime prediction algorithm incorporated into the ESTA approval/denial decision-making black box must consider “terrorism risk” in addition to, as is already required, “security risk”. We have no idea what this means. What sort of “terrorism risk” wouldn’t also constitute a “security risk”? But we can only assume that the proponents of this bill, including the President, want more secret rules added to the algorithm, to keep away even more visitors.

The White House has also talked about denying ESTA approvals and entry under the VWP on the basis of which other countries travelers have previously visited. A European citizen who has visited friends or family in Syria, for example, might find themselves barred from the US for the next five years unless they go through the drawn-out and expensive process of applying for a full US visa. A provision to this effect is part of both the Democratic (S. 2337) and Republican (S. 2362) versions of Visa Waiver Program bills pending in the Senate, but wasn’t included in the version approved by the House.

Dec 09 2015

No passports for US citizens who haven’t paid taxes or don’t have a Social Security number

Buried in the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act (“FAST Act”) signed into law last week is an unrelated rider to provide for revocation of the passport and/or refusal to issue a passport to anyone against whom the IRS has assessed a lien or levy for $50,000 or more in tax debt, or who doesn’t provide a valid Social Security number.

Since a change in Federal regulations in 2009 eliminated the last exception for crossing land borders to or from Canada and Mexico, it is a violation of Federal law “for any citizen of the United States to depart from or enter, or attempt to depart from or enter, the United States unless he bears a valid United States passport.”

This requirement for a passport can be “waived” at the “discretion” of the Department of State. But there is no right to a waiver, no formal procedures or standards for requesting such a waiver, and no apparent mechanism for judicial review of denial of a waiver.

So denying or revoking a US passport amounts to closing the US borders to that US citizen.

A US citizen who is denied a passport, or whose passport is revoked, is still a US citizen even if they are unable to exercise the rights of a citizen. As a citizen, they are still liable for US taxes on their worldwide income and assets, even if they are living outside the US. So any tax debt will continue and is likely to increase with interest, penalties, and new taxes.

It’s not clear at whom, or at what conduct, this new provision in US law is directed.

Are Congress and the President concerned that suspected criminal violators of the tax laws might flee the country before they can be charged or arrested? So much for the presumption of innocence, the distinction between tax debts and crimes, and the Constitutional prohibition on imprisonment for debt.

Is the intent to prevent tax debtors from spiriting their untaxed assets out of the country before they can be seized? If so, restrictions on personal movement are both overbroad and likely to be ineffectual. Most international transfers of wealth occur electronically, and most cross-border shipments of tangible goods are in the form of unaccompanied freight, not accompanied luggage.

Is the goal to exile tax debtors from US territory? Many of the US citizens who might be assessed large tax debts are already living outside the US. Under international human rights treaty law, the right to enter the country of one’s citizenship is the most absolute of the rights of freedom of movement: “There are few, if any, circumstances in which deprivation of the right to enter one’s own country could be reasonable.”

Denial or revocation of a US passport under this new law is an elaborate five-step process, although most of the steps are purely clerical:

The IRS “assesses” a tax liability of at least $50,000 in 2016, or the equivalent amount adjusted according to the cost of living index in future years.
The IRS issues a lien or levy for the tax assessment (again, for at least $50,000 or the latest adjusted equivalent).
The Commissioner of Internal Revenue certifies the existence of this assessment and lien or levy to the Secretary of the Treasury (the head of the parent department of the IRS), and notifies the citizen of this certification and of their right to challenge it in court.
The Secretary of the Treasury transmits the IRS certification to the Secretary of State
Once the State Department receives this certification, it must not issue a new passport to the citizen, and may (apparently at the standardless discretion of the Secretary of State) revoke any current passport.

There are some options, but they are entirely at the discretion of the Secretary of State:

If the Secretary of State decides to revoke a passport…, the Secretary of State, before revocation, may — (i) limit a previously issued passport only for return travel to the United States; or (ii) issue a limited passport that only permits return travel to the United States.

The law also permits (although it does not require — more standardless discretion for the Secretary of State) the denial of any application for a US passport that doesn’t include a valid Social Security number.

There’s an impunity clause in the law, although it’s unclear to what if any extent it is Constitutional, that attempts to protect government agents from liability for violating US citizens’ right to travel:

The Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of State, and any of their designees shall not be liable to an individual for any action with respect to a certification by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue.

There is a procedure for judicial review, but only of the certification of a tax assessment and lien or levy:

After the Commissioner notifies an individual … , the taxpayer may bring a civil action against the United States in a district court of the United States or the Tax Court to determine whether the certification was erroneous or whether the Commissioner [of Internal Revenue] has failed to reverse the certification. If the court determines that such certification was erroneous, then the court may order the Secretary [of the Treasury] to notify the Secretary of State that such certification was erroneous.

The new law is silent on what, if any, redress is available, or through what procedures, for a US citizen whose right to travel is violated when they are denied a passport, their passport is revoked or restricted, or they are subsequently prevented from entering or leaving the US. Responsibility for the deprivation of rights is divided among three Departments: Treasury certifying a tax debt, State denying or revoking a US passport, and DHS enforcing the passport requirement at airports and borders.

A citizen could bring an action for a writ of mandamus ordering the State Department to issue a passport, which in some other cases has prompted the State Department to issue a passport before the case could be decided.

Or a citizen could bring an action for an injunction prohibiting the DHS from interfering with their entry or exit to or from the US.

In either case, we look forward to a declaratory judgment that this law is unconstitutional, and violates US obligations as a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Nov 16 2015

The human rights of migrants in transit

Last year the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) developed and promulgated a set of “Recommended Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights at International Borders”, including respect for the right to freedom of movement, on which we made recommendations at the invitation of the OHCHR.

As a follow-up, and in response to ongoing refugee crises in Europe and elsewhere, the OHCHR has been tasked by the UN Human Rights Council with preparing further recommendations in relation to the rights of migrants in transit, including, “[e]xit restrictions … and the externalisation of border controls which could have an impact on the human rights of migrants in transit.”

Our latest recommendations to the OHCHR focus on the human rights implications of restrictions on travel by common carrier:

As we discussed in our previous submission to the OHCHR concerning the human rights of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, the right to leave any country is routinely and systematically violated – even where there is no explicit requirement for an “exit permit” – through (1) requirements for identity credentials or other travel documents as a condition of travel by common carrier, without respect for the right to leave any country and to return to the country of one’s citizenship regardless of what, if any, credentials or documents one possesses, (2) requirements for “screening” and approval of common carrier passengers that amount to de facto exit visa, transit visa, and/or entry visa requirements, (3) sanctions imposed on common carriers to induce carriers not to transport certain would-be passengers, on the basis of decisions not made, and not subject to appeal, through effective judicial procedures, and (4) failure by governments to enforce the duties of common carriers to transport all would-be passengers, regardless of their legal status or possession of documents.

Some of the most important decision-makers for asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants are airline and other common carrier ticket sellers and check-in staff. Many eligible asylum seekers are unable to reach places of refuge, and others die trying, as a direct result of improper denial of transportation by common carrier staff.

Many eligible asylum seekers could afford to purchase airline tickets or tickets on other common carriers (ferries, trains, buses, etc.) to travel to countries where, on arrival, they would be eligible for asylum. They risk their lives as “boat people”, and some of them die, not for financial reasons, but because airlines or other government-licensed common carriers improperly refuse to sell them tickets or deny them boarding.

When airlines or other common carriers deny passage, they often claim that they are doing so in compliance with government mandates or government-authorized carrier “discretion”. But decisions about these “mandates” and how to apply them, and about the scope of common carrier “discretion”, are enforced not by judicial or police personnel but by airline or other common carrier staff, or by contractors, at the points of ticket sales, check-in, or boarding. As a result, it is almost impossible for would-be passengers to obtain judicial review of carrier decisions to refuse ticket sales, check-in, or boarding.

Asylum seekers who are trying to leave a country where they are subject to persecution, and who are denied transport, are unlikely to have access to effective judicial review and redress through the courts of the country that is persecuting them. Airlines know that they can violate the rights of asylum seekers with de facto impunity.

Respect for the right to freedom of movement requires significant changes in the practices of carrier staff. To fulfill their human rights obligations, governments need to ensure that common carriers are aware of, and respect, the right to freedom of movement.

[More.]

Nov 09 2015

Accurint exposed as data broker behind TSA “ID verification”

The most recent documents released in response to one of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests may have identified the data broker powering the TSA’s “ID verification” system as Accurint — the current incarnation of a component of the discredited and supposedly disbanded Total Information Awareness program — rather than Acxiom as we had speculated (and as had powered other TSA passenger-profiling schemes).

We found this clue to the company behind the curtain in the daily reports on the operation of the TSA Identity Verification Call Center (IVCC) that gets the call whenever someone tries to fly without having, or without being willing to show, government-issued ID satisfactory to the TSA or contractor staff at an airport checkpoint:

Over the past 48 hours the IVCC experienced on-going internet connectivity issues that caused IVCC operations to be disconnected from Accurint and WebEOC databases…. The interrupted service resulted in extended call times when either database conductivity was abruptly discontinued or unavailable. At approximately 1430, TSOC IT contacted the Accurint Customer Support who indicated the issue was internal to Accurint. At approximately 1615, service appeared to be restored. At 1900, the connectivity issue resurfaced but with limited impact to operations. The TSOC Network Engineer is monitoring the Accurint situation and EMOC Security is working to identify and resolve those issues separate to Accurint.

This report strongly suggests that it’s Accurint that provides the database and “verification” algorithms used by the IVCC, the TSA, and TSA contractors to decide who to allow to fly, and who not to allow to fly. There’s no other apparent reason why the IVCC would need connectivity to Accurint, or why an outage in IVCC connectivity would would be significant.

Who are these guys? It’s a shell game of acronyms, acquisitions, and corporate restructuring.

Accurint is a service of the LexisNexis brand of the UK-incorporated RELX Group plc, which until June 2015 was named Reed Elsevier. The aggregated “garbage in, garbage out” database and pre-crime profiling algorithms used by Accurint for “ID verification” were developed by a company called Seisint, under contracts (brokered in part by Rudy Giuliani’s influence-peddling consultancy) to the DHS and Department of Justice, for the MATRIX (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange) component of Total Information Awareness (TIA).

In the midst of public controversy over MATRIX, TIA, and other aspects of Seisint and its operations, Seisint was acquired by Reed Elsevier for $775 million in 2004. Seisint’s Accurint service was folded into LexisNexis, part of what is now RELX Group plc.

“Matrix reloaded”?

Here’s what Megan Kaushik of the Brennan Center for Justice found when she tried to find out what’s in Accurint’s files about herself:

After an exhaustive search, I ultimately received records from … LexisNexis’s Accurint…. The report[] listed every phone number and address I had ever been associated with, from my college mailbox to the relative’s home where I’d forwarded mail while abroad. Accurint listed the apartment I rented while interning in DC, along with the names and phone numbers of its current occupants. It even provided the sale price and mortgage on each home I’d lived in.

Surprisingly, much of the information was also inaccurate….

Accurint listed someone named Florinda as “Associated with Subject’s SSN” though it assured me this “doesn’t usually indicate fraud.”

Obtaining my data … was difficult. Amending incorrect information was impossible. Unlike Canada or the UK where data brokers must allow individuals to access and amend their data, American law lacks such requirements. Accurint’s report stated it “may not contain all personally identifiable information in our databases” and they “do not verify data, nor is it possible to change incorrect data.”

In addition, “LexisNexis does not suppress personal information from databases used by law enforcement customers,” regardless of whether LexisNexis knows it to be inaccurate or misleading. As we said earlier, “garbage in, garbage out”. All the garbage, no matter how much it stinks.

Since its latest latest corporate restructuring in June 2015, Accurint has been operated by a UK corporation, RLEX Group plc. Stock in RLEX Group plc is owned partly by a UK-based and partly by a Netherlands-based parent corporation. But there’s no US-incorporated subsidiary to shield RLEX Group plc, as a UK corporation, from its obligation to comply with UK law in its worldwide operations, whether in the US or anywhere else.

Many of Accurint’s policies and practices with respect to its services for the TSA and other law enforcement agencies appear to violate both the LexisNexis privacy policy and, more importantly, the obligations of RLEX Group plc pursuant to UK and European Union data protection law. The governing factor under UK and EU law appears to be that the data controller for Accurint, RLEX Group plc, is legally domiciled in the UK.

It doesn’t help rescue RELX Group plc from liability under UK and EU law that it has relied on self-certification that it complies with the “safe harbor” framework, which has now been ruled legally inadequate, as the basis for transferring personal data to entities in the US such as the TSA.

Accurint also integrates social media data from “Twitter, Tumblr, Disqus, Foursquare, WordPress, Instagram, Facebook, Google+, YouTube and more,” monitored and mined by Digital Stakeout, Inc. This confirms what we have long feared: that (privatized but government-funded) surveillance of social media and other Internet activity is being used as one of the inputs to the black box that decides whether to allow us to exercise our rights. As we said five years ago in conjunction with the first “Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights”:

In such a world, your “identity” is what these companies say it is. Where do these private companies think you lived, and with whom, in a certain year, for example? An identity thief who has gotten your files may be more likely than you are to to know the “correct” answer. And each time such a commercial service is used to verify your ID for government purposes, the service provider has a record of the transaction to add to its dossier about you, and use for whatever purposes it chooses.

We’ll be posting more details and statistics as the TSA releases more of its records about what happens to people who try to fly without ID. But the records we’ve received to date show that people are already being prevented from traveling by air, despite having valid tickets on common carrier airlines, because the private data broker(s) consulted by the TSA don’t have enough data to profile them, or their answers don’t correspond to the garbage in the aggregators’ data warehouses about things such as who Accurint thinks they live with or thinks who their neighbors are.

Oct 09 2015

Airline and TSA insecurity

Recent news stories have called new attention to longstanding vulnerabilities in the security of travelers’ luggage and personal information created by TSA and airline practices.

Exhibit A: TSA-mandated “key escrow” for luggage locks:

Before the creation of the TSA, airline passengers were encouraged by airlines to secure their suitcases with locks against pilferage in transit. Some airlines’ rules provided that unless passengers locked their luggage, they would not be reimbursed for items that went missing from their luggage.

The TSA, in its infinite wisdom, initially decided that everyone would be more secure if travelers were forbidden to lock our luggage, so as to make it as easy as possible for anyone (especially, of course, TSA staff and baggage handlers) to introduce dangerous items into luggage, or remove valuables from luggage.

The predictable result was a wave of organized theft from checked luggage by groups of TSA staff and baggage handlers at airports throughout the country who used “security” x-rays of luggage to identify which bags contained things worth stealing. 400 TSA employees have been fired for stealing from luggage since 2003. As for airline and airport staff, 37 have been arrested in multiple cases of organized luggage theft at the Miami airport alone just since 2012.

In response, the TSA proposed a fig leaf of pseudo-security: Starting in 2003, air travelers were once again allowed to lock our bags — but only with TSA-approved “Travel Sentry” locks which could all be opened with one of a small set of master keys provided to all TSA baggage screeners.

That makes no sense, of course, in terms of any rational threat model: Almost the only people who have access to checked luggage in transit are airline, airport, and TSA staff. Unsurprisingly, allowing the use of locks to which all of the likely thieves were given master keys did little or nothing to deter or decrease theft.

But that’s not all. Any “key escrow” system is only as secure as the controls on access to the master keys or the information needed to replicate them. The other shoe has now dropped: Specifications for the TSA master keys (obtained from photos accurate enough to make working keys) have been made public. Anyone with a 3D printer can use these files to make their own complete set of keys to open any Travel Sentry lock.

For what it’s worth, while you aren’t allowed to use physical measures to secure your luggage, you still have some legal protection, at least in theory. Up to a liability limit fixed by law, the airline is strictly liable for loss, theft, or damage to luggage or contents between the time the passenger is given a claim check and the time the passenger reclaims their luggage. The TSA and the airlines both want to divert passengers into an arduous claims process against the TSA, but it’s actually the airline that is liable to the passenger for any damage to luggage while it is checked, even if the damage is caused by the TSA or any other third party. You can sue the airline in small claims court for any damage between check-in and baggage claim. The airline can pursue a claim against the TSA, but that’s not your problem and has no affect on the liability of the airline to the passenger. If airlines have to absorb some of these losses, maybe they’ll get motivated to rein in TSA thievery.

Exhibit B: Airlines’ use of non-secrets printed on boarding pass stubs and checked-baggage tags as “passwords” for access to the details of airline reservations and personal profiles:

Airlines store “passenger name records” (PNRs) in “computerized reservation systems” (CRSs) that were developed for purely internal use by airline and travel agency staff. Access to reservations and passenger profiles was controlled by physical controls on access to networked terminals, and by user IDs and passwords for system access. Once a CRS user was logged in, they could retrieve any PNR by “record locator”. There’s never been an individual password in the CRS for each PNR or each passenger profile.

Record locators and passenger names were and are printed on boarding passes, baggage tags and claim checks, and itineraries. At first they were machine-printed in text. More recently they have also been incorporated into barcodes with standard and publicly-disclosed encoding.

Nothing changed when CRSs were connected to Web gateways for self-service booking, ticketing, itinerary review, check-in, and so forth. Once a user is “signed in” to a CRS, all they need is a record locator and name to retrieve all or part of the data in a PNR of interest. But now every Web user in the world is, in effect, already signed in to the CRSs through these Web gateways provided by airlines and directly by each major CRS. Not all of these sites display the same subset of data, but even the most basic information available at any itinerary-viewing or check-in site (Where is this passenger going? When are they coming back?) can pose a major threat in the hands of house-burglars, stalkers, domestic abusers, or kidnappers.

Airlines and CRSs have been alerted and aware for years of the vulnerability created by the lack of passwords for access to PNR data, but have chosen to do nothing. Do they think it wouldn’t be worth the cost? Or do they think that if travelers had to remember and use a password to check in online, they would check in at the airport instead, taking up more airline staff time? Your guess is as good as ours.

The latest report this week from IT security expert Brian Krebs is that some airlines have expanded the information accessible with only the data on a discarded boarding pass (or, we suspect, a baggage tag) from the PNR for a single journey to the passenger’s entire travel history and profile from their frequent flyer record. Krebs found that he could even hijack the password on a frequent flyer account using the information encoded using a public algorithm on a boarding pass barcode. That, in turn, would allow ID thieves to have “free” tickets issued for themselves or other criminals, using the target’s mileage points.

What’s the takeaway? Neither the TSA nor the airlines have paid the least attention to rational risk assessment, risk-based security, or even the most elementary norms of physical and data security. Yet these are the entities to which the government wants to compel us to turn over even more personal information.

Sep 23 2015

Does CBP have access to domestic Amtrak reservations?

Documents released to us by Amtrak suggest that since 2012, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has had direct access to Amtrak’s reservation system, possibly including access to reservations for Amtrak passengers traveling entirely within the USA.

What do these documents show? And why would an immigration and border patrol agency want access to records of travel by US citizens and other residents within the borders of the US?

Papers, Please!

The Identity Project