Papers, Please!

The Identity Project

Category Archives: Papers, Please

Dec 07 2013

“No-fly” trial, day 5, part 2: What happened to the plaintiff’s daughter?

“Your Honor, we’ve confirmed that the defendants did nothing to deny plaintiff’s daughter boarding. It’s our understanding that she just simply missed her flight.”

Neither the public, nor Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim, nor her daughter, Seattle-born U.S. citizen Raihan binti Mustafa Kamal, yet know why a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer sent the email message excerpted above  to the airline on which Ms. Mustafa Kamal was scheduled to fly to San Francisco last Sunday to testify at the trial in Dr. Ibrahim’s lawsuit challenging her placement on the U.S. no-fly list. (Click the image for a larger version or here for the complete e-mail forwarding thread.)

We do know, however, that whatever happened when Ms. Mustafa Kamal showed up at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KUL)  two hours and 45 minutes before the scheduled departure of her flight and tried to check in, it certainly wasn’t (and CBP’s lawyers in San Francisco certainly couldn’t later have “confirmed”, as they claimed to the court on Monday), that Ms. Mustafa Kamal “just simply missed her flight”.

Friday afternoon, after what was to have been the conclusion of the trial in Ibrahim v. DHS, Judge William Alsup held an evidentiary hearing and heard argument from lawyers for Dr. Ibrahim and the government regarding what happened to Ms. Mustafa Kamal and what (if anything) he should do about it.

(See our separate article about the morning session, including the possibility of bar complaints against some of the government’s lawyers and a history lecture from Judge Alsup to the government about the blacklisting of Robert Oppenheimer on the basis of secret, false, allegations that he was a Communist: “No-fly” trial, day 5, part 1: Closing arguments.)

At the insistence of the government and on the basis of a declaration submitted in advance by the one witness, and over objections by Dr. Ibrahim’s lawyers, the courtroom was cleared for almost the entirety of both the hearing and the argument.  The only in-person witness, Ms. Maureen Dugan, Director of the “National Targeting Center” operated by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division of DHS in Reston, Virginia, was questioned only behind closed doors, and her additional written declaration was filed with the court under seal.

Dr. Ibrahim’s lawyers were unable to present her side of the story through in-person testimony, of course, since the U.S. government agencies which are the defendants in the case have prevented both Dr. Ibrahim and Ms. Mustafa Kamal from coming to the U.S. for the trial. But a sworn written declaration by Ms. Mustafa Kamal, including the email message from CBP  that led to her being denied boarding when she tried to fly to San Francisco last Sunday for the trial, was filed in the public court docket.

Following the hearing, Dr. Ibrahim’s lead counsel, Elizabeth Pipkin, said that at the conclusion of the closed court session Judge Alsup ruled:

  1. That the parties could refer to the events, exhibits, and testimony related to Ms. Mustafa Kamal in their proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law in Dr. Ibrahim’s case, and
  2. That Dr. Ibrahim and her lawyers would be allowed until noon Monday, December 9th, to decide whether to move to re-open the case.

If the case is re-opened, the parties would be able to present new evidence, call new witnesses, and/or re-call witnesses including government witnesses whose original testimony might be contradicted and whose credibility might be impeached by what happened to Ms. Mustafa Kamal and what statements they made about it.  Ms. Mustafa Kamal could even be called as a witness, if she could find the money for another airline ticket and make it to the U.S. (In her declaration, she says that her original ticket cost MYR5751, equivalent to US$1782, and she can’t afford another ticket at that price.  It’s already peak season for trans-Pacific travel to and from SFO, and on many airlines seats are unavailable at any price until after New Years.)

Aside from seeing Ms. Dugan enter and leave the closed courtroom, and what Ms. Pipkin said afterward about Judge Alsup’s rulings, we don’t know what the government may have claimed to Judge Alsup.

But when read closely, the public filings from Ms. Mustafa Kamal raise extraordinary questions of whether CBP and DHS have:

  1. Misrepresented their operations in official statements including their most recent formal report to the European Union on how they use airline reservation data,
  2. Tried to secretly strip a person born in the U.S. of her citizenship through some secret administrative action or deem her “inadmissible” to the U.S. despite her U.S. citizenship, and/or
  3. Misled the airline about the basis for their no-board request, and manipulated the airline through those false pretenses into wrongly denying boarding to Ms. Mustafa Kamal despite the fact that she is a native-born U.S. citizen with an absolute, unconditional, and irrevocable entitlement to admission to the U.S.

Read More →

Dec 07 2013

“No-fly” trial, day 5, part 1: Closing arguments

Judge William Alsup convened day five of the trial in Ibrahim v. DHS — the first lawsuit challenging a U.S. government “no-fly” order to  make it to trial — on Friday morning with the announcement that, “I received this additional material about the [plaintiff’s] daughter and her attempts to come here.”

But as he said this, Judge Alsup noticed that lead counsel for both parties were still conferring in the corridor outside the courtroom.  When they were brought in a moment later, Dr. Ibrahim’s lead attorney Elizabeth Pipkin came forward with an even more unexpected announcement: “We have told opposing counsel that we are considering the possibility of bar complaints against some of the attorneys on their team for their conduct during this trial.”

“There is some concern that on our team there have been some blatant misrepresentations made to the court,” one of the supervising attorneys for the Department of Justice team representing the government explained.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Judge Alsup said. What exactly was he supposed to do?

Ms. Pipkin said she wasn’t asking Judge Alsup to do anything, and further volunteered that she had assured the government’s legal team that no such complaints would be made until after the conclusion of the trial.

But one of the government’s supervising attorneys told Judge Alsup she was concerned about compliance with internal rules of  her agency that require that in cases where a supervising attorney is aware of the potential for bar complaints against a government lawyer, the supervisor is required to reassign that lawyer from the case while the possible complaint is pending.

That appeared to be an internal matter within the government’s legal team, and there didn’t seem to be anything for Judge Alsup to do.  No announcement was made as to the departure of any of the government’s lawyers, but with a team one observer counted as ten lawyers and three paralegals before the bar on the defendants’ side, it was hard to keep track of whether one of them might have gone missing for the rest of the day.

Ms. Pipkin told the judge that, “We would prefer to take up the issue of the daughter first,” before closing arguments. “It’s integral to the case, and shows exactly what the issues are.” But Judge Alsup decided he wanted to get the closing arguments over with first, and scheduled a separate hearing regarding Dr. Ibrahim’s daughter after lunch. (See our separate report on that later hearing, which produced even more shocking revelations: “No-fly” trial, day 5, part 2: What happened to the plaintiff’s daughter? )

Each side to was allowed to make a 30-minute closing statement in open court, after which the courtroom was cleared and each side was allowed an additional 15 minutes to make arguments behind closed doors based on, or referring to, evidence that the government contends cannot be disclosed to the public.

“This case is about the right to travel freely, without government interference,” Ms. Pipkin began the public portion of her closing.

“Dr. Ibrahim is not able to be here because the government has not issued a visa for her to do so. She wants to maintain and enrich her ties to colleagues and institutions in the U.S. She has substantial ties to the U.S. But she has been unable to travel to the U.S. since 2005.”

Ms. Pipkin predicted — correctly —  that, “The government will say that there’s been no real harm” to Dr. Ibrahim from the defendants’ actions because she’s been incredibly successful in her career and has been able to travel to other places. “But she has been denied access to the most important country in the world for research and scholarship. She wants to commercialize the patented inventions that she had made in her research, but she has been denied access to the most important center of entrepreneurship and investment in the world. She has been denied permission to travel to the U.S. to petition for redress of her grievances.”

Read More →

Oct 22 2013

TSA’s lying “response” to today’s story in the New York Times

We’re quoted on the front page of today’s New York Times in a story by Susan Stellin, “Security Check Now Starts Long Before You Fly”:

The Transportation Security Administration is expanding its screening of passengers before they arrive at the airport by searching a wide array of government and private databases that can include records like car registrations and employment information….

“I think the best way to look at it is as a pre-crime assessment every time you fly,” said Edward Hasbrouck, a consultant to the Identity Project, one of the groups that oppose the prescreening initiatives. “The default will be the highest, most intrusive level of search, and anything less will be conditioned on providing some additional information in some fashion.”

More:

The TSA refused to say anything to the Times on the record, but published a blog post today (with the misleading title “Expediting Screening for the Traveling Public”) responding to the Times’ story with a succession of lies and prevarications.

We call “bullshit” on the TSA:

  • “We are not using “private databases.”” This is an out-and-out lie, as “Blogger Bob” and the TSA surely know. All TSA pre-secreening systems relie primarily on information from private commercial databases of airline reservations (PNRs). Since there is no requirement for a U.S. citizen to notify the government directly before taking a trip by common carrier, “pre-screening” would be impossible without access to, and reliance on, these private commercial databases. The US government has gone to great effort, through the APIS,  PNR, and Secure Flight regulations and through lobbying for changes to Canadian privacy law and exceptions to European privacy law, to implement requirements for DHS access to this data.  If these databases are no longer “private”, that is only because the TSA and other DHS components have compelled airlines and reservation hosting companies to make this data available to government agencies.
  • “TSA does not monitor a passenger’s length of stay in any location.” The TSA doesn’t always retain the travel itinerary information it compels airlines to provide for domestic travel, but it claims the right to do so for anyone deemed (arbitrarily or according to secret criteria) to be “suspicious” or to “match” an entry on any of the government’s (arbitrary, secret) “watchlists”.  And for international travel, CBP (another DHS component agency) does retain complete PNR data, including travel itineraries, and comprehensive border crossing and entry/exit logs, for all travelers, in its Automated Targeting System (ATS) — and claims the right to “share” all this data with the TSA. (And that doesn’t even begin to consider the NSA’s apparently independent hacking of airlines and reservation systems and potential sharing of PNR and other travel data with DHS.)
  • “We are not using car registrations.” Again, it’s CBP rather than the TSA that is logging license plates and vehicle movements (using cameras near borders and optical character recognition software), linking them to individual ATS records, and using them to generate “risk” scores and watchlist messages — which are then passed on to the TSA.  TSA is using this data, just (slightly) indirectly. According to the latest System Of Records Notice for ATS, published in the Federal Register in 2012, “ATS maintains the official record for … the combination of license plate, Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) registration data and biographical data associated with a border crossing”.
  • “[W]e rely on the same security information passengers have been required to submit at time of booking for many years…. [T]he info we rely on is the same info that passengers have provided for years when they book their flight.” Actually, we didn’t used to have to provide our ID number, date of birth, or gender in order to make an airline (or Amtrak train, or Greyhound bus) reservation. It used to be possible to hold airline reservations in “dummy” names, or with no names at all. The TSA relies on information that has only been required since the creation of the TSA. And in the past, we “provided” that information, if at all, only to airlines and travel companies. Prior to the creation of the TSA, we never had to provide any information to the government to book a flight.  (Unless we were traveling in a foreign country where a foreign government agency like the Stasi required us to show our ID cards or permission papers to book a flight.)
  • “Anyone who has never traveled outside the United States would not have a passport number on file and would therefore not be subject to the rules that the agency uses to determine risk.” Nonsense. Many people have our passport numbers on file with the TSA because we’ve used our passports as ID for domestic flights.  Many people have no government-issued ID except a passport.  Despite the State Department’s moves to make it more difficult to get a passport, the REAL-ID  law sometimes makes it even more difficult to get a drivers license or other state-issued ID than to get a passport.
  • “We are not expanding the type of information we use.” If that were true, why would the TSA have published formal notices in the Federal Register of new systems of records and new uses for existing systems of records?  They don’t publish these legal notices just for fun. Either (a) the TSA has already been illegally collecting and/or using this data without proper notice, in violation of the Privacy Act (as DHS did for years with the Automated Targeting System), (b) the TSA is doing what is says in the notices it is doing, and collecting and using new information in new ways, or (c) the TSA plans to do so in the future, and wants to be able to say, if someone later complains, “But we gave you fair notice that this was what we were going to do. If you wanted to object, you should have done so back in 2013 when we published that notice.”
  • “[W]e are not using any new data to determine low risk passengers.” Applicants for the TSA’s Pre-Check program — i.e. people who want to be relieved of suspicion-by-default and the associated more intrusive search each time they travel — are being required to provide information that the TSA has never before requested, including fingerprints, other biometric information, and authorization for checks of criminal, financial, and other government and commercial records.  If the TSA isn’t using any of this new data, why is it compiling it? More than likely, this new data is being or will soon be used — and retained for possible additional future uses for an unknown range of purposes.

[TSA Pre-Crime graphic from Leaksource]

Oct 10 2013

TSA proposes arbitrarily individualized surveillance-based searches

In the latest version of TSA’s endless series of “trusted traveler” (or “less mistrusted traveler”) schemes, the agency is currently proposing to impose more intrusive searches on any traveler who doesn’t “voluntarily” enroll in the TSA Pre-Check program and authorize the TSA to create a new permanent file with everything from your fingerprints to any “other information provided by … government agencies or other entities”.

These files would be exempted from the normal requirements of the Privacy Act that records used as the basis for decisions about individuals’ exercise of our rights be made available to us and be limited to information that is sufficiently accurate, complete, and relevant to form a legitimate basis for such decisions.

The proposal is contained in a package of three regulatory filings (one new and one revised “System of Records Notice” and a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” proposing Privacy Act exemptions) published last month in the Federal Register.  All three have to be read in combination to appreciate their full implications.

The deadline for public comments on two of these proposals is today, and for the third is tomorrow. We filed consolidated comments today objecting to all three of these proposals:

Read in combination, this new and revised SORN and these proposed regulations describe a system in which an essentially unlimited range of personal information collected from an essentially unlimited range of sources, and known to include inaccurate and irrelevant information, would be (or perhaps already is being) compiled into the “TSA Pre-Check Application Program” system of records.

These records would be used – either according to criteria which are illegally being kept secret, or in an entirely arbitrary manner at the “discretion” of the TSA – to determine who is and who is not deemed “eligible” to exercise the right to travel without being subject to unreasonable searches.

The results of that decision-making would be incorporated into the “Secure Flight” system of records, and used as part of the basis (also either pursuant to secret rules or entirely arbitrarily) for deciding to issue or withhold the issuance of individualized “boarding pass printing results”, including instructions to TSA staff and contractors as to the degree of intrusiveness of the search to which each would-be traveler is to be subjected as a condition of exercising our right to travel.

Maintenance and use of these systems of records in the manner contemplated by these SORNs and the proposed exemptions would violate the 1st, 4th, and 5th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the presumption of innocence, due process, the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA), the Privacy Act, and Article 12 (Freedom of Movement) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR.

These records should be expunged, and the proposed regulations should be withdrawn….

We also point out that the TSA is only pretending to give the required consideration to public comments:

According to the “TSA Pre-Check Application Program” SORN published on September 10, 2013, “The Secretary of Homeland Security has exempted certain records from this system from the notification, access, and amendment procedures of the Privacy Act because it may contain records or information related to law enforcement or national security purposes.”

This claim was, and is, false. As of the date of the SORN, no such exemption had even been proposed: the NPRM proposing such an exemption, and requesting public comments (such as this one) concerning that proposed exemption for consideration by the DHS, was not published until a day later, on September 11, 2013. Even now, the Secretary has promulgated no final rule for such an exemption. Nor could he or she promulgate any such final rule, consistent with the Administrative Procedure Act, unless and until the current period for public comment on the proposed exemption rule has concluded and the comments submitted (including these comments) have been considered by the DHS.

The false claim that “The Secretary of Homeland Security has exempted certain records from this system from the notification, access, and amendment procedures of the Privacy Act”, when in fact the Secretary has not done so, appears to be intended to mislead individuals about what rights we have, and to dissuade us from attempting to exercise our rights.  In addition, by stating the outcome of the current exemption rulemaking as a fait accompli, it constitutes prima facie evidence of bad faith in the consideration of public comments. It is not enough for an agency to accept submissions of comments from the public to the circular file, after making a decision. An agency must give genuine consideration to public comments before deciding whether to finalize, modify, or withdraw a proposed rule.

You can read our complete comments here. You can submit comments at Regulations gov (here, here , and here) but your comments won’t be processed or visible online until after the DHS Privacy Office re-opens.

[TSA Pre-Crime graphic from Leaksource]

Sep 17 2013

How airline reservations are used to target illegal searches

One of the most detailed pictures to date of how the US government uses airline reservations to target illegal searches is provided by documents released recently by the US government as part of an agreement to settle a lawsuit brought by David House, an activist with the Pvt. Manning Support Network.

Mr. House was detained and searched and had his electronic devices confiscated and copied by DHS personnel at O’Hare Airport as he was re-entering the US after a vacation in Mexico in 2010.

The government learned of Mr. House’s travel plans through their systems for real-time monitoring and mining of airline reservations:

The ACLU analysis of the documents released to Mr. House, and reports by the New York Times and the Associated Press,  focus on the DHS seizure and copying of the data from Mr. House’s electronic devices. An article in Mother Jones highlights the technical ineptness of the government’s attempts to analyze the data seized from Mr. House. (It took DHS “experts” more than a month, for example, to realize that a portion of the data dump from Mr. House’s netbook was a Linux partition.)

But as discussed below, more is revealed by these documents about DHS access to, and use of, airline reservations.

The documents released to Mr. House may also help explain how David Miranda, the domestic partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained and searched last month while changing planes at Heathrow Airport in London.

And in that context, they may also suggest an explanation for why Mr. Miranda was detained and searched in the UK, and Mr. House in the US, but Mr. Greenwald himself has not been detained or similarly searched when he travels to the US.

Read More →

Sep 10 2013

9th Circuit considers Constitutionality of ban on Internet anonymity

Last year, we reported on a Federal district court hearing on the Constitutionality of portions of the law enacted by California’s Proposition 35, which requires California residents who have been convicted of certain sex-related crimes to register with the local police, annually and within 24 hours of any addition or change, for the rest of their lives, “A list of any and all Internet identifiers established or used by the person [and] A list of any and all Internet service providers used by the person… For purposes of this chapter, (a) “Internet service provider” means a business, organization, or other entity providing a computer and communications facility directly to consumers through which a person may obtain access to the Internet…. (b)  “Internet identifier” means an electronic mail address, user name, screen name, or similar identifier used for the purpose of Internet forum discussions, Internet chat room discussions, instant messaging, social networking, or similar Internet communication.”

The challenge to this portion of the law, being argued by Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Northern California on behalf of as-yet-anonymous clients who would be subject to this registration requirement, is a crucial test of the right to anonymity on the Internet.

It’s easy to say, “This only affects sex offenders.”

But restrictions on First Amendment rights are always imposed first on the most stigmatized groups of people, whether the villians du jour are serial killers, perverts, Communists, or Jews.  Once they are accepted by the public as applied to those disfavored classes, these measures can gradually be expanded until everyone has to register with the government, carry government-assigned credentials identifying them and/or their group affiliation (Star of David, pink triangle, etc.), or comply with other restrictions that have come to be accepted  as merely “administrative” rules for how they can exercise their rights, and are no longer considered substantive restrictions on rights.

Judge Thelton Henderson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California had issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the state form enforcing this part of the law. Following the hearing we reported on, Judge Henderson converted that order into a preliminary injunction.  Both the state of California, and the sponsors of the ballot initiative (as “intervenors” in the court case) appealed to the Circuit Court before the District Court could resolve the issue of whether to make the injunction permanent.

Today a three-judge panel of he 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments on whether to let the preliminary injunction remain in force while the District Court proceedings continue.

Today’s hearing focused on whether the provisions of Prop. 35 requiring registration of Internet service providers and “identifiers” chill the exercise of free speach and are overbroad, i.e are not “narrowly tailored” to restrict no more activity protected by the First Amendment than is necessary. (The vagueness of the terms “Internet service provider” and “Internet identifier” was raised in the briefs, but barely mentioned at argument.)

Early in the hearing, Judge Jay Bybee observed that, “We’re living in a post-Snowden world now, where we all have to wonder whether all of our communications are being monitored by the NSA.” It was an intriguing suggestion of how much judicial attitudes may have been reshaped by the actions of whistleblowers.

The law’s proponents argued that free speech would not be chilled because under the law the police would have only limited authority to make Internet identifiers public.

But Michael Risher of the ACLU pointed out that chilling effects result primarily from fear of official retaliation — such as by the police. Police don’t have to make registration information public to use it themselves against people who say things they don’t like.

“A registrant who wants to criticize the local police department in comments on a local newspaper’s website, but doesn’t want to face retaliation, will be chilled if they know that their identifier is on file with those local police…. Among the reasons for protection of anonymous speech is to protect against this sort of official retaliation.”  It’s easy for the police to make life hard for a registered sex offender, Risher pointed out.

The law’s defenders had a particularly hard time justifying the breadth of the registration requirement, which they conceded applied (at least as the law is written) to screen names or accounts used to post comments on websites from the New York Times to eBay, and to people whose crimes had nothing to do with the Internet.

“If I open an account so I can sell my bicycle on Craigslist, do I have to report that?”, Judge Bybee asked.

When counsel for the intervenors tried to justify the requirement for registration of Internet identifiers (but not pseudonyms used for other sorts of communications) by claiming that “sex crimes are moving to the Internet”, Judge Mary Schroeder shot back, “So is shopping. So what?”

We’re relatively optimistic that this panel of the 9th Circuit will allow the District Court’s preliminary injunction to remain in force. But it’s still up to the District Court to make that injunction permanent.

Aug 22 2013

California considers “enhancing” drivers licenses with radio tracking beacons

California’s legislature is considering a bill to authorize adding radio tracking beacons to drivers licenses and state non-driver ID cards.

Each such card would broadcast a unique tracking number which could legally be intercepted by anyone with a suitable radio transceiver within range, and which would be linked to a national DHS database of drivers license, state ID card, and citizenship information.

The tracking beacons are designed to allow the tracking numbers on ID cards carried by travelers in motor vehicles to be read from outside their vehicles as they approach or pass through checkpoints.

Independent academic studies of actual ID cards issued by other states, using the same standards proposed for use in California, have found that they can sometimes be read from more than 50 yards away.

S.B. 397 has already been approved by the California Senate, and is now under consideration in the Assembly. Because it has been amended by the Assembly, it will need to be reconsidered by the Senate (to decide whether to accept the Assembly amendments) if and when it is approved by the Assembly.

To date, S.B. 397 has been largely unopposed in the California legislature, and it is likely to be approved unless legislators start hearing a groundswell of opposition from their constituents.

What excuse is being offered for this scheme? And what’s its real purpose?

Read More →

Aug 19 2013

White House approves new “long forms” for some passport applicants

After a year-long “review”, the White House on August 12, 2013, approved the State Department’s proposed new “long form” questionnaires for some (unspecified) subset of applicants for US passports:

Form DS-5513, “Supplemental Questionnaire to Determine Entitlement for a U.S. Passport”:

Form DS-5520, “Supplemental Questionnaire to Determine Identity for a U.S. Passport”:

In approving these forms, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) ignored overwhelmingly public outrage at these questionnaires, which ask such questions as:

  • List all your parent(s) residences one year before your birth.
  • Parent(s) place of employment at the time of your birth (Dates of employment, Name of employer, Address of employer).
  • Did your mother receive medical care while pregnant with you and/or up to one year after your birth? (Name of hospital or other facility, Address, Name of Doctor, Approximate dates of appointments).
  • Please provide the names (as well as address and phone number, if available) of persons present at your birth such as medical personnel, family members, etc.
  • Please list any schools, day care centers, or developmental programs you attended from birth to age 18 in or outside of the United States.
  • Please list all of your permanent residences inside and outside of the United States starting with your birth until age 18.

The proposed forms were slightly (but not significantly) revised by the State Department during the review by OMB. But there are still no publicly-disclosed guidelines for which passport applicants would be sent one or both of these “long forms”.  We requested this information from the State Department more than two years ago under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), but the State Department has not yet responded to our request. (This is, we’ve been told, typical of the State Department’s failure to comply with FOIA deadlines.)  The most reasonable inference is that the new forms are designed to be impossible to complete, so as to provide a pretext to deny you a passport if the State Department doesn’t like your looks (or your opinions, or whatever).

The State Department has also ignored our formal complaint that these conditions for passport issuance violate U.S. obligations as a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and our FOIA request for any records of what (if anything) was done with that complaint.

OMB declined our written request to meet with them to discuss our objections to the proposed forms. OMB policy is to meet with groups interested in its reviews of proposed regulations, but it doesn’t apply that policy to its reviews of proposed “information collections”.

In the course of the review by OMB, the State Department admitted that, as we had already reported, it has already been using these forms illegally. According to the latest State Department submission to OMB:

The DS-5520 has been created to correct a procedure that may have been inconsistent with the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA)….   Field offices have, in the past, sent the applicant a letter containing a questionnaire asking for the supplemental information.  The Department has become aware of this procedure and is now seeking OMB approval to rectify the oversight….

The DS-5520 is a new collection based on the previously internal Information Request Letter (IRL) titled, “Supplemental Identification List”.  To estimate the number of respondents per year, therefore, the Department ran a report using our Management Information System (MIS) to determine the number of these IRLs filed in 2011 by every passport agency and acceptance facility.  The results revealed that in 2011, 54,723 letters were filed along with the DS-11.

Until the forms were approved (as they now have been) by OMB, the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) prohibited the State Department from denying anyone a passport or imposing any other penalties for failure or refusal to fill out these forms.

Now that these forms have been approved, objections to the denial of a passport on the basis of failure to complete these forms (or to do so to the satisfaction of the State Department) will have to be based on other grounds than the PRA.  These objections may be more fundamental, but may also be more difficult to establish in administrative or judicial proceedings.

If you are a US citizen but are denied a US passport because you are unable or unwilling to answer these questions, or you are prevented from entering or leaving the USA because you don’t have a passport, we’d like to hear from you.

Jun 14 2013

How many people fly without ID? How many are denied the right to fly?

Buried in the TSA’s response last month to our FOIA request for information about its ID verification forms a and procedures was a fragmentary report on how many people try to fly without ID, and what happens to them.

An e-mail message discussing the changes made in 2008 to the TSA’s (secret) procedures for flying without ID — the last time TSA Form 415 for air travelers without ID was revised — included a TSA Operation Center (TSOC) “ID Verification Report” for the 15-hour period from 5 p.m. on June 21, 2008, to 8 a.m. on June 22.

On what was described as a “quiet” night, 74 people (nationwide, apparently) tried to fly without ID and were subjected to the TSA “ID verification” procedures between 5 p.m. and 5 a.m., and an additional 45 between 5 and 8 a.m. the next morning, for a total of 119. This didn’t include what is presumably the busiest shift, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., but what still suggest that tens of thousands of people try to fly without ID each year.

It appears that most of these people were allowed to fly without ID. Of the total of 119, only 8 were reported as “denials” (presumably meaning that they were identified, but deemed on the basis of that identification to be subject to no-fly orders), while 23 were reported a “not verified”. It’s unclear if those “not verified” were denied travel,  or were allowed to travel despite not being “verified”.

Now that we know that records are being kept of how many people try to fly without ID, and of what happens to them, we’ve filed a follow-up FOIA request for all “TSOC ID Verification Reports” as well as any records of how incidents and outcomes are categorized for reporting purposes.

May 29 2013

TSA never got OMB approval for “Certification of ID” (Form 415)

In June 2008, the TSA began requiring would-be travelers who didn’t show government-issued ID credentials to fill out and sign — under penalty of perjury — a new “Certification of Identity” form, and answer questions based on the records about them retrieved by a TSA contractor from some commercial data-aggregation company.

Since then, we’ve made a series of FOIA requests to try to obtain the current form, the rules (if any) for its use, and whether the TSA had gotten this collection of information approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as required by the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA).

We’ve recently received a response to one of our FOIA requests, filed more than two years ago, which includes the latest version of TSA Form 415 and makes clear that the TSA has never obtained the requisite OMB approval.

In the absence of OMB approval and a valid OMB control number on TSA Form 415, travelers who decline to respond to these questions or fill  out or sign this form cannot be subjected to any government sanctions, including TSA “civil penalties”.

There are several noteworthy features of the latest documents released by the TSA in response to our FOIA request, particularly TSA Form 415 itself and this email thread regarding how the form is used and whether it requires OMB approval.

First, the e-mail correspondence with the FOIA Office to identify records responsive to our request appears to have been completed within a few weeks. Then the TSA sat on the response for more than two years, presumably while waiting for approval from the DHS FOIA “front office”. From responses to our previous requests, we know that the FOIA “front office” has ordered the TSA not to respond to our requests without this approval, even if responses are complete and otherwise ready to go out.

Second, if the TSA’s latest FOIA response to our request for the “most recent version” is to be believed, the version of the “Certification of Identity” currently in use is this TSA Form 415 dated August 2008.

Third, the TSA never even applied for OMB approval for TSA Form 415 or its unnumbered predecessor “Certification of Identity” form, because the office responsible for obtaining OMB approval was led to believe that the form was to be completed by TSA staff, not by travelers (a manifestly implausible claim, since all versions of the form have included a space labeled for the signature of the would-be traveler).

Fourth, the TSA completely misunderstood the statutory criteria for determining when OMB approval is required. Who fills out the form, or whether there even is a paper form (or information is collected by verbal questioning), is completely irrelevant to the definition in the Paperwork Reduction Act of a “collection of information” for which OMB approval is required:

[T]he term “collection of information” … means the obtaining, causing to be obtained, soliciting, or requiring the disclosure to third parties or the public, of facts or opinions by or for an agency, regardless of form or format, calling for … answers to identical questions posed to, or identical reporting or recordkeeping requirements imposed on, ten or more persons, other than agencies, instrumentalities, or employees of the United States….

The consequence is that you aren’t required to complete TSA Form 415 (since it doesn’t have an OMB control number),  you aren’t required to answer any TSA questions (if the same questions are asked of ten or more people), and you can’t be penalized for declining to fill out the form or answer such questions.