Papers, Please!

The Identity Project

Category Archives: Papers, Please

Dec 02 2012

TSA updates its “notice” of Secure Flight records

The TSA published a revised System of Records Notice in the Federal Register on November 19th, updating its disclosures of what information about our “travel histories” it collects, retains, and uses through its Secure Flight program for airline passenger surveillance and control.

The new notice is both better and worse than it might appear at first glance. The new “Secure Flight” SORN describes some disturbing TSA practices that were not explicitly disclosed in the previous “Secure Flight” SORN published in 2008.

In particular, the new SORN discloses that if you are turned down or predetermined to be ineligible for the TSA’s “Pre-Check” or other “Registered Traveler” (a/k/a “Possibly Slightly Less Mistrusted Traveler”) programs, you can be placed on a new watchlist, as a result of which logs of your air travel will be retained by the TSA for 99 years. That’s especially problematic because applicants for the Pre-Check program aren’t told that being turned down could leave them worse off than if they had never applied, and subject to lifetime TSA air travel monitoring and itinerary logging.

Bad as this is, however, it isn’t really a change in what data TSA claims the right to collect, or how long it claims the right to retain and use it. These practices were already covered under “catch-all” clauses of the prior SORN, which are retained in the revised SORN, and that actually purport to authorize a much wider range of even worse practices.

Specifically, the “Secure Flight” SORN already disclosed that “Secure Flight” records might contain:

Records obtained from the TSC [Terrorist Screening Center] of known or suspected terrorists in the TSDB [Terrorist Screening Database] and records regarding individuals identified on classified and unclassified governmental watch lists…

There’s no definition or limitation on the sources or purposes of these additional “watch lists”. But it’s clear from the description quoted above that these are watch lists other than those of suspected terrorists: lists of people who are to be watched, and whose air travel itineraries are to be logged for life, for (secret, unrestricted) reasons other than that they are suspected of terrorism. Read More →

Nov 17 2012

Air Canada lies about government access to reservations

Airlines should have been defending their customers against government demands for information. Instead, they have chosen to collaborate with governments not just in surveillance and violation of the rights of their customers, but in the cover-up of those practices and the attempt to keep travelers from realizing their extent.

We got a letter from Air Canada yesterday informing us that, “Your personal information was not disclosed to a government agency with respect to the flights mentioned in your Request…”

If we didn’t know better, this would be reassuring. But it’s not true.

As it happens, we had gotten another letter earlier this week from the Canadian Border Services Administration (CBSA), containing portions of its records of Passenger Name Record (PNR) and Advance Passenger Information (API) data about our flights on Air Canada, which CBSA had obtained from computerized reservation systems and Air Canada’s Departure Control System (DCS):

[Excerpt from Air Canada API and PNR data from the CBSA “Air Targeting” system]

The information in the CBSA Air Targeting files includes both PNR and API data for Air Canada flights, despite the “claim”: that, “Air Canada is not in a position to provide you with APIs records and logs for the flights listed in your Request since no such APIs records were created.”

And earlier this year, in the last batch of information disclosed by US Customs and Border Protection in response to our Privacy Act and FOIA lawsuit for records from the CBP Automated Targeting System, we received copies of two PNRs that CBP had obtained from different reservation systems for those same Air Canada flights:

[Excerpt from Air Canada PNR from the USCBP Automated Targeting System]

[Excerpt from Air Canada & Swiss International PNR from the USCBP Automated Targeting System]

Read More →

Nov 16 2012

The facts on the ground in Arizona

“Don’t trust, and don’t verify“, would seem to be the motto of authorities in Arizona when it comes to demands for documents and “proof” of citizenship and status — if your skin is brown.

Arizona’s SB1070 requires police, in certain circumstances, to “attempt” to determine your immigration status. But that obligation on the police does not create any obligation on individuals. In its initial decision on SB1070, the Supreme Court made clear that this provision of the law cannot Constitutionally be used as the basis to detain people without some other lawful basis.

Actions on the ground in Arizona, however, suggest that in practice the burden of proof is being placed on (brown-skinned) Arizonans to prove that they are “not illegal”, on pain of prolonged detention on the basis of mere suspicion (and regardless of the weight of the actual evidence).

The Phoenix New Times has been following the case of Briseira Torres.  She was born (at her mother’s home, which the Department of State seems to find inherently suspicious) in Arizona, and her birth was registered (albeit late, as is common for home births) with the Arizona Office of Vital Records.

One doesn’t have to be registered with the government to be born, or to be a US citizen. But that didn’t stand in the way of Arizona and US authorities.  When Torres went to the Federal Building to apply for a passport for her daughter, after submitting a copy of her own birth certificate as evidence of her daughter’s US citizenship by birth, the State Department employees at the passport office called in Arizona state law enforcement officers to help interrogate Ms. Torres.

Eventually, on the theory that the original registration of Ms. Torres’ home birth had been falsified, the Feds turned her over to state authorities, who had her indicted (withholding from the grand jury the state’s official record of her valid birth certificate, and falsely claiming to the grand jury that her birth registration had been “cancelled”)  for fraud.  She was jailed for 4 1/2 months, during which time she was separated from her child and lost her home and car because she couldn’t make the payments on them, before she got a lawyer and the state withdrew the charges.

Now, to try to retroactively justify their deprivation of Ms. Torres’ rights, state officials have initiated a newly-created administrative process to revoke the registration of her birth.

In other words, the state of Arizona wants to “un-birth” Ms. Torres — at age 31.

We’re glad Ms. Torres has a lawyer, and we hope she collects substantial damages from both Arizona state and county officials and the State Department “special agent” who initially detained her, called in the state cops, and eventually turned her over to their custody.

This incident began with Ms. Torres being called in to answer questions about her passport application for her daughter. The role of the Passport Office and other State Department employees shows exactly why we are so concerned about the State Department’s proposed new questionnaire for passport applicants.

Government “un-birthing” of citizens isn’t the only strange thing going on in Arizona, unfortunately.

At the Deconcini border crossing between the central business districts of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, US Customs and Border protection is requiring some “trusted travelers” to submit to interrogation by allegedly lie-detecting robots developed (with DHS grant money, we presume) by the National Center for Border Security and Immigration at the University of Arizona.

If the robot thinks you are lying, “a more through interview would follow”, according to news reports.

But Ms. Torres’ example shows that if a human Fed in Arizona thinks you are lying about your papers, they will detain you and turn you over to the state of Arizona to be locked up without bail for months, without bothering even to look at your actual papers (not that you have to have any “papers” in the first place to be born or have rights).

In that light, we hope courts will look skeptically at the legality of prolonging the detention of a border crosser based on the statement of a semi-anthropomorphic animated robot that, “I think you are lying.”

Nov 13 2012

How Australia profiles travelers: A look inside the “black box”

At a “Big Data” conference in Sydney earlier this month, the head of Australia’s traveler tracking and profiling office (his actual title — we are not making this up — is “Director Intent Management & Analytics“) gave an  unusually revealing presentation (PDF) [also here] about the nature of the government’s travel data warehouse and how it is used to predict the “intent” of travelers to and from Australia.

Klaus Felsche of the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) didn’t mince words, referring explicitly to “data mining”, “risk scoring”, and “profiling” systems and algorithms, although lamenting that DIAC doesn’t (yet) have access to social media profiles or some data from other Australian  government agencies.

The US government has rarely used the words “scoring, “profiling”, or “data mining” with respect to its warehousing and use of Passenger Name Records (PNRs) and other travel data.  Most of the architecture, as well as all of the rules and algorithms, have been withheld from public disclosure, even when we have requested this information under the Privacy Act, FOIA, and/or through foreign governments and airlines that have allowed PNR data subject to their jurisdiction to be fed into these data warehouses and data-mining systems.

The “threat analysis” component of US travel control systems like Secure Flight has remained an unexplained “black box” whose operations are part of the magical secret sauce that justifies the government in enforcing  whatever its oracle decrees.  In this diagram — the most detailed yet provided by the TSA — it’s the red box at right center.

So we are grateful to Mr. Felsche of the Australian DIAC for providing a clearer picture of what data governments are archiving about us and our travels, and how they are using it.  Just remember, as you study his presentation, that:

  1. “Targeting” — the one euphemism that still permeates Mr. Felshe’s presentation — means search, seizure, interrogation, and prohibition of travel. In other words, deprivation of fundamental rights, to a greater or lesser degree depending on whether it means mere delay and intrusion or whether it means being confined by a no-fly order to the island of Australia for the remainder of one’s natural life.
  2. Australia is a relatively small country in population and (as his presentation makes clear) computing resources available to this component of the government.  Presumably, what’s being done with travel data by DIAC is only a subset of what is being done by the DHS, and perhaps in the European Union.
Oct 17 2012

Cuba makes it easier to leave the country, while the US makes it harder

We’re pleased that Cuba has promulgated rules, effective January 13, 2013, which will eliminate the requirement for most (but not all) would-be emigrants to obtain the government’s permission to leave the country, and to make the issuance of a passport a matter of right for most Cuban citizens.

At the same time, the US has ordered airline common carriers not to allow any would-be passenger to board any international flight departing from the US without individualized prior permission from the government. Any attempt to leave the US, even by land, without a passport, has been criminalized, without any recognition of passport issuance as a right. The State Department, in its claimed “discretion” to deny passports to US citizens at whim, has increasingly been demanding that passport applicants answer impossibly detailed and irrelevant interrogatories to establish their identity and citizenship. At the same time, the State Department has tried to suppress knowledge of its own regulations which entitle passport applicants to establish their identity by the testimony of a witness rather than by paper credentials.

And the State Department continues to ignore our complaints that these practices violate US obligations under the same provisions of the same human rights treaties that the US has invoked against Cuba.

So our challenge to those in Congress who have criticized Cuba’s restrictions on freedom of movement is this:

By January 13, 2013, when these new rules take effect in Cuba, will you have introduced and enacted legislation to require the State Department to treat passport issuance as a matter of right for US citizens, and to repeal the prohibitions on departure from the US without government permission?

We encourage our readers and supporters to let your representatives know that you expect the US to do at least as much as Cuba’s government to effectuate the right to freedom of movement.

Oct 03 2012

Government Surveillance of Travelers

For those attending today’s discussion of Government Survelliance of Travellers and the DHS “Automated Targeting System” (ATS) at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, or those who can’t make it but are interested in the topic, here are the slides from the presentation by Edward Hasbrouck of the Identity Project (PapersPlease.org), and links to additional references:

Today’s event is open to the public, so please join us if you are in New York and free at mid-day.

Sep 24 2012

State Dept. admits passport form was illegal, but still wants it approved

The new U.S. passport application forms are back, worse than ever.

Ignoring massive public opposition, and despite having recently admitted that it is already using the “proposed” forms illegally without approval, the State Department is trying again to get approval for a pair of impossible-to-complete new passport application forms that would, in effect, allow the State Department to deny you a passport simply by choosing to send you either or both of the new “long forms”.

Early last year, the State Department proposed a new “Biographical Questionnaire” for passport applicants, which would have required anyone selected to receive the new long-form DS-5513 to answer bizarre and intrusive personal trivia questions about everything from whether you were circumcised (and if so, with what accompanying religious rituals) to the dates of all of your mother’s pre- and post-natal medical appointments, your parents’ addresses one year before you were born, every address at which you have ever resided, and your lifetime employment history including the names and phone numbers of each of your supervisors at every job you have ever held.

Most people would be unable to complete the proposed new form no matter how much time and money they invested in research. Requiring someone to complete Form DS-5513 would amount to de facto denial of their application for a passport — which, as we told the State Department, appeared to be the point of the form.

The State Department’s notice of the proposal in the Federal Register didn’t include the form itself. After we published the proposed Form DS-5513, the story went viral and more than 3,000 public comments objecting to the proposal were filed with the State Department in the final 24 hours of the comment period.

After that fiasco, the State Department went dark for several months, and claimed that they would “revise” the form. But they didn’t give up, and apparently they didn’t listen to (or didn’t care) what they had been told by members of the public in our comments.

The State Department is now seeking approval for a (slightly) revised Form DS-5513 as well as a new Form DS-5520, also for passport applicants, containing many of the same questions.

The State Department no longer wants you to tell the passport examiner about the circumstances of your circumcision, but does still want to know the dates and locations of all of your mother’s pre- and post-natal medical appointments, how long she was hospitalized for your birth, and a complete list of everyone who was in the room when you were born. The revised forms no longer ask for all the addresses at which you have lived, but only for those addresses you are least likely to know: all the places you lived from birth until age 18.

And so on, as you can see for yourself on the proposed Form DS-5513 and Form DS-5520.

Read More →

Sep 23 2012

Phillip Mocek v. Albuquerque et al.

Are TSA staff and police immune from liability when they violate travelers’ rights?

 

Are First Amendment rights not “clearly established”?

These are now the issues before Judge James O. Browning of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico in Phillip Mocek v. Albuquerque et al., a Federal civil rights lawsuit brought by “Freedom Flyer” Phillip Mocek following his acquittal by a jury on all of the trumped-up criminal charges brought against him after his false arrest at a TSA checkpoint at the Albuquerque (ABQ) airport.

Here’s how this case came about, what has happened, and where things now stand:

Read More →

Sep 22 2012

“Automated Targeting System” briefing 10/3 at the Brennan Center

Identity Project consultant and policy analyst Edward Hasbrouck will give a brown-bag lunch presentation on the DHS “Automated Targeting System” and government surveillance and control of travelers on Wednesday, October 3, 2012, 12:30 – 2 p.m., at the Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law, 161 Avenue of the Americas (6th Ave.), 12th Floor, New York (in SoHo, 1/2 block from the Spring St. station on the C and E subway lines).

Hasbrouck will give an introduction to the DHS “Automated Targeting System” (including examples of data from ATS records obtained through Privacy Act and FOIA litigation), its role in US government surveillance and control of travelers, and the civil liberties and human rights issues it raises.

The “Automated Targeting System” (ATS) is one of the largest of post-9/11 warrantless dragnet surveillance programs.  Built at a cost of more than $2 billion in government-mandated changes to commercial travel IT systems, to which DHS now has root access, ATS “ingests,”  archives, and mines complete mirror copies of all international airline reservations (“passenger name record“) data for travel to, from, or via the US. ATS records include where, when, and with whom you traveled; your IP address; what credit card was used; whether you asked for a kosher or halal meal; and whether you and your traveling companion asked for one bed or two in your shared hotel room.

While little known or debated in the US, ATS has been at the center of intense disputes with the European Union and Canada over US demands for access to travel reservation data from other countries.

Edward Hasbrouck works with the Identity Project on travel-related civil liberties and human rights issues. An award-winning travel journalist, blogger, and author, he also has 15 years of travel industry experience in airline reservations technology and travel agency  operations. Hasbrouck has testified before the TSA as well as the European and Canadian Parliaments on issues related to government access to airline reservations, and was the plaintiff in a recently-concluded Privacy Act and FOIA lawsuit seeking ATS records about himself as well as information about ATS data-mining capabilities.

The event is free and open to the press and the public.

Sep 21 2012

Department of State Form DS-71: “Affidavit of Identifying Witness”

We don’t normally require our friends and family to show us their papers to establish their identities. We have better ways of recognizing who they are.

Many US government agencies, however, seems to want to make government-issued ID credentials the only way to establish who we are — even when Federal regulations require them to accept other forms of evidence of identity.

Case in point: Department of State Form DS-71: “Affidavit of Identifying Witness” for passport applicants.

As we’ve noted previously, the State Department’s own regulations at 22 C.F.R. § 51.28 entitle applicants for US passports to establish their identity by the affidavit of an identifying witness, in lieu of documentary evidence of identity.  But it seems like the State Department doesn’t really respect this right, and prefers to get all applicants to provide papers, rather than people, to “prove” who we are.

As of today, the version of Form DS-71 posted on the State Department’s website is an obsolete one whose use was approved by the Office of Management and Budget only until Dec. 31, 2005. Elsewhere on the State Department site, the link for Form DS-71 in the index of passport forms links to a PDF of an otherwise-blank page that says, “Please visit your local [passport] Acceptance Facility to obtain this form.”

Disturbingly, we’ve received reports from people who went to the State Department’s own passport offices, accompanied by witnesses prepared to identify them, and were told that no current version of Form DS-71 was actually available.

We can’t see any reason not to make this form available online with all the rest of the passport forms, much less not to have it available at passport offices, other than to hide its existence and discourage its use.

Having let its approval for any version of this form lapse for several years, and having now obtained only temporary approval that expires at the end of this month, the State Department is now in the process of seeking renewed OMB approval for a revised form, to be used for the next three years.

According to to the State Department’s application to OMB (which includes both the current and proposed versions of Form DS-71), the number of passport applicants using this form has declined dramatically, from 163,400 in 2009 to 44,000 this year.

The State Department claims that this decline is due to greater use of other “public records” by passport examiners. But a better explanation for the abrupt decline in use of this form is its removal from the State Department website and from availability at passport offices. Applicants for passports are providing other identifying records because they aren’t being told they have the alternative of establishing their identity with an affidavit from an identifying witness.

Have you tried to establish your identity to the Passport Office by having a witness identify you? Have you had trouble obtaining the proper form, or been discouraged from using it in favor of obtaining and providing other types of evidence of identity?  Please let us know.

[Update: Here’s the version of Department of State Form DS-71, “Affidavit of Identifying Witness”, most recently submitted to and approved by OMB.]