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Jun 01 2009

Today we’re all prisoners in the USA

As of today, June 1, 2009, even U.S. citizens are officially prisoners in the USA, or exiles barred from entering our own country without the government’s permission.

We are now forbidden by Federal regulations from leaving or entering the USA, anywhere, by any means — by air, by sea, or by land, to or from any other country or international waters or airspace — unless the government chooses to issue us a passport, passport card, or “enhanced” drivers license (any of which “travel documents” are now issued only with secretly and remotely-readable uniquely-numbered radio tracking beacons in the form of RFID transponder chips), or unless the Department of Homeland Security chooses to to exercise its standardless “discretion” to decide — in secret, with no way for us to know who is making the decision or on what basis — to issue a (one-time case-by-case) “waiver” of the new travel document requirements.

If you’re in the USA without such documents — even if you were born here, or are a foreigner who entered the USA legally without such documents (a Canadian, for example, who entered the USA by land yesterday when no such documents were yet required), or your document(s) have expired or have been lost or stolen — you are forbidden to leave the country unless and until you procure such a document, or unless and until the DHS gives you an exit permit in the form of a discretionary one-time waiver to leave the country — but not necessarily to come home, unless they again exercise their discretion to “grant” you another waiver.

If you are a U.S. citizen abroad without such a document (for example, if you entered Canada legally without it yesterday by land, when it wasn’t required, or again if your document(s) are expired, lost, or stolen) you are forbidden to come home unless and until you can procure a new document acceptable to the DHS, or unless and until the DHS gives you permission to come home in the form of a discretionary one-time waiver. Read More →

May 26 2009

TSA releases (censored) ID checking procedures

In response to a request by the Identity Project under the Freedom of Information Act, the TSA has for the first time given us a (redacted) version of the section on Travel Document and ID Checks from the TSA’s “Screening Management SOP” (Standard Operating Procedures) manual. Our request was made June 21, 2008, the day the TSA announced what they claimed were changes to ID “requirements” for air travelers. It took the TSA almost seven months to respond.

The version of the SOP manual which the TSA has now made public is dated June 30, 2008, so it ought to reflect the changes announced in the TSA’s June 21, 2008 press release. But there is nothing at all in the sections of the manual the TSA has released about the new procedures and new ID verification form which the TSA had, in fact, started using. Rather than requiring people who don’t have or don’t choose to show government-issued ID credentials to execute affidavits stating who they are under penalty of perjury, the TSA procedures manual requires that such people be allowed to proceed through secondary screening as “selectees”, and specifically directs screeners and other TSA staff not to make any attempt to detain or delay them.

California DMV plans crackdown on “look-alikes”

Has anyone ever looked at your face and mistaken you for someone else?

If so, and if you live in California, you could be a victim of a proposal by the California Department of Motor Vehicles which is now under consideration in the state legislature.

At a hearing yesterday (May 13, 2009) before the Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 5 on Information Technology/Transportation, the Director and Chief Information Officer of the DMV pleaded for more money (in spite of the desperate state budget crisis) to hire a contractor to digitize and store the photographs taken for every California drivers license or state ID, and then use “biometric” facial recognition and matching software to compare each new photo of an applicant for a license or ID with every photo in the database. (The DMV proposal next goes before the Senate Budget Subcommittee No. 2 on Resources, Environmental Protection, Energy and Transportation on Wednesday, March 20th.)

If the computer thinks your picture looks like any other picture in the database, both you and the other person whose photo the robot thinks looks like yours would be placed under suspicion of fraud, identity theft, or worse. Read More →

May 14 2009

“Warden’s skills a plus for TSA chief”

Has it ever seemed like the TSA treats passengers the way prison guards treat convicts? Here’s what the TSA thinks it takes to run their operations at the world’s busiest airport:

Warden’s skills a plus for TSA chief

Newly appointed Byrd has a background in corrections.

By Kelly Yamanouchi, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Thursday, May 14, 2009)

Mary Leftridge Byrd sees some similarities between her career in corrections and her new job as head of the Transportation Security Administration at the Atlanta airport….

Byrd, 60, joined the TSA last month from a position as assistant and deputy secretary at the Washington State Department of Corrections, and she is a former prison warden and superintendent in Pennsylvania and Maryland.

… The TSA has about 900 security officers in Atlanta.

May 03 2009

EU Council renews push for government access to PNR data

The Council of the European Union has put forward its new version of the “Proposal for a Council Framework Decision on the use of Passenger Name Record (PNR) for law enforcement purposes” originally made by the European Commission. (More background on the proposal is available from Statewatch.)

The latest Council version of the proposal is essentially the same as the original Commision proposal, with only trivial changes in repsonse to input from Council members. Like the original version introduced by the European Commission, the new Council version of the PNR proposal would require each member state to establish a new surveillance agency (a government “Passenger Information Unit” or PIU), and would require each airline operating flights to, from, or within the EU to make PNR data available to the PIU of each origin or destination state.

The Council appears to have entirely ignored the criticisms raised by the European Parliament in its consideration of the PNR proposal, as detailed in its most recent November 2008 resolution withholding Europarl approval. As the Europarl rapporteur said in the plenary session preceeding the vote:

I think the European Parliament is a serious partner, fully available to give input in this process. However, we will only issue a formal position once there are full, satisfactory and detailed answers to all the concerns and objections that were raised on several occasions by the European Parliament, the European Data Protection Supervisor, the national data protection authorities, the fundamental rights agencies and the airlines, because I think they are entitled to a real answer.

The latest Europarl vote in favor of this resolution (and against approval of the PNR proposal) was overwhelming: 512 to 5, with 19 abstentions. Under the “codecision” procedure, Europarl approval is required in order for the PNR proposal to be adopted. But neither the Commission nor the Council have responded in any meaningful way to their critics, or provided any evidence that any benefit of the PNR scheme would be proportionate to the grave damage it would do to funadamental freedoms.

Europeans should encourage their MEPs to continue to demand answers before they approve any scheme with such profound implications for justice and civil liberties, and not to allow the EU to repeat the mistakes made by the U.S. in establishing PNR-based systems of travel surveillance and control.

Mar 18 2009

NPR parrots the government line on RFID passports

Today’s edition of “All Things Considered” includes a puff piece on e-passports with embedded RFID chips, based entirely on propaganda statements by government spokespeople. For the other side of the story that NPR didn’t bother to cover, see the listener comments in NPRs blog, our previous articles on RFID chips in government-issued identity documents, and reports elsewhere on how RFID passports facilitate ID theft, how the globally unique ID numbers on the RFID chips facilitate surveillance, how the encryption used for the rest of the data on the RFID chip has already been cracked, and how space has already been reserved in the data structure on the chip for logs of travelers’ movements.

Mar 10 2009

DHS considering hackable long-range RFID as “alternative” to REAL-ID

Chris Strohm of the National Journal’s CongressDaily reports:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona, said Monday that her office is participating in a working group established by the National Governors Association to review the so-called Real ID law, which Congress passed in 2005 while under Republican control.

“What they’re looking at is whether statutory changes need to be made to Real ID,” Napolitano said after a speech to Homeland Security employees marking the sixth anniversary of the department’s creation.

“They are looking at whether some version of an enhanced driver’s license that perhaps creates options for states would be feasible. They’re looking at what the fiscal impact would be particularly given that states have no money right now,” she added.

“I would expect that over the course of the spring we’ll be rolling something out,” she said.

So-called “enhanced” drivers licenses, already being issued in Washington and Vermont, contain a remotely-readable long-range (“vicinity”) RFID chip, in violation of ICAO international standards for only shorter-range RFID chips in travel documents, with a globally unique identification number to permit anyone within range to track the card or the movements of the person carrying it. Hackers have already demonstrated, in on-camera real-world tests on the streets of San Francisco, that these enhanced drivers licences and the passport cards that use the same type of RFID chips have succeeded in their design goal of being readable from inside or outside a moving car as it passes by.

This is no “solution” to the problems of the REAL-ID Act, and no improvement.

As we’ve argued in our proposals to the administration and Congress, the only solution to REAL-ID is repeal. Until Congress takes that essential action, states and citizens should continue their refusal to comply with REAL-ID.

Feb 20 2009

“Homeland Security USA” shows how to travel without ID

The new “reality” television show Homeland Security USA has prompted a Facebook group calling for it to be taken off the air, and protests against its bigotry outside the ABC-TV / Walt Disney Corp. offices in Burbank, even while ratings and viewership have been falling steadily since the first episode.

This week, though, the show gave us a useful lesson: how to fly (within the U.S.) without showing ID.

You can watch Benjamin fly without showing ID in the first half of Episode 5 here on the ABC.com website. (The player won’t work unless it thinks you are running Windows XP or Vista, but it’s possible — sometimes — to get it to work in Linux by using the Windows version of Firefox in the “wine” environment.) Read More →

Feb 11 2009

ID checks and government logs of hotel guests

Demands for ID credentials from hotel guests are once again in the public eye, with commenters in travel journalist Christopher Elliott’s blog weighing in with opinions on his recent article about an Orlando hotel, Hotel shows customer the door after he refuses to show ID — can it do that?

This sort of thing doesn’t happen only in the land of Disney World, though. Coincidentally, one of the final public acts of the outgoing Chief Privacy Officer of the DHS last month was to release a lengthy analysis of European laws and practices for requiring hotel guests to identify themselves, and for government access to those records: Interim Report on the EU Approach to the Commercial Collection of Personal Data for Security Purposes: The Special Case of Hotel Guest Registration Data. Read More →

Feb 09 2009

Exit permits, ESTA, APIS, and asylum seekers

According to a recently-released European Commission staff working document, the U.S. Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) is not “tantamount to the … visa … process” required for admission to the European “Schengen Zone”, and therefore does not give cause for the imposition of reciprocal visa requirements for US citizens seeking to enter Schengen countries.

That’s may be correct. But the EC appears to have asked the wrong question: the ESTA is not an entry permit but an exit permit scheme — which is a much more fundamental violation of human rights, U.S. treaty obligations, and the sovereignty of European and other countries from which people might wish to travel to the U.S.

The same is true of other U.S. travel control schemes (including the APIS and Secure Flight regulations), the proposed European PNR regulations, and the “carrier responsibility” rules in both the U.S. and the E.U. Regardless of whether it is referred to as “travel authorization”, “pre-departure clearance”, or “permission to transport”, the only meaningful way to construe a “travel authorization” that isn’t an entry visa is as a de facto exit visa. Read More →

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