Papers, Please!

The Identity Project

Category Archives: Papers, Please

Jun 02 2020

“Immunity passports”, opportunism, and COVID-19

Today the Appropriations Committee of the California Assembly held another hearing on A.B. 2004, a bill that would add to state law a provision that:

An issuer, including an issuer that is a public entity, of COVID-19 test results or other medical test results may use verifiable credentials, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for the purpose of providing test results to individuals.

What does this mean? Why does it matter? Is it part of a larger pattern?

Read More →

May 19 2020

TSA tries again to impose an ID requirement to fly

Air travel in the US has been reduced by more than 90%, measured by the numbers of people passing through checkpoints at airports operated by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and its contractors.

And the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has postponed its threat to start unlawfully refusing passage to travelers without ID credentials compliant with the REAL-ID Act of 2005 for another year, from October 1, 2020, to October 1, 2021.

So relatively little attention is being paid right now to air travel or TSA requirements — making it the ideal time for the TSA to try to sneak a new ID requirement for air travel (to take effect in 2021) into place without arousing public protest.

Today, in collaboration with nine other organizations concerned with freedom of travel, identification, privacy, human rights, and civil liberties, we filed comments with the TSA in opposition to what is ostensibly a “Notice of intent to request approval from the Office of Mangement and Budget” for a new form, TSA Form 415.

Our comments were joined by the Identity Project, Freedom To Travel USA, Fiat Fiendum, Inc., National Center For Transgender Equality (NCTE), Restore The Fourth, Inc., Patient Privacy Rights, Defending Rights And Dissent, The Constitutional Alliance, Privacy Times, and Just Futures Law.

According to our comments, the TSA is attempting to “use the innocuous-seeming device of a request for approval of an information collection to introduce a fundamental and profoundly controversial change in substantive TSA requirements and the rights of travelers”: Read More →

May 04 2020

Dare County tries to evade court review of its entry controls

Local government controls on travel to the Outer Banks (barrier-beach islands) of North Carolina remain in place, but local officials are making changes to try to head off a court decision on the Constitutionality of their emergency orders restricting free movement.

A month ago, as we reported earlier,  Dare County, North Carolina, set up checkpoints on all three roads leading into or out of the county. Police began denying passage along these public rights-of-way on the basis of  criteria including whether travelers have government-issued ID (even if they are passengers rather than drivers, or traveling on foot or by bicycle,  for which no drivers’ license is needed); what address is shown on their ID (if any —  U.S. passports, for example, show no address); which direction they are traveling; and whether they have been sponsored for an “entry permit” by an entity with a business license issued in Dare County.

County officials represented their emergency orders imposing these restrictions on travel  as health measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But none of the criteria for who is allowed to pass through the checkpoints, or in which direction, have anything to do with whether travelers were believed, suspected, or likely to be infected with the novel coronavirus.

The emergency orders gave no indication of what, if any, procedures were available for administrative or judicial review of decisions to deny passage in or out of the county. But non-resident owners of homes in Dare County quickly brought suit in Federal court against the prohibition on traveling to their own seasonal, rental, or second homes.

Since then, the case has been referred for mediation, and the parties (non-resident property owners and the Dare County government) have requested and been granted a delay on the basis that they are in negotiations towards a possible settlement.

Today Dare County is beginning to allow passage across the bridges and into the county by non-resident owners of real property in Dare County, if and only if they have both an “entry permit” issued by the county and matching government-issued ID.

Read More →

Apr 29 2020

No cellphone? Not at address on your ID? Hawaii threatens arrests.

[“Aloha!” Passengers arriving at Honolulu International Airport on April 28th are interrogated and their cellphones are tested. Photo provided by the Hawaii Department of Transportation.]

We’ve been puzzling over this press release issued April 24th by the Department of Transportation of the State of Hawaii, entitled, “Improved verification process implemented for airline passenger,” which begins as follows:

The Hawaii Department of Transportation (HDOT) has implemented improved measures to verify incoming passenger information before they leave the airport to help ensure people are abiding by the traveler quarantine order. The enhanced process is underway at the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL) and will begin statewide in the coming days.

We’ve read through the emergency proclamations by the Governor of Hawaii, and can’t find anything in the quarantine orders purporting to give authority to state officials to “verify passenger information.”

The press release threatens that anyone who arrives without  a working cellphone, charged, with service and coverage in the arrival area at the airport, will be arrested:

An airport representative will collect the two forms and begin verifying their information. First, they will call their mobile phone number to confirm it rings right in front of them. If it does not ring, the person may have listed inaccurate information and is asked to verify the number. If the person refuses to provide a phone number that can be answered on the spot, law enforcement is contacted and they are subject to citation and arrest.

We have no idea what the purported basis would be for arresting someone who isn’t carrying a cellphone, whose phone doesn’t have service in Hawaii (especially likely if they are arriving from another country), or whose cellphone battery has run down from watching  videos or playing games in airplane mode during a trans-oceanic flight.

But that’s not all:

Read More →

Apr 20 2020

COVID-19, the REAL-ID Act, and ID to fly

A month ago — in what seems like it was long ago and in a galaxy far, far, away, before the COVID-19 pandemic reduced air travel in the US by more than 95% —  the US Department of Homeland Security was stepping up its baseless threats to begin “enforcement” of the REAL-ID Act against airline passengers on October 1, 2020.

There’s been no change (yet) in the REAL-ID Act or the regulations for its implementation, despite proposals that remain pending in Congress.

Over the last month, though, President Trump, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, and the Transportation Security Administration have each issued formal or informal notices or statements about their intentions with respect to the REAL-ID Act and ID demands for air travel.

As of now, it appears that the DHS/TSA “ultimatum” to air travelers to obtain “compliant” ID cards or be denied passage through TSA and contractor checkpoints at airports will be postponed yet again, this time for another year, until October 1, 2021.

After that date, it appears that the TSA intends to continue to allow people to fly even if they don’t show ID at checkpoints, but only if it the TSA or its contractors thinks that they have been issued some compliant ID (even though they don’t have it with them).

Is this legal? No. Does this make any sense? No. But it’s what the TSA seems to saying it plans to propose. The TSA  is asking for comments on this proposal from the public through May 19, 2020.

Read More →

Apr 14 2020

Dare County wants to see your papers

Providing the rest of the USA with an object lesson in how not to react to a pandemic,  Dare County, North Carolina, has established checkpoints on all roads crossing the county borders, at which travelers must show their papers to enter the county.

Pursuant to a series of emergency declarations issued by the Dare County Board of Commissioners, law enforcement officers are demanding that each person seeking to enter the county show either a government-issued ID card with an address in Dare County, or both some other government-issued photo ID and a county-issued entry permit.

A Federal lawsuit has been filed, seeking to have this enjoined as unconstitutional (at least as applied to the named plaintiffs). But as discussed below, the lawsuit barely scratches the surface of the issues this raises.

Why is Dare County doing this? What’s wrong with this ID requirement? Is it legal?

Read More →

Mar 30 2020

“Known Traveler Digital Identity” (KTDI)

On March 26, 2020, the World Economic Forum published specifications  and launched a new website for a project it has christened “Known Travel Digital Identity” (KTDI):

KTDI is a “surveillance-by-design” vision for tracking and control of travelers more dystopian than anything we have seen before.

KTDI would use a blockchain-based distributed ledger to bind together, through an app on a traveler’s mobile device, all of the following data:

  • Biometrics (initially facial images, possibly also fingerprints, etc.)
  • Government-issued ID credentials (passport number, etc.)
  • Travel history including logs of border crossings, hotel stays, and possibly also car rentals and/or other events
  • Purchase logs and possibly bank account information and/or other financial and transaction records
  • Pre-crime predictive “risk assessment” and profiling scores generated at each “intervention” point before and during each trip or transaction

Read More →

Mar 24 2020

How drivers license photos are aggregated and shared

During a press conference yesterday, President Trump announced a postponement of the “deadline” previously announced by the Department of Homeland Security for “enforcement” of the REAL-ID Act of 2005 at TSA checkpoints:

I’m also announcing that we’re postponing the deadline for compliance with REAL ID requirements…. We will be announcing the new deadline very soon. It’s going to be announced in a very short moment.

The REAL-ID Act “deadline” was set by DHS press release, not by law or regulation. It’s unclear if a new date will be announced by decree of the Secretary of Homeland Security, or by promulgation of regulations. There has been no further announcement by the DHS, and there is no notice of rulemaking in the Federal Register today.

As we noted yesterday, neither a postponement nor any of the other proposed amendments to the REAL-ID Act would address the central problems in this law: the requirement for states that want to be deemed “compliant” to share their drivers’ license and state-ID databases with all other states.

Read More →

Mar 23 2020

In a pandemic, freedom is the first casualty

We’ve seen before — notably after September 11, 2001 — how a crisis can result in damage to rights and freedoms that persists long after the initial cause of public panic.

Some advocates for restrictions on individuals and our movements and activities will exploit any crisis to ratchet the mechanisms of surveillance and control tighter.

Other officials, including many who mean well but are too traumatized to recognize the long-term consequences of their short-term actions, will advocate “temporary” restrictions on individual rights and freedoms that almost inevitably become permanent.

We don’t yet know what the cost in lost lives of the coronavirus pandemic will be. But we can already see the outlines of some of its potential cost in lost civil liberties.

Earlier in the pandemic, we reminded our readers of the risks of abuse of overbroad quarantine powers. But that’s only one aspect of the problem.

The basic methodology of control of travel and movement is that compulsory identification of travelers enables surveillance (tracking and logging) of travel and movement histories, and control of future movements based on individuals’ identities and the histories and other databases of personal information linked to those identities.

Already, changes to policies and practices related to (1) identification, (2) surveillance, and (3) control of travelers have all been proposed in response to the coronavirus pandemic: Read More →

Feb 13 2020

REAL-ID Act amendments don’t address the real ID problem

In response to fears by the travel industry (fueled by government lies) that businesses dependent on air travel will lose money if their would-be customers are prevented by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) from flying because they don’t have ID credentials that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deems sufficiently “compliant”, a proposal was introduced in Congress this week by Rep. Debbie Lesko of Arizona to amend the REAL-ID Act of 2005.

What’s really called for, though, is repeal, not revision, of the REAL-ID Act, and explicit Congressional recognition that travel by common carrier is a right that cannot be conditioned on government-issued credentials or other permission. The amendments proposed in H.R. 5827 would only exacerbate the Constitutional flaws in the REAL-ID Act, and would do nothing to rein in the TSA and other DHS components in their violations of travelers’ rights.

H.R. 5827 appears to have been drafted by travel industry lobbyists. Its provisions exactly match the recommendations of the U.S. Travel Association, the umbrella trade association for the travel industry in the USA. Rep. Lesko’s press release announcing the filing of H.R. 5827 quotes endorsements for the bill from spokespeople for U.S. Travel and its constituent trade associations of airlines, airports (which in the US are almost all publicly operated, but tend to act like self-interested businesses rather than operating in the public interest), and travel agents. No advocates for travelers , civil liberties, or freedom to travel are quoted — nor are they likely to endorse H.R. 5827 or the REAL-ID Act it would amend.

H.R. 5827 is styled as the “Trusted Traveler REAL ID Relief Act of 2020”, and is described as a bill “To exempt certain travelers from certain requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005 for purposes of boarding a federally regulated commercial aircraft, and for other purposes.”

But what would H.R. 5827 actually do, and would that make things better or worse?

Read More →