Papers, Please!

The Identity Project

Category Archives: Papers, Please

Apr 02 2018

Can US citizens entering the country opt out of CBP mug shots?

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has published a new Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) for its Automated Passport Control (APC) kiosks and Mobile Passport Control (MPC) apps.  Unlike most PIA’s, this one does not say why it was prepared, or what, if anything, about the programs it assesses has changed. But it appears to be a response — although an inadequate and possibly still a factually inaccurate one — to some of our complaints.

At many international airports and some cruise ports  in the US, travelers — including US citizens — have to submit their mug shots to CBP through either an APC kiosk or the MPC smartphone app before they are allowed to proceed to CBP officers for customs, immigration, and agricultural inspections.  This requirement is enforced by “line minders” manning the velvet ropes and directing pedestrian traffic inside “sterile” arrival areas. These line minders are employed by the airline, airport, and/or their contractors or sub-contractors, making it easy for CBP to deny any responsibility for their actions.

In January of this year, we were part of a meeting between civil liberties and human rights organizations and CBP officials on the subject of these  “biometric entry/exit” schemes.

The CBP officials we met with in January denied that anyone is required to use the APC kiosks, contrary to our experience and that of other participants in the meeting.

When we complained that CBP hasn’t complied with even the minimal notice requirements of the Privacy Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) for this sort of data collection, CBP’s Privacy Officer responded, “I do not consider this program to be operating in violation of the Privacy Act, therefore, I have nothing to investigate.”

But although CBP didn’t conduct an “investigation”, it does appear to have conducted a new “assessment” and published a new set of claims about what it is doing.

What does CBP now say about its mug shots of arriving travelers? And is it true?

We call B.S.

Read More →

Mar 30 2018

State Department proposes more surveillance of social media, communications, and travel

[Excerpt from proposed US visa application form as posted at Regulations.gov]

Today the US Department of State published proposals in the Federal Register to expand its ongoing surveillance of social media, e-mail, and travel by applicants for immigrant and nonimmigrant (tourism and other temporary visits) visas:

The Department is revising the collection to add several additional questions for…  visa applicants. One question lists multiple social media platforms and requires the applicant to provide any identifiers used by applicants for those platforms during the five years preceding the date of application. The platforms listed may be updated by the Department by adding or removing platforms….

Other questions seek five years of previously used telephone numbers, email addresses, and international travel.

Questions about social media identifiers were added to the applications for visas and the ESTA form (electronic visa for citizens of countries in the US Visa Waiver Program) in 2016. But until now, the State Department has claimed that answering these questions was “voluntary”.

This expanded social media, telephone, and e-mail surveillance has all the problems we and other organizations have previously objected to, and more.

There has not previously been any requirement for would-be visitors or immigrants to the US to provide current or past telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, or a comprehensive list of which countries other than the US have been visited or when they have been visited.

The State Department will use these identifiers and share them with other Federal agencies such as DHS, including through the National Vetting Center, to target surveillance of foreign citizens, to mine its historical archives of dragnet surveillance, and to decide whether or not to allow foreigners to enter or remain in the US.  As part of “Visa Lifecyle Vetting” (formerly known as the “Extreme Vetting Initiative”) they will also be used for “continuous vetting”: ongoing suspicionless monitoring, profiling, and scoring by “pre-crime” algorithms purported to have robotic “pre-cognitive” abilities to predict future crimes based on what people say and who they associate with.

Read More →

Jan 31 2018

DHS threatens to harass American Samoan travelers

In the latest installment of the game of chicken between the Department of Homeland Security and US states and territories over the REAL-ID Act of 2005, the DHS has announced that drivers licenses and IDS issued by American Samoa won’t be accepted at TSA checkpoints for “domestic” flights beginning next Monday, February 5, 2018 — unless the DHS, in its standardless discretion, backs down again as it has so many times before, and gives American Samoan travelers a last-minute reprieve.

Why American Samoa? And what will this actually mean?

Read More →

Jan 30 2018

Government and industry collaborate in travel surveillance

Senior officials of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) came to San Francisco last week to meet with representatives of the Identity Project and other civil liberties and human rights organizations regarding CBP “biometric entry/exit” schemes. These CBP programs, some of which are already in operation, involve taking digital mug shots of international travelers — including US citizens — as they enter and leave the US. The meeting in San Francisco was a follow-up to one in Washington, DC, in August 2017.

Debra Danisek, CBP Privacy Officer, and John Wagner, Deputy Executive Assistant Commissioner in charge of the CBP “Office of Field Operations”, were accompanied to the meeting by CBP national, regional, and SF Bay Area local CBP policy and operations staff.

We welcomed the opportunity to point out to the CBP officials in charge of these programs that — especially as they apply to US citizens — they violate multiple Federal laws,  involve unconstitutional warrantless, suspicionless dragnet surveillance of how we exercise our right to assemble  as protected by the First Amendment, and should be abandoned.

It was an infuriating meeting, however. Rather than offering explanations for many of the CBP’s practices, the CBP officials across the table flatly denied much of what is happening at airports throughout the US, even in the face of first-person testimony to the contrary from many of the civil liberties advocates in attendance.

Since they wouldn’t admit that some of the most abusive CBP practices — the ones we thought the meeting had been called to discuss — are actually happening, the CBP officials wouldn’t talk about what, if any, legal basis these practices might have. Meanwhile, these unlawful practices by CBP and other DHS components continue and  expand.

Here are some of the counter-factual claims made by CBP in our meeting, and some of the issues left unaddressed: Read More →

Jan 20 2018

All the fake news that’s fit to print about REAL-ID and ID to fly

We’ve been spending a lot of our time lately writing letters to the editor pointing out errors and requesting corrections of news stories reporting DHS propaganda as fact.

Earlier this month, the DHS postponed from January 22, 2018, to October 10, 2018, the date on which it had threatened to have the TSA begin (illegally) interfering with air travel by residents of certain states.  Since neither the January 22, 2018, date nor the choice of which states to threaten was set by law or regulation, but solely by DHS press release, the DHS could and did withdraw its threat merely by issuing another press release.

The DHS had little choice, after its bluff was called by reality (compliance with the REAL-ID Act would require more money, more time, and changes to state laws and in some states including California, changes to state constitutions) and the likelihood of resistance by the flying public (any attempt to prevent residents of certain states from flying without ID would lead to protests at airports and lawsuits that the TSA and DHS would likely lose).

But we are not surprised, given the long history of DHS lies about the REAL-ID Act and ID to fly, that the DHS press release withdrawing the threat of a January 22, 2018, crackdown on air travel without ID by residents of certain states was immediately followed by a renewed DHS public relations campaign of lies about the law and the facts.

DHS press releases should no more be published as “facts” without fact-checking or acknowledgment that they contain contested (and readily refuted) factual and legal claims than should President Trump’s,  President Obama’s, or anyone else’s Tweets.

The New York Times is the latest news outlet to have been taken in, yet again, by this DHS “fake news” campaign, with an article this week on the Times’ website and in the travel section, “Is Your ID Approved for Travel? These Are the Latest Rules“. Many of the DHS falsehoods in this article were reported as facts in an earlier story in the Times in November, 2017, by the same reporter, Shivani Vora. We wrote to Ms. Vora at that time to correct the errors in that story, but received no reply.

To be clear, DHS claims are worthy of reporting as news. It is newsworthy that the DHS has engaged in a decade-long campaign, through both Democratic and Republican Administrations,  of brazen public lies about the REAL-ID Act and ID to fly.

It is equally newsworthy, however, that a “newspaper of record” appears to have made no attempt to fact-check the claims made by DHS spokespeople or to include any other points of view, and repeats demonstrably false DHS claims as undisputed facts even after their falsehood was pointed out to the reporter on the story.

Specifically, the latest article in the New York Times reports the following DHS “fake news” as fact: Read More →

Jan 08 2018

DHS postpones threats of REAL-ID Act enforcement

Again postponing its threats to interfere with air travel by residents of “noncompliant” states, the Department of Homeland Security announced today that it has given the last three remaining states either certifications of “compliance” with the REAL-ID Act of 2005, or extensions of time to comply until at least October 10, 2018.

Travelers in all 50 states can continue to ignore the false signs at airports, the false claims being made by state authorities collaborating with the Feds in the national ID scheme, and the blizzard of confused  and error-filled news stories (largely based on unverified and misleading DHS and state government press releases) claiming that U.S. citizens will need to obtain, carry, or show passports or other government-issued ID in order to travel by air.

This does not mean that all or most states have actually complied with the REAL-ID Act or are planning to do so. At most 14 states are arguably compliant with the Federal law.

The plain language of the Federal law requires that, “To meet the requirements of this section, a State shall … Provide electronic access to all other States to information contained in the motor vehicle database of the State.”  Only 14 states are participating in the outsourced SPEXS national ID database set up to enable this nationwide data access:

In addition to the 14 current SPEXS particpants, the contractor managing the national ID database optimistically lists 4 other states as “actively working on implementation.” But none of these states are listed as having signed letters of intent  to join the SPEXS national ID database.

The other 32 states are not compliant with the data-sharing provision of the REAL-ID Act, and have given no indication of intent to comply.

What will happen next?

Read More →

Jan 05 2018

A REAL-ID Christmas present from the California DMV

On the Friday before Christmas Monday, when state officials hoped that everyone who might object would be sleeping, the California Department of Motor Vehicles finalized its regulations for partial compliance by the state with the Federal REAL-ID Act of 2005.

The final regulations and a statement of responses to public testimony and comments were posted on the DMV website on December 22, 2017, and went into effect the same day.

The final regulations are essentially unchanged from those the DMV proposed in September 2017, and that we objected to in written comments and in-person testimony at the DMV’s one hearing on the proposal in Sacramento in October.

The DMV’s response to public testimony and comments brushes off our objections, and the objections by other commenters and witnesses, on the basis of repeated invocation of patently false and/or irrelevant and unresponsive legal and factual claims.

Read More →

Dec 18 2017

Canada puts U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers above the law

A Canadian law which received final approval last week, Bill C-23, gives officers of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) staffing “preclearance” facilities within Canada police powers to detain, interrogate, and search travelers, while granting these agents of the U.S. government absolute and unconditional immunity from any civil lawsuit or liability under Canadian law, and immunity from criminal liability except in limited cases of death, injury, or property damage.

This immunity from civil lawsuits or liability in Canada extends to violations by US CBP officers at preclearance sites of fundamental rights, including the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that are protected by law everywhere else in Canada,. Bill C-23 places CBP officers above Canadian law, as though they were diplomats enjoying immunity from local law inside extraterritorial enclaves, while giving them police-like powers to use force against ordinary people seeking to travel between the US and Canada.

Travelers passing through US preclearance facilities at Canadian airports, train stations, and ferry terminals are now required by Canadian law to: Read More →

Oct 24 2017

DHS blinks (again) on REAL-ID

The Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration have threatened to prevent citizens of many US states from being able to travel by air within the US, starting in January 2018, because their state governments won’t dump all their driver’s license and ID card information into a nationwide database. But these threats didn’t actually cause states to follow the TSA’s illegal orders. So rather than follow through on the threat, which would risk a legal challenge that would make it clear the threat is hollow, the DHS has again blinked. It just quietly deferred its deadline about when it claims it will enforce the REAL-ID Act against airline passengers.

Just over a week ago, when we testified before the California Department of Motor Vehicles about why the largest state in the union should not comply with the REAL-ID Act, and could not do so without violating its state constitution and its residents’ rights, the DHS website included California among 21 states “under review” by the DHS for possible Federal interference with their residents’ right to travel by air beginning as early as January 18, 2018.

Just days later, the DHS in its standardless discretion granted 15 of these 21 states, including California, another round of “extensions of time” to comply with the REAL-ID Act until October 20, 2018.

The states granted another round of arbitrary extensions until October 2018 included eight of the nine states singled out by signs in airports across the country as targeted for TSA harassment of their residents who travel by air beginning in January 2018:

The dates picked by the DHS are as arbitrary as the DHS choices of which states to threaten. The DHS has repeatedly amended its REAL-ID Act regulations to postpone its threatened “deadlines”, but neither January 18, 2018, nor October 20, 2018, are dates that appear anywhere in the law or the most recently revised regulations.

Read More →