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The Identity Project

Category Archives: Surveillance State

Dec 03 2025

Airlines Reporting Corp. says it’s ending sales of ticket data to police & Feds

The Airlines Reporting Corporation — the financial clearinghouse that processes payments between U.S. travel agencies and hundreds of airlines in the U.S. and worldwide — plans to sunset the program through which it has given Federal agencies and an unknown range of other customers access to searchable archives of billions of agency-issued tickets for past and future airline flights.

According to a letter (first reported by Joseph Cox of 404 Media) sent by ARC in response to a request by members of Congress to end warrantless access by law enforcement agencies to ticketing data,  ARC says its Travel Intelligence Program (TIP) “is sunsetting this year”.

ARC’s “TIP” program was first uncovered by Katya Schwenk of Lever News in May 2025, and discussed in more detail here on PapersPlease.org and in a series of follow-up stories by Joseph Cox of 404 Media based on his FOIA requests to agencies that subscribe to TIP.

Many of these stories have described ARC as a “data broker”, which is legally correct but somewhat misleading. ARC is a financial clearinghouse that provides its airline and travel agency customers with transaction and payment-processing services.

It’s unclear whether the TIP program was devised by ARC as a profit center, or simply as a way to efficiently manage  and defray the expense of responding to requests by law enforcement agencies for searches of ticketing records.

TIP was always peripheral to ARC’s core business, as is demonstrated by the alacrity with which ARC was willing to end it as soon as it came under criticism from Congress. It’s unlikely that shutting down TIP will have any any material impact on ARC’s bottom line.

ARC could have told police and Federal agencies to go away and not come back without a warrant. But while some travel agencies might have preferred that course of action to protect their customers’ privacy, ARC is controlled by airlines, not agencies. And airlines have never prioritized protecting passengers’ privacy or security against police or anyone else.

Airlines have largely ignored privacy and data protection laws, even in jurisdictions like Canada and the European Union that have them (unlike the US). And data protection authorities (DPSs), even in jurisdictions that have such agencies (again, unlike the US), have largely let airlines get away with this.

When the cops come knocking, the typical response of an airline is, “Please come in! How can we help?” Airlines’ willingness to allow ARC to sell ticketing data is not an anomaly but an indication of the pervasive airline industry culture of collaboration with law enforcement. We can find no record of any airline, anywhere in the world, ever, that has gone to court to challenge government demands or requests for passenger data.

It’s unclear what motivated ARC’s decision to pull the plug on police access to ticketing data through TIP.  A few members of Congress had complained about TIP, but the odds that Congress would finally enact privacy legislation applicable to airlines remain slight.

A more likely explanation may be that publicity about TIP (and inquiries about TIP from local journalists) may have caused some of the airlines that use ARC to process payments for tickets issued by their U.S. agents to fear that DPSs in their home countries might be prompted by the ARC scandal to start asking more general questions about how airlines apply their purported privacy policies to the agents they appoint to execute contracts in their name in other countries such as the US with lax or nonexistent privacy laws.

Agencies and contractors in the US, including computerized reservation systems, have always been among of the skeletons in the closet of airline privacy invasion, and could expose airlines to huge liability if foreign DPA’s ever looked behind the curtain at airlines’ agents and contractors — not just ARC — in the US.

ARC has a nearly total but insecure monopoly, and can ill afford to give airlines a reason to start looking harder for alternatives. The existential threat to ARC for decades has been wider adoption of direct connections between airlines and travel agencies. Some of the largest airlines have already set up direct connections and settlement with some of the largest online and offline travel agencies. ARC might have decided that the incremental revenue from TIP, and the goodwill that being a willing police informer and collaborator generated with governments, weren’t worth possibly driving away some of its core financial-clearinghouse business.

ARC probably assumes that ending the TIP program ends the problem — but it shouldn’t. The TIP program may not have violated any US law, which is why even angry members of Congress could only ask, not demand, that ARC stop selling out travelers to the police. It’s a different story abroad, though.

Foreign airlines that participate in the ARC settlement clearinghouse — and not just those that share in ownership of ARC as a joint venture — have been systematically violating the privacy and data protection laws of their home countries for twenty years. They could, and should, be held to account for that history of misconduct.

ARC still has data on all the ticketing transactions it processes. It could still be ordered to provide ticketing data to the police, as compuerized reservation systems have been, and could be ordered not to disclose this to the airline, travel agency, or passenger involved in the transaction.

The TIP scandal should be the beginning, not the end, of investigation, exposure, and enforcement action against airlines that have been disregarding passengers’ expectations of privacy, willingly and often secretly  collaborating with law enforcement agencies, and failing to protect them against stalkers and other everyday threats to their privacy and security.

Dec 02 2025

Has the TSA added immigration enforcement to “Secure Flight”?

Arrest warrants have never been disclosed to be part of the Secure Flight algorithm used by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to process information about each domestic US airline passenger and decide whether to send the airline a Boarding Pass Printing Result (BPPR) authorizing the airline to issue a boarding pass or take other action.

But at least three incidents have made the news in the last month that together suggest that the TSA may have added  immigration orders to the Secure Flight ruleset, turning US airports and domestic flights into traps for unwitting foreign citizens.

Each of these individuals was unaware that there was an immigration order for their arrest or deportation. And there is no apparent basis or methodology for DHS to have known when and where to intercept them at airports other than matching of airline reservations and immigration enforcement orders — something never previously disclosed.

The Feds could have learned of planned domestic air travel by searching records of tickets settled through the Airlines Reporting Corp. (ARC) clearinghouse under a program that was exposed earlier this year and is supposedly now set to “sunset” by the end of this month.  But that wouldn’t have enabled the Feds to block the issuance of boarding passes, as reportedly happened in some of these recent cases.

At any time, there are millions of records of arrest warrants in the FBI’s National Crime Information System (NCIC) database. Many of these are inaccurate or out of date, such as long-since-quashed bench warrants for failure to appear in traffic court or pay fines on time. Local courts often report to NCIC when warrants are issued, but fail to report when they are cleared. Hundreds of people are arrested every day after traffic stops when local police run check on motorists and find warrants listed in NCIC.

Three million people a day travel by air in the US, sixty times as many as are stopped on the roads by local police. If every domestic airline reservation were checked against NCIC for outstanding warrants, thousands of domestic travelers would be arrested at US airports every day. That simply doesn’t happen. So far as we can tell, at least until the last month, you could be wanted for murder and fly back and forth across the US without ever being stopped — just as you can walk down the street without being required to identify yourself or subjected to a warrant check without probable cause to suspect you of a crime.

This is as it should be. The US Constitution rightly prohibits general warrants or all-purpose law enforcement checkpoints or searches without individualized probable cause.

Earlier this month we noted the unusual arrest of UK citizen and political commentator Sami Hamdi at San Francisco International Airport on October 26th when he went to check in for a domestic flight to the next stop on his US speaking tour. At the time, we speculated that perhaps the government had added Mr. Hamdi to its no-fly or “selectee” lists as a suspected terrorist. We already know that these lists are part of the Secure Flight ruleset. Now we wonder whether Mr. Hamdi’s treatment was an early case of the expansion of Secure Flight from a system ostensibly used for aviation security to a more general police dragnet.

We’ve been getting tips for years that some officials of the TSA, DHS, and other law enforcement agencies want to check all airline passengers for outstanding warrants. That would be technically straightforward. Once an algortithmic checkpoint is in place, it’s relatively easy to add new list-based or attribute-based rules to the algorithm. And the TSA has also wanted all-purpose authority for searches, seizures, and detention.

In court, though, the TSA to date has always pretended that warrantless Secure Flight “vetting” and warrantless administrative searches of airline passengers  are used solely to identify people and things that are demonstrably dangerous to aviation. Using  Secure Flight for immigration enforcement would require a completely new legal rationale, and would open the door to even wider use of airports as general law enforcement checkpoints.

In addition, the most recently-disclosed version of the TSA’s internal staff directive for disclosure of Secure Flight Data (SFD), issued sometime after January 20, 2025, says that:

SFD shall not be shared for purposes of ordinary law enforcement or tracking the movement of an individual who is not a potential or confirmed match to a watch list…. TSA will only respond to a written request for SFD by a law enforcement agency when there is a nexus to terrorism, transportation security, or national security for individuals not listed on the consolidated and integrated terrorist watch list. Exceptions to this policy may be granted on a case-by-case basis where an exigent threat to life or a similar extraordinary circumstance suggests that disclosure is warranted.

Routine use of Secure Flight for general law enforcement (warrant checks) or immigration enforcement would either violate this policv or have required a change in policy.

We welcome any information that can shed light on what’s really happening.

Please let us know of you hear of other immigration or criminal arrests at airports that appear to have been based on matching of domestic airline reservations with NCIC data.

Nov 18 2025

Another court turns down TSA appeal for impunity for checkpoint staff

Another Federal appeals court has overruled arguments by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that its checkpoint staff are immune from any liability for sexual assaults or other offenses committed in the course of their official duties.

In its decision last week in Elisabeth Koletas v. USA, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t reach the question of whether sexual or other assaults on airline passengers are within the scope of TSA officers’ duties. But a panel of the 11th Circuit held that . The panel was unpersuaded by a decade-old, unpublished, nonprecedential decision by an earlier panel of the 11th Circuit that failed to address the text of the law that makes the US government liable for the wrongful acts of “any officer of the United States who is empowered by law to execute searches.”

It would seem beyond argument that “Transportation Security Officers” (TSOs), as they are identified by the TSA and on their uniforms and badges, are “officers  of the United States”. And the entire reason for their job is to “execute searches” of travelers.

But in Circuit after Circuit, the TSA has put forth the absurd (and, we are pleased to report, unsucessful) argument that TSOs aren’t the sort of officers Congress meant when it enacted this law. That argument has now been rejected, in published precedential opinions, by all six Circuit Courts of Appeal that have considered it.

More information about the case of Koletas v. USA:

Despite the rulings in victimized travelers’ favor in each of these courts, we are disturbed that the TSA is so fixated on its quest for absolute impunity that it continues to make this discredited argument. The TSA’s hope, apparently, is to find one sympathetic Court of Appeals that will buy its argument, creating a circuit split that can provide a basis for getting the Supreme Court to weigh in on the question.

Let’s not get bogged down in the details of statutory construction, though. Checkpoint staff — whether they are TSOs or TSA contractors — should be liable to criminal sanctions if they rape or assault travelers. And both thewy and the Federal government in whose name they act and whose power they wield should face civil liability in these cases.

Nov 17 2025

Targeting domestic travelers and restricting the right to leave the US

Political commentator and UK citizen Sami Hamdi was finally allowed by the US government to leave the US on November 12, two and a half weeks after he was arrested at San Francisco International Airport when he went to check in for a domestic US flight.

Mr. Hamdi had been a keynote speaker at the annual banquet of the Central Valley chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) on October 25 in Sacramento, and was on his way to the next stop on his US speaking tour when he was taken into custody at SFO on October 26.

Mr. Hamdi had obtained a valid US visa prior to his arrival in the US. “Hamdi entered on a B-1/B-2 visa on October 19, 2025, and complied with inspection and admission”, according to the complaint filed on his behalf in Federal court during his detention.

No criminal charges were ever filed against Mr. Hamdi, and there has been no suggestion that he knew his visa had been revoked until he was taken into custody. The government has argued that issuance or revocation of any visa is entirely discretionary, and that once Mr. Hamdi’s was revoked, he was no longer legally entitled to remain in the US.

Even if that were factually and legally correct, it begs two important questions:

First, how did the immigration agents who arrested Mr. Hamdi at SFO know about his travel plans in order to intercept him?

Federal agents can use a TECS alert to monitor reservations for international flights for a person of interest, even without any charges or any warrant for search or arrest. This appears to be how Dr. Mark Bray was targeted for questioning by Feds at Newark Airport on the second of his two attempts on successive days last month to flee the US with his family.

However, Mr. Hamdi went to SFO to check in for a domestic flight, not an international flight. The TSA has long wanted to check reservations for domestic flights against warrants listed in the FBI’s aggregated NCIC database. But so far as we can tell, that hasn’t yet been done. If it were, hundreds of air travelers would be arrested every day, given the number of records of arrest warrants — many of them obsolete  or inaccurate — in NCIC.

And there’s been no hint that there were any criminal charges or any warrant – – even one based on  a sealed indictment — against Mr. Hamdi. So a “warrant check” seems unlikely.

The lists that are checked whenever an airline sends Secure Flight Passenger Data for a  domestic flight to the TSA, before the TSA returns a “Boarding Pass Printing Result” (BPPR) to the airline, are the “no-fly” and “selectee” lists which constitute a subset of the names in the Terrorist Screening Database.

We know that the no-fly and selectee lists have been used primarily to target Muslims. But as the name of the TSDB suggests, these are supposed to be used, and have been justified to courts as being used, solely for individuals who pose an identified threat to aviation security. There’s been no suggestion that Mr. Hamdi did anything to offend the US government or cause it to revoke his visa aside from saying things the US doesn’t want said, much less anything — no matter how offensive to anyone — that posed a threat to aviation security.

It thus seems likely — in the absence of any better explanation — that some Federal agency or official put Mr. Hamdi on the no-fly or selectee list as a way to use airports as a dragnet to catch him the next time he tried to fly, solely on the basis of pure speech that did not provide a basis for any criminal charges. If so, that was a gross abuse of the aviation “security” system and a significant foray into its use as a tool of political retaliation against disfavored speakers. If this could be done to Mr. Hamdi, it could be done to US citizens.

Second, why was Mr. Hamdi not allowed to leave the US sooner?

Normally, non-US citizens denied entry on arrival at US airports are detained only until they can be put on the first flight back to their port of embarkation for the US, or any earlier flight to that or any other destination for which they choose to buy a ticket.

There are five nonstop flights every day from San Francisco to London. Why, instead of being put on one of these flights the day he was detained, was Mr. Hamdi shipped in shackles to a private prison near Bakersfield and held there for more than two weeks?

Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which both the US and the UK are parties, provides that, “Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own.” And the UN Human Rights Committee has made clear that, “the scope of article 12, paragraph 2, is not restricted to persons lawfully within the territory of a State.”

So once Mr. Hamdi was deemed no longer entitled to remain in the US, and was not (and never had been) subject to any  criminal charges, he had a right, as a matter of international human rights treaty law, to leave the US at any time and for any destination.

Mr. Hamdi’s eventual departure was described as “voluntary”.  But it’s hard to see his leaving the country as uncoerced when they only alternative  he was offered was to remain indefinitely imprisoned without charges or trial.

Detaining Mr. Hamdi without the opportunity to leave the country, and holding him for  more than two weeks without letting him leave, was a clear violation of international law.

Nov 12 2025

A case study in the importance of anonymous travel

The case of Rutgers University professor Mark Bray and his family provides an object lesson in the importance of being able to travel anonymously, and how the practices of governments and airlines endanger travelers by making them identifiable.

Dr. Bray, his partner Dr. Yesenia Barragan (also  a professor at Rutgers), and their two young children tried to flee the US last month after being denounced by members of the Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA, doxxed,  and receiving death threats. They planned to spend the rest of this academic year teaching remotely from Spain, where Dr. Bray had lived on previous research trips.

Trying to get away from death threats isn’t an uncommon reason for travel, unfortunately. The factors behind the threats against Dr. Bray and his family — Dr. Bray’s scholarship as a historian of anti-fascist activism in Europe and North America since World War II — may be atypical. But thousands of people in the US flee their homes every day to escape from threats or ongoing patterns of domestic violence, often including credible death threats. We’ll never know how many of them have been stalked through their airline reservations.

Dr. Bray and his family bought tickets on United Airlines for a nonstop flight from Newark to Madrid — the most direct route from Rutgers (just a few miles from Newark in New Brunswick, NJ) to Spain. This was, unfortunately, also the most obvious airline and airport for them to use, and the easiest one for any of their local adversaries to stake out.

After they got to the airport, Dr. Bray posted on Bluesky, that, “‘Someone’ cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second. We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’”

In an interview with the Associated Press from a hotel room where he spent the night before trying again a day later, Prof. Bray said that, “We called the service that made the reservation. They didn’t cancel it. United [Airlines] didn’t cancel it.”

Bary told Mother Jones that airline staff “made a bunch of phone calls and basically said that, somehow, someone at the very last second had canceled our flight reservation—which I didn’t even know was possible.”

Airline staff rebooked the family on the same flight 24 hours later, when they had a different experience. In a later interview after making it to Spain, Dr. Bray described being pulled aside at the departure gate at Newark the next evening by Federal agents for an hour of questioning before being allowed to board the flight to Madrid with his family.

Dr. Bray and his family may never know who cancelled their reservations unless the culprit confesses, but there are two important lessons in this incident:

First, anonymous travel matters, sometimes as a matter of life or death. Both anonymity and the right to travel are never so important as they are for those who are fleeing death threats, whether those threats come from domestic abusers, vigilantes, or the government.

A decision last month by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a case against Lufthansa shows how disclosure of personal information by an airline can put travelers at risk. A gay Saudi Arabian citizen reluctantly provided a copy of his marriage certificate (a same-sex marriage in the US to a US citizen) to Lufthansa. The marriage to a US citizen was relevant to the traveler’s admissibility to the US, but not to the validity of his ticket from Riyadh via Frankfurt to San Francisco, or to Lufthansa’s obligation to transport him. And because homosexuality, as would be conclusively proven by the marriage certificate, is a capital offense in Saudi Arabia, the traveler had not previously disclosed his sexual orientation to the Saudi government. But because Lufthansa staff took actions that may have disclosed his marriage to the Saudi government, he hasn’t dared to return to Saudi Arabia. He has been cut off from his family and community and has been forced to liquidate his real estate there at a loss, among other consequences. The takeaway from the case, at this stage, is that protecting passenger data really can be a life-or-death matter.

Name and ID requirements are touted as measures to “protect” travelers. But for some of the most vulnerable travelers they are a threat to personal security.

We don’t think governments should require passengers on common carriers to identify themselves, or that common carriers should be allowed to require them to do so. On domestic flights in the US, until 1996 anyone could buy a ticket in any arbitrary name and fly without showing any ID. We see no reason not to return to this historic norm.

On international flights, passengers’ names and documents may be relevant to decisions made by governments as to their right to leave the country from which the flight departs  or to be admitted to the destination country on arrival. But travelers can show their passports or other documents or make their claims for admission without documents (for example, as asylum seekers) without needing to identify themselves to airlines or other private parties. The right to leave any country is, under international treaty law, almost absolute. And decisions about admissibility, particularly in the case of asylum seekers, can be made only after arrival on the territory of the destination country. Airlines have no legitimate need to require identifying information about passengers.

Second, identifying information about air travelers isn’t adequately protected.

If governments unnecessarily require travelers to identify themselves to airlines or other common carriers,  then it must be recognized that (1) names and other potentially life-threatening identifying information are provided to these carriers solely to satisfy government mandates, and could not and would not otherwise be required or provided, and (2) the government therefore has the obligation to  make sure that this extremely sensitive information is not retained, used, or disclosed to anyone except the government.

As has long been known, and as the experience of Dr. Bray and his family illustrates yet again, airlines have failed to put in place even minimal protections for passenger data, and governments in the US and other countries, including in Spain and  the European Union, have failed to require airlines to protect this data or to sanction airlines for not doing so.

Read More →

Oct 16 2025

USCIS still wants to stalk US residents and visitors on social media

Doubling down on its attack on anonymity and disregarding comments from the Identity Project and more than a thousand other organizations and individuals, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has renewed its request for blanket authorization to require applicants for US visas, visa-free entry, residency, or citizenship to disclose every social media platform and identifier they have used in the last five years.

Today the Identity Project and Restore The Fourth (RT4) filed comments opposing this USCIS proposal for dragnet social media surveillance of foreign visitors and residents and the US citizens with whom they communicate and associate on social media.

USCIS made no significant changes in response to the first round of public comments and ignored most of the issues we and others raised, including the ways that social media surveillance would impact First Amendment rights of assembly and association.

In addition to reiterating the unanswered concerns raised in our initial comments, our latest comments also respond to the false claims made by USCIS:

In its analysis of the first round of comments, USCIS claimed that “the information that DHS may access via social media is publicly accessible and DHS may not access information that is designated as private.”

This claim is entirely unsupported, and clearly false.

The association between an individual and a particular anonymous or pseudonymous social media account or posting is, by definition, not public information. In requiring individuals to disclose with which social media accounts they are associated, including anonymous or pseudonymous accounts, USCIS is demanding disclosure of non-public information.

Of course, if all of the requested information including which individuals are associated with which anonymous or pseudonymous social media accounts and postings were public, USCIS would have no need to request it from individuals or require them to provide it. USCIS is requiring individuals to list all social media accounts with which they are associated, including anonymous and pseudonymous accounts, precisely because this information is deliberately private – in some cases intensely private – and because USCIS cannot obtain this information without forcing individuals to disclose this private information and make it public.

The purpose – the only purpose – of requiring individuals to disclose anonymous and pseudonymous social media accounts is to enable USCIS to access private information.

By falsely claiming that all of this information is public, USCIS entirely avoids responding to any of the comments regarding the compelled disclosure of private information.

The deadline to comment on this proposal is midnight tonight, Eastern time.

Oct 06 2025

The weaponization of travel blacklists

Excerpt from "After Action Report" by a Federal Air Marshal.

[A Federal Air Marshal (FAM) tasked with surveillance of an airline passenger targeted by Quiet Skies lists and/or rules followed the traveler out to the curb and recorded the license plate number of the vehicle in which she left the airport, so that her airline reservations could be integrated with license plate reader data into an uninterrupted multi-modal travel history.]

On September 30, 2025, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs held a hearing on Examining the Weaponization of the Quiet Skies Program.

Coming just hours before the partial shutdown of Federal government operations, this hearing was sparsely attended, even by members of the committee, and got little press attention. The hearing opened with the Chair and Ranking Minority Member of the committee talking over each other at length.

Much of the argument between Senators and the questioning of witnesses focused not on the general problems of the Quiet Skies traveler surveillance program program or government travel blacklists (referred to euphemistically as “watchlists” throughout the hearing) but on whether these programs have been weaponized to a greater extent under Democratic or Republican administrations.

But if we — and, we hope, members of Congress — can look past the partisan polemics, the testimony and documents introduced into the record of this hearing provide important guidance on what can and should be done to protect all travelers —  regardless of our party affiliation (if any), ethnicity, religious beliefs, or political opinions — against the weaponization of travel blacklists by whatever government is in power. Read More →

Oct 01 2025

ICE is buying location data from smartphone apps, etc.

How can your movements be tracked?

The Penlink surveillance company counts some of the ways:

Penlink: "6 Overlooked Sources of Tracker Data Investigators Shouldn’t Miss"

Penlink was brought to our attention by a report from Joseph Cox in 404 Media that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the US Department of Homeland security (DHS) is entering into a contract with Penlink as a unique and irreplaceable source of aggregated location data from smartphone apps and other sources.

According to an ICE document  justifying the no-bid single-source contract that was uncovered by 404 Media, Penlink is the only company that can “compile, process, and validate billions of daily location signals from hundreds of millions of mobile devices, providing both forensic and predictive analytics”, and that is willing to sell ICE access to this data.

Penlink also extracts and makes available to its subscribers, in real-time, location data embedded in EXIF metadata in smartphone photos uploaded to Facebook and other social media, and boasts of its ability to aggregate location data from many other sources.

How does Penlink get this data, in order to be able to sell it to ICE?

Most people didn’t (and wouldn’t) knowingly consent to having this information sent to and used by the government, and wouldn’t think of this information as “open source”. How many people even realize that, by default, each smartphone photo contains precise location information included within the image file?

Most people would consider an app that collects timestamped location tracking data and sends it to a company that sells it to the police to be “malware”.

Almost all of these apps with embedded surveillance malware are distributed — in most cases, distributed exclusively — through the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.

To put it another way, the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store are the primary distribution channels for malware people install on their smartphones that enable government surveillance.

Read More →

Sep 12 2025

“America brought ‘predictive policing’ to China”

[Diagrams obtained by AP News show how the functionality of IBM suspicion-generating software for analyizing relationships between cellphone users (left) was deliberately replicated by developers of Chinese pre-crime software (right)]

We’ve often pointed to China as exemplifying modes of government surveillance and control of movement that we don’t want replicated in the USA.

But a new report by independent journalist Yael Grauer and a team from the Associated Press, based on documents provided by courageous whistleblowers in China and the US, shows that US technology companies are sometimes leaders, not just followers, in the globalization of Big Brother tools and techniques.

As a summary of key takeaways from the AP investigation puts it, “America brought ‘predictive policing’ to China”:

U.S. companies introduced systems that mine a vast array of information — texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use — to unearth individuals deemed suspicious and predict their movements. But this technology also allows Chinese police to threaten friends and family and preemptively detain people for crimes they have not even committed….

Across China, surveillance systems track blacklisted “key persons,” whose movements are restricted and monitored. In Xinjiang, administrators logged people as high, medium, or low risk, often according to 100-point scores with deductions for factors like growing a beard, being 15 to 55 years old, or just being Uyghur.

Chinese government agencies and companies (often indistinguishable in the Chinese economy of state-owned enterprises) have bought into the US model of  pre-crime predictive policing, purchasing or copying US pre-crime tools.

This isn’t the first time, of course, that US companies have provided the hardware and software used by foreign governments to identify, track, and control individuals. In the 1970s, for example,  Polaroid and IBM sold the South African government the database software, computers, instant cameras, and ID-card printers used to manufacture and keep track of the infamous apartheid travel-permission “passbooks”, with IBM developing customized hardware and software specifically for enforcement of apartheid.

Whistleblowers and dissidents within tech companies played an important role in exposing the role their employers and other corporate partners played as enablers of, and profiteers from, apartheid in South Africa.  Similarly today, anonymous whistleblowers within tech companies provided much of the source material for the latest AP report on the US sources of China’s infrastructure of surveillance and control.

We commend these whistleblowers for taking the risk to expose what their employers are doing. We encourage more whistleblowing by other tech workers with information about the companies building Big Brother, whether in the US, China, or anywhere else.

Aug 11 2025

Flock expands pre-crime policing from air travel to road travel

New tools deployed and offered to law enforcement agencies by Flock Safety, the largest US aggregator of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data from both government and private cameras, are moving Flock from data mining into profiling and pre-crime predictive policing. This marks the expansion to road travel of the profiling and predictive policing that was developed and has until now been applied primarily to air travel.

Flock’s data warehouse  includes billions of monthly records, each of which links a unique vehicle identifier (license plate number) to a precise date, time, and location. Flock boasts that it is now using artificial intelligence (i.e., more complex algorithms) to identify patterns and “surface” evidence of suspicious activity.

This moves Flock from a surveillance company and provider of investigative tools to a provider of suspicion-generating and predictive tools for “pre-crime” policing. This makes  a quantitative difference in degree of intrusiveness and danger, of course, but there’s also a qualitative difference between an investigation based on a lawful pre-existing basis for suspicion, and dragnet surveillance intended to generate a basis for new suspicion (that can in turn be used as the basis for further surveillance, search, seizure, detention, etc.).

Thanks to Jay Stanley for calling attention to these new Flock tools in articles on the ACLU website and and in his own Free Future newsletter.

Read More →