Papers, Please!

The Identity Project

Category Archives: Surveillance State

Jun 30 2010

New lawsuit challenges no-fly orders

In a lawsuit filed today by the ACLU in Federal court in Oregon, Latif, et al. v. Holder, et al., ten U.S. citizens who have been refused permission to board flights to, from, or within the US, or have boarded flights to the U.S. only to have them turn back en route, are suing the Attorney General, the Director of the FBI, and the Director of the Terrorist Screening Center for denying their rights by ordering airlines not to transport them.

At least one of the plaintiffs even flew to Mexico, to avoid overflying the US, with the hope of returning to the US by land.  Instead, he was arrested by Mexican police (presumably at the behest of the U.S. government, and deported not to the country of his citizenship, the USA, but to Colombia, where he has only a temporary visa and can’t remain.  That should have prompted diplomatic protest by the US to Mexico for the improper deportation of a US citizen to a third country.  But presumably Mexico acted at the behest of the US, and there has been no sign of US objection.

So far as we know, this is only the second lawsuit to directly challenge the legality of no-fly orders, and the first on behalf of US citizens.  The previous case was brought by Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian graduate student at Stanford University, after she was detained by San Francisco Airport police and prevented from flying home to her country in 2005. While her complaint remains pending against the individual police in U.S. District court for the Northern District of California, the cases against all of the Federal agencies and officials have been dismissed.

The latest case will test whether the Obama Administration still agrees with former Secretary of Homeland Security Chertoff that no-fly decisions should not be subject to judicial review.  [Update: From the latest statement by the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, it appears that they may.] And it will be closely watched in Europe as well, where the Obama Administration has assured the European Union that adequate means of redress do exist in U.S. courts for individuals — including some of the plaintiffs in the latest case — denied permission to travel from the EU to the U.S. on the basis of passenger data transmitted to the DHS.

Jun 30 2010

Will Canadian travelers be subject to more US tracking and control?

After a series of investigative reports in the Canwest newspapers in March of this year called attention to the lack of any legal basis under Canadian law for US government access to information about flights to and from Canada that overfly the US (notably including Canada-Cuba flights), the Canadian Conservative minority government has responded by introducing a bill earlier this month that would, if approved by the Canadian Parliament, override Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) to allow the US or any foreign government to find out who is on flights to and from Canada overflying those countries, even if they don’t land in the US.

Canadian law was amended after September 11, 2001, to override PIPEDA and allow US government access to airline reservation data, but only for flights that actually carry passengers to or from the USA. BIll C-42 would extend that to overflights of any country that wants to vet (or simply log) who’s on flights through its airspace.

The sponsors of the latest proposal, Bill C-42, expect it to be controversial, and it has already been criticized by opposition MPs.  Opposition parties have united to pass other legislation supported by the minority government related to collaboration with US wars (such as a measure supporting political asylum in Canada for people resisting service in the US military in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that violate Canadian and international law), and some observers predict that could happen with Bill C-42 as well.

We certainly hope that Canadians learn from the mistakes of the USA, stand up for their sovereignty, and say “no” to US surveillance of overflights, just as people in the USA would say “no” if the Cuban government demanded to know who is on the dozens of flights every day that fly over Cuba en route between Miami and South America.

Jun 07 2010

Another Paris-Mexico flight barred from US airspace

Despite being a party to international aviation and human rights treaties guaranteeing free passage through international airspace, the US government claims the right to require prior government permission (granted or withheld in secret, without due process, judicial review, or publicly disclosed standards) not just for travel to or from the USA but for transit through US airspace — even on nonstop flights that aren’t scheduled to land in US territory.

Most such overflights of the US between other countries are to and from Canada, where US control and surveillance of overflights have provoked continuing controversy and opposition.

Of the handful of other airline flight paths between other countries that cross over  US territory, the Paris-Mexico route continues to generate most of the — increasingly bizarre — incidents of US refusal of permission to overfly the US.

Read More →

May 28 2010

Wanna buy a prepaid SIM card? “Papers, please!”

S. 3427, a bill introduced in the Senate this week by Senators Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) and John Cornyn (R-TX),  would require would require ID “verification” as a prerequite to buying a prepaid cell phone or SIM card.

The seller or reseller of the phone or SIM card would be required to collect your personal information (including name, address, date of birth, and for online sales your Social Security number) and all unique identifiers of the phone or SIM card including the including the EMEI or other serial number and the assigned phone number.

For in-person sales, you would have to show government-issued ID credentials in a form to be determined later by the Attorney General.  For online or other non-face-to-face sales, you would also have to provide “Any other personal identifying information that the Attorney General finds, by regulation, to be necessary for purposes of this section.”

The bill would place no limits on the amount or intrusiveness of the information the Attorney General could demand, as long as it is spelled out in regulations.  And there’s nothing in the bill to stop the AG from making the verification requirements so onerous as to amount to a de facto ban on online or mail order sales of prepaid SIM card or cell phones, as Ken Grunski —  president of Telestial.com, a leading US-based online source of prepaid SIM cards and cell phones for international travelers — immediately picked up on when we sent him a copy of the bill:

The level of verification that the bill requires is critical to e-commerce providers … because they can only verify an identity to a certain extent online. For example, if the bill just required that the billing address match the shipping address, we can do that easily. But if the bill requires a state or country issued identity card, we can’t do that online. You are essentially saying that the product can’t be sold online anymore, because you can’t verify the identity of the person making the purchase.

It really opens up all types of questions, like what types of impositions would that take on the e-commerce companies and why only SIM cards and prepaid cell phones? This could lead to regulation of all types of telecom products – or anything that puts out a transmission signal.

Read More →

May 23 2010

“Freedom Flyer” Phil Mocek to go on trial June 14th in Albuquerque

[UPDATE: The trial which was scheduled to begin June 14, 2010 has been postponed. Check our FAQ about the case or the court calendar for further updates as soon as they are available.]

We’ve written previously about the arrest of Phil Mocek at a TSA checkpoint at the airport in Albuquerque last November. Mr. Mocek had a valid ticket on Southwest Airlines (“You are now free to move about the country”), and was attempting to get to his flight. Like the “Freedom Riders” of the 1960s on interstate buses, Mr. Mocek sought to exercise his Federally and Constitutionally-guaranteed right to travel, but was arrested by local police for alleged violations of state and local laws and ordinances.

So far as we can tell, this is the first time someone in the USA has been arrested or charged with a crime for attempting to exercise their right to travel by air without showing ID or answering questions about themselves or their trip, or for photography or audio or video recording at a TSA checkpoint.

Mr. Mocek is now scheduled to go on trial starting June 14th on charges of violating four state and local ordinances carrying a total maximum sentence of 15 months in jail.  (The charges could still be dropped, and the trial could be rescheduled.  We’ll post an update in this blog and in our FAQ about the case if we learn of any change in the schedule.)

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May 20 2010

Is “SPOT” a reasonable basis for suspicion or surveillance?

Today the Government Accountability Office released a detailed report on the TSA’s “Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques” (SPOT) program, providing considerably more detail than the TSA itself has ever provided, confirming the lack of any evidence that the program has spotted any terrorists, and suggesting implicitly that the DHS has been keeping yet another set of illegal records about innocent travelers.

We’ve followed the SPOT program since its existence was first revealed in 2004, and we’ve been detained, interrogated, and subjected to more intrusive search ourselves after being picked out by SPOT “Behavior Detection Officers”.  (Fancy language for, “They didn’t like our looks, so they harassed us and gave us a thorough shakedown.”)

The SPOT program is the TSA’s attempt to adopt Israeli-style passenger profiling based on appearance and behavior (isn’t that supposed to be un-American, or at least illegal?), and now has a budget of more than $200 million a year.  As shown in the diagram above from the GAO report, more than 150,000 people have been subjected to more intrusive search or interrogation as a result of being fingered by BDOs as “suspicious” or allegedly fitting the (secret, of course, this being the TSA) SPOT appearance and behavior profile.  In 14,000 cases, police were called and passengers detained for “investigation”, typically including a police demand for, and logging of, their ID.

The GAO report serves mainly to confirm the obvious: There is no scientific evidence that the SPOT program has identified any actual would-be terrorists, or provides any legitimate basis for suspicion of those it singles out: Read More →

May 20 2010

Statistics on UK travel surveillance and control

It’s tempting to think that ID and PNR-based travel control systems don’t “work” as anti-terrorist measures (they obviously work as surveillance measures and as general law enforcement dragnets, as do house-to-house searches) solely because of the incompetence of the TSA and DHS. Could they be more effective elsewhere, if better implemented?  That seems to be the view of some sectors of center-right opinion in Europe, where the EU continues to consider a mandate for members states to set up their own “Passenger Analysis Units” to decide who to allow to fly, even while the the European Parliament has defined strict standards that they would have to meet.

Newly-reported data from the UK, however, suggests the UK PNR scheme — the most developed and extensive in the EU to date — has all the same problems as the US one. This suggests that the defcst are in the concept, not the details of its execution, and calls in question whether any PNR scheme is likely to likely to be able to meet the Europarl’s criteria for acceptability.

Read More →

May 18 2010

USA presses travel surveillance and control agenda at ICAO

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has been holding another round of meetings this week at its headquarters in Montreal.  As we predicted, the US delegation has been pressing its vision of an integrated and standardized global system of surveillance and control of air travel, in which government access would be built into airline reservation systems (think, “CALEA for CRSs and PNR data”, worldwide) and government permission would be a prerequisite to boarding any flight on what used to be considered a “common carrier” required to transport all comers.

It’s hard to know what’s going on at ICAO meetings if you aren’t there (think of other international bodies like the WTO and WIPO), and no privacy or civil liberties group was in attendance. But outsiders can get some sense what’s in ICAO’s pipeline from its own recently-published Vision 2020 10-year plan and from the working papers submitted by participants in last week’s sessions of the facilitation panel, including these:
Read More →

May 18 2010

TSA still has no answers to key questions about “Secure Flight”

The procedures and timeline for implementation of the TSA’s Secure Flight scheme for identity-based surveillance and control of airline passengers are spelled out not in laws or published regulations but in secret Security Directives to airlines.  So we noted with considerable interest this report today by travel journalist Charlie Leocha of a relatively rare public appearance by the head of the Secure Flight program (emphasis added below):

Paul Leyh, TSA Director Secure Flight Program, claimed that all U.S. airlines will be enrolled in Secure Flight within a month and that all foreign carriers will be working in the program by the end of 2010.

Speaking at U.S. Travel Association’s Pow Wow conference to encourage foreign tourism, Leyh noted that TSA is about to complete their mission of … performing the [watchlist] matches prior to allowing passengers to board….

The system sounds simple, however, there were significant IT hurdles to be overcome. Expanded data field requirements for online travel agents such as Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Priceline were more complex than originally thought. The new data collection by brick and mortar travel agents meant internal profile systems to accommodate the storage of this very valuable and confidential information had to be developed…

Foreign journalists attending the press conference asked whether there is a judicial process to use should the normal DHS TRIP process not result in having your name cleared. Leyh didn’t have an answer for that question….

Leyh didn’t have an answer about privacy issues regarding the GDS [Global Distribution Systems, also known as Computerized Reservation Systems], airline reservation systems or travel agents who are allowed to keep all passenger information indefinitely and who fall under no privacy legislation.

Leyh may not have had answers today, but the TSA can’t avoid those questions forever, especially when they are being raised from abroad.  Last month, the European Parliament voted to include both judicial review of no-fly orders and a review of US government access to CRS/GDS data in its conditions for any agreement to give the DHS access to data about passengers on flights between the EU and the US.