Our work is cited in an article today by Kaveh Waddell in The Atlantic, “How Long Can Border Agents Keep Your Email Password? Some data gathered from travelers going through customs can stay in a Homeland Security database for 75 years.” The article in The Atlantic highlights several recent incidents in which international travelers have […]
Legislation has been introduced in both the USA and Belgium to subject rail travelers to the same sorts of travel surveillance schemes that are already being used to monitor and control air travelers. If these proposals are enacted into law, passenger railroads would be required to collect and enter additional information such as passport or […]
We got a pleasant surprise this week: a phone call from Eric F. Stein, the head of the State Department’s FOIA-processing office. Mr. Stein’s name and signature appeared on a bizarre letter we received last month, telling us that one of the unanswered Freedom Of Information Act requests we’d been bugging the State Department about for […]
In the latest episode of the FOIA follies, we recently received a bizarre letter letter from the U.S. State Department asking us whether we are “still interested” in receiving a response to one of several of our requests for State Department records that have each gone unanswered for more than five years. The Department of […]
It’s not a crime to flee from persecution, to try to get to a place of refuge, or to apply for asylum once you get there. The case of a man who walked 30 miles from France to England through the tunnel under the Channel shows how wrong-headed restrictions on airlines, railroads, ferry operators, and […]
An ongoing trickle of still-incomplete responses by the TSA to a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request we made in June 2013 continues to shed more light on the TSA’s procedures for air travelers who don’t have ID credentials the TSA deems satisfactory. It’s difficult to compile statistics from files in the image format in […]
This week the European Parliament is scheduled to debate (Wednesday) and vote (Thursday) on a resolution (PDF) to approve, with amendments, a proposed compromise on a directive “on the use of Passenger Name Record [PNR] data for the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of terrorist offences and serious crime.” What does this mean, why does […]
Can second-class US citizens be required to carry second-class US passports with a conspicuous stigmatizing “scarlet letter” label? Congress has now said yes. Do DHS pre-cogs have the omniscience and infallibility of angels at predicting and protecting the US and the world against future crimes? Congress has now said yes. Yesterday Congress completed its approval […]
Under the pressure of empty (but scary) threats by the Federal government to harass residents of states whose governments the DHS doesn’t deem sufficiently “compliant” with the REAL-ID Act of 2005, many state governments are trying to find ways to “comply” with DHS desires without selling out their residents’ rights. State legislatures in New Hampshire, […]
Now that the DHS has postponed its self-imposed (and legally baseless) “deadline” for domestic air travelers to have ID that complies with the REAL-ID Act until at least 2020, the only threat left in the Federal arsenal to intimidate state governments into “compliance” with the REAL-ID Act any sooner than 2020 is the threat to […]