For years Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials and their state government collaborators have been repeating the big lie that all airline passengers must have government-issued ID credentials. That lie has been included in TSA and DHS press releases, airport signage, and Tweets from the official DHS and TSA accounts. […]
The latest response to one of our Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests shows the lengths to which the Federal government has gone to obscure its underwriting of the construction of a national ID database. Supporters of a national ID database know that there is resistance to exactly that idea. So they try to pretend […]
Playing out the endgame we predicted last year of a two-decade campaign by the US government to establish a global regime of government surveillance of air travelers, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has adopted an amendment to the Chicago Convention on Civil Aviation that will require each of the 193 state parties to that […]
Today the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced that it has launched a “pilot” at Washington National Airport (DCA) of yet another scheme for biometric identification and tracking of domestic air travelers. [Screen capture from TSA video] The new “touchless ID verification” stations at DCA include a webcam (at top center of photo above) a magnetic-stripe […]
According to a solicitation to potential contractors published last week, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) wants to outsource its current questioning of airline passengers without ID, and its decisions about which travelers without ID to allow to travel and which to prevent from flying, to a fee-based system operated through a cellphone app provided by […]
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 […]
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 […]
[“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 […]
The New York Times published a lengthy but deeply flawed report last week, “Airlines Refused to Collect Passenger Data That Could Aid Coronavirus Fight.” Here’s the lede: For 15 years, the U.S. government has been pressing airlines to prepare for a possible pandemic by collecting passengers’ contact information so that public-health authorities could track down […]
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): World Economic Forum KTDI project page (with links and list of partners) KTDI.org March 2020 KTDI specifications 2019 KTDI video on Vimeo 2018 KTDI video on Youtube Marriot / […]