We attended and testified at the first meeting of Minnesota’s “Legislative Working Group on REAL-ID Act Compliance” today in St. Paul. Like other states, Minnesota has been told (falsely) that it’s the only state that isn’t planning to “comply” with the Federal requests in the REAL-ID Act, and (also falsely) that Minnesota residents will be […]
When we reported last week on the passport provisions in the new “Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act”, we focused on the details of the rules for denial or revocation of US passports of citizens alleged to owe more than $50,000 in Federal taxes. We should, perhaps, have put more emphasis on the other new basis […]
President Obama’s televised speech last Sunday included a smorgasbord of proposals (and endorsements for proposals already made by members of Congress) for more control and surveillance of travel. We’ll look first at the proposals for restrictions on travel by foreign visitors to the US, followed in our next post by some of those that would […]
Stumbling into the embrace of the homeland-security state, California’s state legislature has sent to Governor Jerry Brown a bill which, unless the Governor vetoes it by October 11th, will require that: [T]he Department [of Motor Vehicles] shall require an applicant for an original driver’s license or identification card to submit satisfactory proof of California residency […]
If you exercise your right to travel, will the US government use your past travel as the basis for denying you the right to travel in the future? Reading between the lines of the redacted public versions of recent filings in one of the ongoing legal challenges to US government no-fly orders, the answer appears […]
Independent legal experts commissioned by the Council of Europe (COE) to assess proposals for surveillance and profiling of air travellers throughout the European Union have returned a detailed and perceptive critique of the proposed EU directive on government access to, and use of, Passenger Name Record (PNR) data from airline reservations. Before the revelations by […]
The Supreme Court has found unconstitutional on its face a Los Angeles ordinance requiring operators of hotels and motels to demand specified personal information from and about each guest and their behavior (date and time of arrival and departure, license plate number of the vehicle in which they arrived, etc.), log this travel metadata, and […]
The US government has paid $40,000 as part of the settlement of a lawsuit by a traveler who was falsely arrested by Federal agents and local police when a Frontier Airlines flight she was on arrived at the Detroit airport in 2011, arrive, taken off the plane in handcuffs, locked in a cell for four […]
The US Department of Homeland Security has announced plans to expand its data mining and “sharing”of DHS files about travelers, while removing some of the limited access controls and audit logging that it had only recently claimed to be putting in place for its Department-wide surveillance data framework: Privacy Impact Assessment for the DHS Data […]
This week is Stop C-51 Week, marked by events throughout Canada and elsewhere in opposition to Bill C-51, currently under consideration by the Parliament of Canada, “An Act to enact the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act and the Secure Air Travel Act, to amend the Criminal Code, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act and […]