The Lawyer’s Corner is a resource for attorneys, and for individuals bringing cases on their own behalf, to view the court documents (the legal complaints and subsequent pleadings filed by the parties) of important recent ID related cases. It is through the open sharing of these legal documents that common litigation pitfalls can be avoided […]
Is the U.S. government monitoring social media? Yes. Since December 2016, all visitors to the U.S. under the “Visa Waiver Program” (VWP) have been asked to identify the social media IDs they use to the Department of State on the online ESTA form. In several recent notices in the Federal Register, and in official statements […]
A Federal judge has ruled that yes, he can review the Constitutionality of Federal blacklists (euphemistically but misleadingly labeled “watchlists”). That should be an unsurprising finding. But “pre-crime” and predictive policing programs, including decisions to put people on blacklists that are used to control what they are and aren’t allowed to do, have largely operated in […]
San Francisco and Silicon Valley are among the centers of opposition to President Trump and his fascism, especially as it relates to restrictions on movement, border controls, immigration, and asylum. Bay Area technology companies and their better-paid classes of employees like to think of themselves as building a better world that reflects the distinctive values […]
[D]ue process requires… notice and a hearing prior to restricting an individual’s ability to travel. (9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Order on Motion for Stay, February 9, 2017, State of Washington and State of Minnesota v. Trump) President Trump’s Executive Orders prohibiting entry to the US by citizens of specified blacklisted countries and cutting off […]
Congress is again debating the proposals we wrote about last year to deny firearms licenses or permits to anyone “suspected of supporting” terrorism. We stand by our earlier analysis and our condemnation of this proposal as (1) another step from sanctions against criminal conduct to pre-crime predictive policing, and (2) an expansion of the collateral […]
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 […]
The broadest and most fundamental legal challenge to the waging of the US “War on Terror” through standardless, secret, extra-judicial government blacklists was filed today in the Federal court for the district in Virginia where the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are headquartered. (Video backgrounder and interviews […]
The curious incident of the dog named “Dash” has spotlighted a type of outsourced surveillance and control of our everyday activities that typically operates invisibly but that is much more pervasive than most people in the USA imagine. We were contacted last week by KTVU News to help explain what happened to Bruce Francis, a […]