Documents newly released to us by the TSA strongly suggest that the TSA has been lying about whether people are “allowed” by the TSA to fly without showing ID, and that decisions about whether to allow travelers to fly without ID are being made arbitrarily, on the basis of irrelevant and unreliable commercial data and/or […]
We’ve talked a lot about government surveillance and control of air travelers, and occasionally about its extension to bus and train travel. (Our FOIA request about this to Amtrak remains unanswered and several months overdue for a response.) But can you avoid being tracked and watched by the government if you travel by private car? […]
Dan Geer’s keynote speech at the Blackhat security conference earlier this month (video, transcript) included an important discussion of the often-misunderstood “right to be forgotten” and the larger context of why it matters: the threat posed by compelled identification, and how we can defend ourselves against that threat: Privacy used to be proportional to that […]
Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim still doesn’t know why she was placed on the “no-fly” list, even after the trial of her lawsuit against the US government and US District Judge William Alsup’s finding that Dr. Ibrahim was denied the due process of law which was her right. At trial, the government admitted that back in 2004, […]
The latest revelations about NSA attacks on encrypted electronic communications include this sentence buried in an article in yesterday’s New York Times (first noted today by the travel news website Skift): But by 2006, an N.S.A. document notes, the agency had broken into communications for three foreign airlines, one travel reservation system, one foreign government’s […]
California’s legislature is considering a bill to authorize adding radio tracking beacons to drivers licenses and state non-driver ID cards. Each such card would broadcast a unique tracking number which could legally be intercepted by anyone with a suitable radio transceiver within range, and which would be linked to a national DHS database of drivers […]
The L.A. Times has reported that people who live anywhere within a mile of the site of the Coachella Valley Music Festival in Indio, California (and perhaps residents’ visitors, if any visitors were allowed?) were “required” to wear individually numbered RFID-chipped tracking bracelets throughout the two weekends of the festival: In 2011, the organization began […]
While we’re picking on what the TSA posts in its official blog, let’s take a look at what the TSA said in another blog post earlier this week entitled, “Can you fly without ID?” It’s an important question, but the TSA only hints at the answer. One might expect that the answer to the question, […]
On March 24th, 20 months after being ordered to do so by a Federal judge, the TSA quietly published a notice in the Federal Register “inviting” the public (that’s you!) to submit comments concering its use of ongoing use of virtual strip-search machines to determine who to subject to “enhanced” groping by checkpoint staff. Does […]
Our friends at CheckpointUSA.org, in conjunction with CopBlock.org and others, are holding a contest for the best video or other educational content that “demystifies” roadblocks and your rights when stopped. Details are here. The contest is open through midnight EST, April 8, 2013, and the entry that “does the best job educating others about checkpoints […]