Remarks by President Barack Obama on the Administration’s Approach to Counterterrorism, MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida, December 6, 2016: Let my final words to you as your Commander-in-Chief be a reminder of what it is that you’re fighting for, what it is that we are fighting for… The United States of America is not […]
Reversing its longstanding official position that no law or regulation requires air travelers to possess or show any ID credentials, the TSA has given notice of a new administrative requirement for all airline passengers: In order to be allowed to pass through checkpoints operated by the TSA or TSA contractors, air travelers will be required […]
A federal judge is hearing arguments today on whether the state of Texas has complied with the District Court’s earlier rulings and a decision of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that portions of the Texas state law requiring specific government-issued ID credentials as a prerequisite to voting are unconstitutional. Today’s US District Court hearing […]
Some people ask us, “What’s wrong with showing ID to police? If you are innocent and have nothing to hide, just show your ID, and you can be on your way.” In the real world, however, showing ID can be a bad idea even if you are innocent. And the decision of the Supreme Court […]
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 […]
To: Julie Holcomb, Abigail Franklin, Darryl Moore, Jim Novosel, Winston Burton, City of Berkeley <bolt@ci.berkeley.ca.us> From: Eric Neville Subject: The cost of requiring ID for library cards Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2016 09:05:15 -0800 Dear Board of Library Trustees: Sometimes the cost of how we do things sneaks up on us. I grew up visiting […]
Just days after posting an out-and-out lie on DHS.gov about whether states that want to comply with the REAL-ID Act have to give other states unconditional access to their drivers’ license and ID database (they do, contrary to what the DHS claims), the DHS has posted an equally blatant lie about whether domestic air travelers […]
We’re quoted in an article today in the New York Times about the Federal government’s efforts to use the threat of denial of air travel to scare state legislators into connecting their state drivers license and ID databases to the distributed national “REAL-ID” database through the REAL-ID “hub” operated by the American Association of Motor […]
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? […]