At a “Big Data” conference in Sydney earlier this month, the head of Australia’s traveler tracking and profiling office (his actual title — we are not making this up — is “Director Intent Management & Analytics“) gave an unusually revealing presentation (PDF) [also here] about the nature of the government’s travel data warehouse and how […]
In the latest episode in the increasingly bizarre but all too real saga of standardless secret administrative no-fly orders from the DHS to airlines, prohibiting the transportation back to their home country of US citizens, Oklahoma native Saadiq Long is being prevented from returning home to the US to spend the holiday season with his […]
Are TSA staff and police immune from liability when they violate travelers’ rights? Are First Amendment rights not “clearly established”? These are now the issues before Judge James O. Browning of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico in Phillip Mocek v. Albuquerque et al., a Federal civil rights lawsuit brought […]
Federal civil rights lawsuit for false arrest at TSA checkpoint U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit Argued March 17, 2015; decided December 22, 2015 Phillip Mocek v. City of Albuquerque, Albuquerque Aviation Police Department, Marshall Katz (in his official capacity as Chief of Police of the Albuquerque Aviation Police Department), Jonathon Breedon [TSA], […]
The TSA is a lawless agency, and its checkpoints are a domestic counterpart of Guantanamo: There are no rules saying what travelers do or don’t have to do at TSA checkpoints. All of the “procedures” we are required to comply with are secret. No “no-fly” order has yet been reviewed on its merits by any […]
[MEPs picket outside the plenary chamber to ask their colleagues to say “No” to the PNR agreement with the US. (Photo by greensefa, some rights reserved under Creative Commons license, CC BY 2.0)”] Last week — despite the demonstration shown above (more photos here) by Members of the European Parliament as their colleagues entered the […]
Today Google and Cape Air announced that Cape Air has migrated its reservations and Passenger Name Records (PNRs) to a new computerized reservation system (CRS) provided by Google’s ITA Software division. ITA Software was working on a CRS even before it was acquired by Google last year, but had appeared to lack a launch customer […]
In the latest variation on what has become a depressingly-familiar theme, US citizen Jamal Tarhuni was denied boarding on a flight home to the USA last month, apparently because while he was abroad the US government put him on the list of those people it has secretly ordered airlines not to transport. Mr. Tarhuni had […]
In his ruling this week in Hasbrouck v. CBP, Judge Seeborg of the US. District Court for the Northern District of California suggested that US citizens have no “rights” that would be prejudiced by applying newly-issued Privacy Act exemption rules to previously-made requests for government records. But a parallel case currently before the U.S. District […]
In anticipation of the announcement today of new, secretly-negotiated plans for a “North American Security Perimeter” agreement between the US and Canada, Privacy International, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and a coalition of other Canadian organizations have released a joint statement of the core civil liberties and human rights principles […]