This week the US House of Representatives has been debating whether to accept a proposal, introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and already approved by the Senate, which would give the IRS extra-judicial administrative authority and mandate to prevent a US passport being issued or renewed, and to have any existing US passport revoked, for […]
More than five years after we filed our first formal complaint with the Department of Homeland Security that its travel surveillance and control programs violate U.S. international human rights obligations under freedom of movement) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, we’ve finally received a response from the DHS Officer for Civil Rights […]
A little more than a year after we filed suit on behalf of Edward Hasbrouck against the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division of DHS to find out what records they are keeping about our international travels, and what they have done with those records, we had our first real day in court yesterday in […]
There’s a report on our work on the front page of the current summer 2011 issue of “Human Rights Now!”, the newsletter of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute. MCLI has long been in the vanguard of efforts to bring the U.S. into compliance with international human rights law, and we thank them for bringing the […]
The DHS can’t exempt itself from the civil remedies provided by the Privacy Act for people who are harmed by government violations of the law, according to a decision announced today by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati in the case of Shearson v. Department of Homeland Security. The case was brought by Julia […]
The TSA has reviewed 929 pages of policies we requested, and released one page of them and parts of 12 other pages. All the rest are still being kept secret. But even those tidbits show that the TSA is exceeding its legal authority. The TSA continues to drag its feet in responding to our outstanding […]
Our friend the attorney, frequent traveler, and blogger Paul Karl Lukacs has been generating lots of long-belated discussion (see links in the CBP category in his blog) in response to his report last January on the right of US citizens not to answer questions from US border inspectors, and why many lawyers, if consulted, would […]
The good news: In one of the first tests of US rules purporting to forbid US citizens from crossing US borders without first obtaining US passports (issued at the government’s apparently standardless discretion), the US Department of State issued “one-time waivers” authorizing the “Iroquois Nationals” lacrosse team to leave the US (and presumably to return, […]
US citizens generally assume that, whatever mistreatment is meted out to foreigners by US border guards and the DHS, we are entitled to enter and leave our own country without asking for, or receiving, permission from”our” government. That should be a safe assumption, under both the First Amendment to the US Constitution (which guarantees our […]
The new UK coalition government has announced its initial Programme for Government, including a plan of action on civil liberties including, “We will scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register and the ContactPoint database, and halt the next generation of biometric passports.” Talk is cheap, but Bill 1 (text, explanatory notes) already introduced […]