While it’s gotten almost no notice (yet) in the USA, our publication of the previously-secret text of the proposal for an agreement between the US and the European Union on DHS access to European PNR (passenger name record) data has prompted extensive discussion this week by journalists, activists, politicians, and bloggers throughout Europe. Here’s a […]
On November 17, 2011, US and European Union officials initialed a renegotiated proposed agreement (original English version; official German translation; official French translation) to authorize airlines to forward PNR data (travel reservations) to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As an executive agreement, not a treaty, it doesn’t require any further US approval, but […]
A troika of officials from the DHS appeared today before the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence of the House Committee on Homeland security to make a joint sales pitch for the proposed agreement between the US and the European Union on DHS access to PNR data (airline reservations). Today’s hearing appears to have been staged […]
In an appearance on September 20th before the LIBE (civil liberties) Committee of the European Parliament to lobby for legalization of US government access to European airline reservations (PNR data), US Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that there has been “not one single example of privacy being breached” by the US in its processing of […]
The U.S. government has yet again ordered a foreign airline, transporting foreign citizens between foreign countries, not to transport a specific foreign passenger through U.S. airspace between foreign points. Yet again, U.S. authorities did this not through legal process and a judicial order such as an injunction, but through an extrajudicial administrative order to the […]
In a new twist on the control of movement through control of issuance of ID credentials, the Associated Press reports that a U.S. citizen has been trapped in Kuwait after the local U.S. Embassy summarily confiscated his passport: Aziz Nouhaili, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Morocco, has been trying for nearly four months to get […]
A leaked copy of the latest draft of a proposed “Agreement between the United States of America and the European Union on the use and transfer of Passenger Name Record [PNR] data to the United States Department of Homeland Security” has been published by the civil liberties watchdog and investigative reporting group Statewatch. The leaked […]
We aren’t sure how it’s been done, but the US government has somehow prevailed on Air Canada to deny boarding in London, for a flight to Toronto, to U.K. citizen Moazzam Begg. Begg was imprisoned (and, he says, tortured) for more than three years by the U.S. at Bagram, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo, Cuba, but was […]
The travel industry — concerned that treating all travelers as suspected terrorists will discourage travel and reduce their business — has joined forces with the homeland-security industrial complex of providers of travel surveillance and control technology in a pseudo-grassroots lobbying and propaganda campaign for more profiling of travelers. The motives of DHS contractors and their […]
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 […]