Under a series of new laws and regulatory proposals, almost everyone traveling internationally to or from the USA — US passport holders, visa-free foreign visitors, and foreigners with visas — would have to pay more in government fees for the required credentials and/or permissions. This week the U.S. Senate passed the “Travel Promotion Act”, a […]
After two months, we’ve gotten an initial round of non-responses from the DHS and TSA to our complaint that their procedures for subjecting holders of certain passports to more intrusive search and/or interrogation as a condition of domestic common-carrier air travel violate published TSA civil rights policies, Federal laws, Constitutional rights, and rights guaranteed by […]
Three members of Congress have sent a joint letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano about the posting of a version of the TSA’s Screening Management Standard Operating Procedures on a Federal government website. (We’re still pursuing our FOIA appeal for the current version and related documents, which the TSA has been stonewalling, as […]
In the course of testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, the Director of the FBI’s “Terrorist Screening Center” (TSC) has, for the first time, stated publicly what the government claims to be the “substantive derogatory criteria” used in the (secret, non-adversarial, extra-judicial) process of determining whether to place a name on the “No-Fly” list, […]
From time to time, people ask us, “But why don’t you want to show ID when you travel? What’s wrong with that?” There are probably as many answers to that question as there are people who resist government demands to show ID when they travel, even when it’s scary and involves some personal risk to […]
Until recently, the TSA has been a domestic legal Guantanamo, and the TSA has treated their domain of “checkpoints” and travel control and surveillance as a law-free zone where their powers of search, seizure, detention, and denial of passage were unconstrained by the Constitution, human rights treaties, judicial review, or stautory or regulatory standards. As […]
260,000 members down the tubes. No refunds. Congratulations, suckers! Not only did you sign up for and pay money to a totalitarian program, but as usual, the police state was run by incompetents. Your little attempt to suck up to the TSA gestapo now won’t be doing you any good. Their competitor “Flo Corp” is […]
As of today, June 1, 2009, even U.S. citizens are officially prisoners in the USA, or exiles barred from entering our own country without the government’s permission. We are now forbidden by Federal regulations from leaving or entering the USA, anywhere, by any means — by air, by sea, or by land, to or from […]
In response to a request by the Identity Project under the Freedom of Information Act, the TSA has for the first time given us a (redacted) version of the section on Travel Document and ID Checks from the TSA’s “Screening Management SOP” (Standard Operating Procedures) manual. Our request was made June 21, 2008, the day […]
We were surprised last week to see that the GAO has issued a report certifying that, “As of April 2009, TSA had generally achieved 9 of the 10 statutory conditions related to the development of the Secure Flight program and had conditionally achieved 1 condition (TSA had defined plans, but had not completed all activities […]