(video; slides) [Facial recognition at each step in airline passenger processing. Slide from presentation by Heathrow Airport Holdings Ltd. to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Traveler Identitification Program symposium, October 2018] Today, the day before Thanksgiving, will probably be the busiest day for air travel in the USA since the outbreak of the COVID-19 […]
[Arrows indicate populations of states where abortion is, or is likely to become, illegal, and directions and distances to the nearest states where abortion is legal. Note that some of the routes shown are more likely to be followed than others, since abortion is more or less heavily restricted in some states where it is […]
Ongoing litigation on behalf of journalist Thomas Brewster and Forbes Media has revealed a few more details about how computerized reservation systems (CRSs) collaborate with the US government to surveil travelers. It has also prompted new denials by some of those CRS companies that range from misdirection to out-and-out lies.
For more than a decade (see our articles from 2012 and 2018), we’ve been monitoring the saga of Yonas Fikre, a US citizen who was placed on the US government’s “No-Fly List” and blacklisted by his government as a “suspected terrorist” while he was overseas on business. Last week, after nine years and counting in […]
[“Secure Flight” process flow used by the TSA for airline passengers and being tested on Amtrak passengers. The red box at right center is the “black box” for algorithmic profiling, blacklist/blocklist enforcement, and fly/no-fly decision making.] Amtrak has reportedly given the Transportation Security Administration several months of archives of Amtrak passenger reservations and frequent rider […]
May court records related to orders requiring a travel reservations company to provide real-time updates to the U.S. government whenever a “person of interest” makes reservations for flights or other travel be kept secret from the public, the press, and other travel companies including the airlines on which the target plans to travel? That issue […]
In a victory for the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA), an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) has ruled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must either disclose records of e-mail messages which we requested in the “native” file formats in which they are held on DHS servers or archival storage media, or must “demonstrate with […]
After stalling for more than five years, the Transportation Security Administration has made public a curious internal memo regarding photography and audio and video recording at TSA checkpoints. The TSA wants to photograph us and track our movements and activities using facial recognition, but wants to limit our ability to photograph and record its activities. […]
Two recent court cases, and follow-up articles and interviews with the plaintiffs and their lawyers, show how the highest priority for the U.S. government with respect to no-fly orders continues to be preventing judicial review of these government decisions, not preventing terrorism. When an airline requests permission to allow an individual to board a flight, […]
Today the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a competition between hardware and software vendors to demonstrate the facial-recognition systems that are most useful for surveillance and other malign uses: cameras or other sensors and facial and/or other biometric matching algorithms that can identity travelers (or other people in public places) even if they […]