State agencies that issue drivers’ licenses are conducting warrantless searches of their databases of license photos, using automated face recognition software, at the request of law enforcement agencies including the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security. The use of automated facial recognition to search databases of drivers’ license mug […]
A Tweet that went viral from an airline passenger questioning JetBlue Airlines about its use of automated facial recognition at departure gates has called new attention to the growing use of automated facial recognition to identify and track travelers. Our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have an excellent analysis in their Deeplinks blog of […]
The Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) “fails to provide constitutionally sufficient procedural due process,” according to a motion for summary judgment filed this week in a lawsuit brought by people who have been placed on the TSDB blacklist. We’ve been following this case, Elhady v. Kable, since it was filed in 2016. Discovery and depositions taken […]
In December 2018, the White House announced that President Trump had sent Congress a classified “National Strategy to Combat Terrorist Travel”. Two months later, in February 2019, the White House released both this “National Strategy to Combat Terrorist Travel” (supposedly as signed in December 2018, and with no indication that it had ever been classified) […]
A white paper on the use of PNR and API data (airline reservations), published by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in January 2019, lays out more starkly than ever before the goal of governments around the world: a permission-based system of government control and prior restraint in which a common carrier […]
Having successfully used the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as a vehicle for policy laundering on RFID transceivers in passports, the US government is making a new push toward its decade-old goal of getting ICAO to adopt a standard mandating (a) government access to Passenger Name Record (PNR) data and (b) the creation of airline […]
Buried in the final 500-page PDF file of redacted and munged e-mail messages released by Amtrak in December 2018 in response to a FOIA request we made in 2014, we got the first hint at an answer to one of the questions that originally prompted our request: What did Amtrak think was its legal basis […]
With its recent revival, the Federal government’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has a chance to take a fresh look at how far the USA has gone since 9/11 in implementing a combination of “pre-crime” policing (à la Minority Report) and “social credit scoring” integrated with commercial service providers (à la China) as […]
A viral video of an announcement on a Chinese high-speed train and a series of reports (here and here) on NPR have prompted a surge of interest this week in China’s “social credit” system: Dear passengers: People who travel without a ticket, behave disorderly, or smoke in public areas will be punished according to regulations, […]
A new report by the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) gives perhaps the most detailed official picture to date of the US government’s plans for ed biometric identification, tracking, and control of international air travelers through automated facial recognition. Contrary to specious claims in DHS propaganda that the current rollout of mug-shot machines at […]