One reason there’s been no change in TSA “policy” under the Obama administration — if you can call it “policy” when there are no rules and the people in charge think their decisions aren’t subject to judicial review — is that President Obama hasn’t yet appointed an Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Transportation Security […]
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 […]
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 […]
This month the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Justice has released a report on their recent audit of the FBI’s “Terrorist Watchlist Nomination Practices”. The OIG report contains far more detail than has previously been made public about how and by whom (although very little about why) the government’s watchlists […]
Amendments to the ATA/IATA Reservations Interline Message Procedures – Passenger (AIRIMP) take effect today, providing the first industry standard formats that airlines, travel agencies, and computerized reservation systems (CRSs) can use to transmit the additional information about travelers and prospective travelers newly required by the TSA for its Secure Flight airline passenger “screening” (surveillance and […]
The Identity Project participates actively in U.S., Canadian, European Union, ICAO, and other international regulatory and policy development proceedings through policy analysis, research, written comments, white papers, and testimony on proposed rules and regulatory notices. We monitor ID-related regulatory filings in the Federal Register and E.U. notices, but we also welcome your tips on upcoming […]
On December 21, 2008, Amtrak police arrested a photographer taking pictures on a public platform at Penn Station in New York … in response to an Amtrak photo contest calling for the public to submit photos of Amtrak trains. We had heard about this story before, but now the Colbert Report has the story including […]
The Obama Administration promises change, and invites suggestions for their agenda. Since they’ve asked, here are the first things we think the new administration should do to restore our right to travel, and to address the issues of ID requirements and identity-based government surveillance and control of travel and movement. Some of these can be […]
The DHS and TSA announced their final rule for the Secure Flight program for the control and surveillance of airline passengers during a photo op today at Reagan National Airport. We aren’t among the journalists to whom the TSA’s anonymous spin doctors chose to leak their plans. We’ll have more comments after we have reviewed […]
The massive U.S. terror watchlists will soon add their one millionth name and the ACLU will mark the day with an event on July 14th at the National Press Club involving innocent individuals who have been wrongly matched to the terrorist watchlists. The ACLU gets the one millionth number from a Department of Justice Inspector […]