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 […]
A report in the Washington Post last week has brought renewed attention to the US State Department’s ongoing denial of passports to many US citizens. The Washington Post story focuses on Mexican-Americans whose passports have been revoked or whose applications for new or renewal passports have been officially or effectively denied, and suggests that, “under […]
1. The federal government has imposed a kind of second-class citizenship on the Plaintiffs. Without charges, without arrests, without even an investigation sometimes — the agency defendants act in concert to deprive thousands of innocent Americans, mostly Muslim, of their right to be free from a government that extrajudicially designates them as worthy of permanent […]
This month US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) posted the latest in a series of Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) for its Traveler Verification Service (TVS) program. The latest PIA gives notice (although not in the form required by Federal law) that CBP and its airline and airport partners are carrying out a second expanded phase […]
Jana Winter has a detailed investigative report on the front page of today’s Boston Globe about a previously secret TSA program of illegal surveillance of innocent air travelers, “Quiet Skies”. According to the story in the Globe, based in part on descriptions and documents apparently leaked by dissident Federal Air Marshals, the “Quiet Skies” program […]
This month some cruise lines are joining airlines and airports in taking mug shots of travelers and passing them on to US Customs and Border Protection (CB P). CBP uses these facial images (“biometrics”) for border and travel control and general law enforcement (policing and surveillance) purposes, and shares them with other Department of Homeland […]
TSA checkpoint staff often act as though they were above the law. But are they really? Sadly, they often are, at least in the opinion of some Federal judges. The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals recent decision in Pellegrino v. TSA , in combination with its decision last year in Vanderklok v. TSA, mean that […]
A press release last week from Unisys gives a disturbing glimpse into the extent to which border guards — possibly including US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other components of the US Department of Homeland Security — are making decisions on the basis of automated “pre-crime” predictions of future bad actions or bad intentions. […]