We got a pleasant surprise this week: a phone call from Eric F. Stein, the head of the State Department’s FOIA-processing office. Mr. Stein’s name and signature appeared on a bizarre letter we received last month, telling us that one of the unanswered Freedom Of Information Act requests we’d been bugging the State Department about for […]
In the latest episode of the FOIA follies, we recently received a bizarre letter letter from the U.S. State Department asking us whether we are “still interested” in receiving a response to one of several of our requests for State Department records that have each gone unanswered for more than five years. The Department of […]
Congress is again debating the proposals we wrote about last year to deny firearms licenses or permits to anyone “suspected of supporting” terrorism. We stand by our earlier analysis and our condemnation of this proposal as (1) another step from sanctions against criminal conduct to pre-crime predictive policing, and (2) an expansion of the collateral […]
Since the start of the post-9/11 shift from case-by-case government access to travel reservations to dragnet surveillance of all reservations and pre-crime profiling of all travelers, the government has claimed repeatedly that the information to which it has demanded access was already “routinely” provided by travelers to airlines and other travel companies. We’ve recently received […]
This week the European Parliament is scheduled to debate (Wednesday) and vote (Thursday) on a resolution (PDF) to approve, with amendments, a proposed compromise on a directive “on the use of Passenger Name Record [PNR] data for the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of terrorist offences and serious crime.” What does this mean, why does […]
The curious incident of the dog named “Dash” has spotlighted a type of outsourced surveillance and control of our everyday activities that typically operates invisibly but that is much more pervasive than most people in the USA imagine. We were contacted last week by KTVU News to help explain what happened to Bruce Francis, a […]
Yesterday President Obama signed the Judicial Redress Act into law. European Union Commissioner for Justice Věra Jourová described the new law as, “a historic achievement [that] will ensure that all EU citizens have the right to enforce data protection rights in U.S. courts…. The entry into force of the Judicial Redress Act will pave the […]
The latest installment in Amtrak’s response to one of our FOIA requests confirms our suspicion that Amtrak has given US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) access to all Amtrak reservations including those for purely domestic passengers and trains — but in an additional and harder-to-track manner than we had previously been aware of. In October […]
Can second-class US citizens be required to carry second-class US passports with a conspicuous stigmatizing “scarlet letter” label? Congress has now said yes. Do DHS pre-cogs have the omniscience and infallibility of angels at predicting and protecting the US and the world against future crimes? Congress has now said yes. Yesterday Congress completed its approval […]
The real test of whether the TSA is above the law isn’t whether TSA or DHS officials, flacks, or lobbyists claim that there are legal procedures which (hypothetically) permit judicial oversight of TSA actions. The real test is what happens when real people object to specific conduct by TSA staff and contractors, or private parties […]