There’s a cautionary tale for people who travel by public transit in the latest report on collaboration with Canadian police by the Toronto regional transit agency, Metrolinx. If you build a system that keeps personally-indentifiable logs of when and where people go, eventually the police will want to exploit those logs for their own purposes […]
Congress is currently considering multiple “immigration” bills containing provisions for “continuous screening” or “continuous vetting” of foreign residents, visitors, and would-be visitors to the US. As we have noted previously, “continuous screening” and “continuous vetting” are euphemisms for “continuous surveillance and control”. These so-called “immigration” bills would not be limited to foreigners. Many of them […]
The White House today announced the creation by executive order of a new “National Vetting Center”, led by the DHS, to coordinate efforts to surveill, profile, and control movement by U.S. citizens, residents, immigrants, and visitors. The “National Security Presidential Memorandum” was not made public, and the press release announcing it gives few details. So far […]
In the latest installment of the game of chicken between the Department of Homeland Security and US states and territories over the REAL-ID Act of 2005, the DHS has announced that drivers licenses and IDS issued by American Samoa won’t be accepted at TSA checkpoints for “domestic” flights beginning next Monday, February 5, 2018 — […]
Senior officials of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) came to San Francisco last week to meet with representatives of the Identity Project and other civil liberties and human rights organizations regarding CBP “biometric entry/exit” schemes. These CBP programs, some of which are already in operation, involve taking digital mug shots of international travelers — […]
The latest so-called “Privacy Impact Assessment ” (PIA) made public by the US Department of Homeland Security, “CBP License Plate Reader Technology“, provides unsurprising but disturbing details about how the US government’s phobias about foreigners and drugs are driving (pun intended) the convergence of border surveillance and dragnet surveillance of the movements of private vehicles […]
What is required by the Secure Flight regulations that wasn’t required before? (1) You have to give the airline or travel agency your name, data of birth, and gender, all exactly matching your ID, before you can make a reservation for any flight. (2) The airline has to send that information, and various other data […]
Today The Identity Project joined 55 other civil rights, civil liberties, government accountability, human rights, immigrant rights, and privacy organizations in calling on the US Department of Homeland Security to abandon its Extreme Vetting Initiative. The essential goal of the DHS Extreme Vetting Initiative is to extend the bogus “pre-crime” prediction algorithms and methods based on “big data” […]
Is the U.S. government monitoring social media? Yes. Since December 2016, all visitors to the U.S. under the “Visa Waiver Program” (VWP) have been asked to identify the social media IDs they use to the Department of State on the online ESTA form. In several recent notices in the Federal Register, and in official statements […]
We’ve gotten used to delays, obstruction, and slander from TSA privacy and Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) officers. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether these result from incompetence, under-staffing, lack of diligence, mendacity, malice, or some combination of these and/or other factors. The latest in these TSA FOIA follies is a letter we got last week from […]