An anonymous traveler has posted the records of their international travel that were provided by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division of the Department of Homeland Security, in response to a request under the Privacy act using these forms updated from those used by the Identity Project in our original investigation of the CBP […]
There’s been a lot of confusing (and often confused) reporting recently about the TSA’s so-called “Secure Flight” scheme for surveillance and control of passengers on domestic U.S. airline flights, based on data mining of airline reservations and lifetime travel histories. If you’re looking for answers, you might start with our FAQ about “Secure Flight”. Much […]
The TSA has been anxious to convince us that the renamed Secure Flight scheme for airline passenger profiling, surveillance, and control is fundamentally different and (despite the great new name) less Orwellian than its prdecessor, the thoroughly discredited CAPPS-II (“Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System, version 2”). The TSA also wants us to believe that Secure Flight […]
260,000 members down the tubes. No refunds. Congratulations, suckers! Not only did you sign up for and pay money to a totalitarian program, but as usual, the police state was run by incompetents. Your little attempt to suck up to the TSA gestapo now won’t be doing you any good. Their competitor “Flo Corp” is […]
As of today, June 1, 2009, even U.S. citizens are officially prisoners in the USA, or exiles barred from entering our own country without the government’s permission. We are now forbidden by Federal regulations from leaving or entering the USA, anywhere, by any means — by air, by sea, or by land, to or from […]
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 […]
Follow-up reports have provided more details but also raised more questions about the incident last month in which the US government refused to allow an Air France flight en route from Paris to Mexico City to follow its normal route through US airspace, because the passengers included a journalist on the US “no-fly” list. The […]
Has anyone ever looked at your face and mistaken you for someone else? If so, and if you live in California, you could be a victim of a proposal by the California Department of Motor Vehicles which is now under consideration in the state legislature. At a hearing yesterday (May 13, 2009) before the Assembly […]
The Council of the European Union has put forward its new version of the “Proposal for a Council Framework Decision on the use of Passenger Name Record (PNR) for law enforcement purposes” originally made by the European Commission. (More background on the proposal is available from Statewatch.) The latest Council version of the proposal is […]