Just days after posting an out-and-out lie on DHS.gov about whether states that want to comply with the REAL-ID Act have to give other states unconditional access to their drivers’ license and ID database (they do, contrary to what the DHS claims), the DHS has posted an equally blatant lie about whether domestic air travelers […]
At yesterday’s first meeting of a new Minnesota “Legislative Working Group on REAL-ID Compliance“, state lawmakers’ concerns centered on (1) whether residents showing state-issued IDs will be prevented from boarding domestic flights, or harassed and delayed by the TSA, if the state doesn’t agree to “comply” with the REAL-Act Act to the satisfaction of the […]
We attended and testified at the first meeting of Minnesota’s “Legislative Working Group on REAL-ID Act Compliance” today in St. Paul. Like other states, Minnesota has been told (falsely) that it’s the only state that isn’t planning to “comply” with the Federal requests in the REAL-ID Act, and (also falsely) that Minnesota residents will be […]
We’re quoted in an article today in the New York Times about the Federal government’s efforts to use the threat of denial of air travel to scare state legislators into connecting their state drivers license and ID databases to the distributed national “REAL-ID” database through the REAL-ID “hub” operated by the American Association of Motor […]
The US government has paid $40,000 as part of the settlement of a lawsuit by a traveler who was falsely arrested by Federal agents and local police when a Frontier Airlines flight she was on arrived at the Detroit airport in 2011, arrive, taken off the plane in handcuffs, locked in a cell for four […]
This week cyber-security and threat modeling expert Chris Roberts of One World Labs was detained and interrogated for four hours and had his laptop and other electronic devices seized without warrant by the FBI, and later was denied boarding by United Airlines for a flight on which he had a valid ticket, for posting this […]
Documents newly released to us by the TSA strongly suggest that the TSA has been lying about whether people are “allowed” by the TSA to fly without showing ID, and that decisions about whether to allow travelers to fly without ID are being made arbitrarily, on the basis of irrelevant and unreliable commercial data and/or […]
A Federal civil rights lawsuit recently filed in Philadephia describes a pattern of facts that combine the worst aspects of several previous incidents of TSA and local police collaboration in mistreatment of insufficiently subservient travelers. Roger Vanderklok was falsely arrested at a TSA checkpoint at the PHL airport on January 26, 2013, “Because a TSA […]
For many years after 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security got a “free pass” from most mainstream media. This has been especially true of the largely unreported negative impact of the DHS and the homeland security industrial complex at the state and local level. We’re pleased to call the attention of our readers to one […]
The TSA has assessed a $500 civil penalty against “Naked American Hero” John Brennan, who removed all his clothes at a TSA checkpoint at the Portland, Oregon, airport in 2012 to show that he wasn’t carrying any weapons or explosives and in protest of the TSA’s practices. Mr. Brennan was arrested at PDX airport by […]