In a case we’ve been following closely, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that orders requiring the Sabre computerized reservation system to provide real-time reports to the FBI on any reservations made in or through Sabre associated with specific individuals can continue to be kept secret, at least as long as warrants for […]
[Florian Gutsche of the VVN-BdA: An embarrassment to Germany’s reputation? Or a credit to it? And does his black shirt prove that he’s dangerous?] On Friday, February 24th, Florian Gutsche, a German citizen and the national chair of the German Association of People Persecuted by the Nazi Regime – Association of Anti-Fascists (VVN-BdA), was intercepted […]
[Arrows indicate populations of states where abortion is, or is likely to become, illegal, and directions and distances to the nearest states where abortion is legal. Note that some of the routes shown are more likely to be followed than others, since abortion is more or less heavily restricted in some states where it is […]
A series of revelations in recent months have highlighted a pattern of misuse by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) of data about travelers and their activities. Information obtained without a warrant or probable cause under a under a variety of exceptions to the Fourth Amendment (including administrative searches and mug shots at airports, border […]
The Department of Homeland Security has added a Countdown to REAL ID Enforcement at airports to its website. But questions remain as to what this really means, despite our best efforts to find out. What — if anything — will really change at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints when this countdown clock runs out on May […]
The highest court of the European Union ruled today that an EU mandate for dragnet surveillance of travelers through government access to airline reservations might be permissible under EU law — but only under conditions that governments of EU member countries, and the US government, may be unable or unwilling to meet. In 2016, the […]
For more than a decade (see our articles from 2012 and 2018), we’ve been monitoring the saga of Yonas Fikre, a US citizen who was placed on the US government’s “No-Fly List” and blacklisted by his government as a “suspected terrorist” while he was overseas on business. Last week, after nine years and counting in […]
Inquiring minds at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) want to know if officers or agents of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or other components of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have tried to stop you from taking photographs, filming, or recording publicly-visible scenes and events at US land border crossing points. As […]
[Slide from internal TSA presentation, Identity Verification Staffing Support Overview, March 2017, released in response to FOIA request by the Identity Project.] As of 2016, almost 2,000 people a day were allowed through TSA checkpoints at US airports either without showing any ID at all, or with other forms of ID that the TSA or […]
In a letter first reported by Reuters and first published in full by The Points Guy, CEO Edward Bastian of Delta Air Lines has called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to “support our efforts with respect to… putting any person convicted of an on-board disruption on a national, comprehensive,… ‘no-fly’ list that would bar that […]