Invoking memes that we’ve seen and warned about before under both Democratic and Republican administrations, President Trump has attributed the latest version 3.0 of his “Muslim ban”announced today (proclamation, FAQ, explainer) with the need to comply with ICAO and INTERPOL standards for passport issuance, “identity management”, and data sharing about travelers — as though US immigration […]
Bills are moving forward in both houses of Congress which, if approved, would mandate the administrative, extra-judicial revocation, non-renewal, and refusal of issuance of a US passport to any US citizen, even if their citizenship is unquestioned and they have been accused of no crime, but “whom the Secretary [of State] has determined is a […]
San Francisco and Silicon Valley are among the centers of opposition to President Trump and his fascism, especially as it relates to restrictions on movement, border controls, immigration, and asylum. Bay Area technology companies and their better-paid classes of employees like to think of themselves as building a better world that reflects the distinctive values […]
President Trump’s Executive Order expanding the pre-existing and ongoing #MuslimBan from foreign airports to US points of entry, by forbidding entry to the US by citizens of specified blacklisted countries, doesn’t say anything explicit about searches or interrogation of people entering or leaving the US. But this Executive Order seems to have been interpreted by […]
A Federal Court of Appeals has found that the latest version of Michigan’s “Sex Offender Registration Act” (SORA), including restrictions on where registrants can live, work, or “loiter”, constitutes a form of punishment intended to inflict pain or unpleasant consequences. “More specifically, SORA resembles, in some respects at least, the ancient punishment of banishment,” according […]
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 […]
If you exercise your right to travel, will the US government use your past travel as the basis for denying you the right to travel in the future? Reading between the lines of the redacted public versions of recent filings in one of the ongoing legal challenges to US government no-fly orders, the answer appears […]
Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice (DHS), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI, which includes the NSA). The winner of an Oscar and a Pulitzer […]
Four days before a Federal judge was scheduled to hear arguments in a lawsuit brought by four Muslim US citizens who were placed on the US government’s “no-fly” list to try to pressure them into becoming informants for the FBI, the government has notified the plaintiffs in the case that all of them have been […]
We’ve been reading the Jetsetting Terrorist blog (highlighted last week by Boing Boing) to see what we can learn from the anonymous author’s chronicles of his experiences traveling on commercial airlines, within the U.S. and internationally, after being convicted of a nonviolent misdemeanor criminal offense the U.S. has since defined as “terrorism”: Since 2009, I’ve […]