A 3-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the government’s procedures and criteria for issuing “no-fly” orders against a complaint that the criteria (which are essentially “pre-crime” criteria based on predictions of future bad actions) are too vague to provide fair notice of what actions might lead to a “no-fly” order, […]
An advance notice posted last week by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) of a forthcoming request for bids by IT contractors includes one of the most detailed inventories made public to date of the databases and interfaces used by CBP and its government and commercial partners (some of which are shown in the illustration […]
Following its most recent meeting on May 31, 2019, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) announced last week that “The Board has voted to conduct an oversight project related to the use of airline Passenger Name Records.” We welcome this announcement by the PCLOB, and look forward to whatever opportunities may be presented […]
A new report by Seth Harp in The Intercept confirms that, despite by ongoing litigation challenging warrantless, suspicionless searches of travelers’ electronic devices, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division of the DHS is continuing to target journalists for these illegal searches and for interrogation about their journalistic travel and other activities. Mr. Harp’s experience […]
Complaints filed today in German courts and administrative complaints to data protection authorities in Austria challenge government access to and use and retention of Passenger Name Record data (commercial airline reservation records) as a violation of fundamental rights guaranteed by European Union, German, and Austrian law: English translation of complaint, De Capitani v. Federal Republic […]
A Tweet that went viral from an airline passenger questioning JetBlue Airlines about its use of automated facial recognition at departure gates has called new attention to the growing use of automated facial recognition to identify and track travelers. Our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have an excellent analysis in their Deeplinks blog of […]
In December 2018, the White House announced that President Trump had sent Congress a classified “National Strategy to Combat Terrorist Travel”. Two months later, in February 2019, the White House released both this “National Strategy to Combat Terrorist Travel” (supposedly as signed in December 2018, and with no indication that it had ever been classified) […]
Having successfully used the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as a vehicle for policy laundering on RFID transceivers in passports, the US government is making a new push toward its decade-old goal of getting ICAO to adopt a standard mandating (a) government access to Passenger Name Record (PNR) data and (b) the creation of airline […]
With its recent revival, the Federal government’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has a chance to take a fresh look at how far the USA has gone since 9/11 in implementing a combination of “pre-crime” policing (à la Minority Report) and “social credit scoring” integrated with commercial service providers (à la China) as […]
A viral video of an announcement on a Chinese high-speed train and a series of reports (here and here) on NPR have prompted a surge of interest this week in China’s “social credit” system: Dear passengers: People who travel without a ticket, behave disorderly, or smoke in public areas will be punished according to regulations, […]