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, […]
[Click image for full-sized version.] Heavily redacted records released by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) last month, more than six years after they were requested by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), give fragmentary clues to the answer to an important question: Just how many air travel blacklists does the US government have?
An interview with the head of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) published this month by the U.S. Military Academy as part of a “View From The Foxhole” series provides an unusually revealing, and disturbing, picture of the expansion and globalization of surveillance and control of travelers. It also highlights the ways that policy is […]
Jana Winter has a detailed investigative report on the front page of today’s Boston Globe about a previously secret TSA program of illegal surveillance of innocent air travelers, “Quiet Skies”. According to the story in the Globe, based in part on descriptions and documents apparently leaked by dissident Federal Air Marshals, the “Quiet Skies” program […]
[Excerpt from proposed US visa application form as posted at Regulations.gov] Today the US Department of State published proposals in the Federal Register to expand its ongoing surveillance of social media, e-mail, and travel by applicants for immigrant and nonimmigrant (tourism and other temporary visits) visas: The Department is revising the collection to add several […]