1. The federal government has imposed a kind of second-class citizenship on the Plaintiffs. Without charges, without arrests, without even an investigation sometimes — the agency defendants act in concert to deprive thousands of innocent Americans, mostly Muslim, of their right to be free from a government that extrajudicially designates them as worthy of permanent […]
[Attendance at the most recent face-to-face (F2F) meeting of the AAMVA S2S Governance Committee, Milwaukee, WI, March 22, 2018] We’ve been trying for years to find out who is really in charge of the national ID database being created to enable states that choose to do so to comply with the Federal REAL-ID Act of […]
The list of questions asked of applicantas for U.S. visas goes on for page after page, including: Do you belong to a clan or tribe? Are you or have you ever been a drug abuser or addict? Are you coming to the United States to engage in prostitution or unlawful commercialized vice? Do you seek […]
[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 […]
There’s a cautionary tale for people who travel by public transit in the latest report on collaboration with Canadian police by the Toronto regional transit agency, Metrolinx. If you build a system that keeps personally-indentifiable logs of when and where people go, eventually the police will want to exploit those logs for their own purposes […]
The latest so-called “Privacy Impact Assessment ” (PIA) made public by the US Department of Homeland Security, “CBP License Plate Reader Technology“, provides unsurprising but disturbing details about how the US government’s phobias about foreigners and drugs are driving (pun intended) the convergence of border surveillance and dragnet surveillance of the movements of private vehicles […]
Phil Mocek was arrested by Albuquerque aviation police at a TSA checkpoint at the Albuquerque International Sunport on November 15, 2009. He had a valid ticket on Southwest Airlines (“You are now free to move about the country”), and was attempting to get to his flight. Like the “Freedom Riders” of the 1960s on interstate […]
The Identity Project and ten other civil liberties and human rights organizations filed comments today with the US Department of Homeland Security objecting to the DHS keeping records of what we say and publish and who we associate with on social media. (See our FAQ: U.S. government monitoring of social media. The DHS isn’t the only Federal agency spying on […]
Is the U.S. government monitoring social media? Yes. Since December 2016, all visitors to the U.S. under the “Visa Waiver Program” (VWP) have been asked to identify the social media IDs they use to the Department of State on the online ESTA form. In several recent notices in the Federal Register, and in official statements […]
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 […]