Just a week after the publication of a memo from the U.S. Border Patrol confirming that it’s up to bus companies to decide whether to allow law enforcement officers onto their buses to search and/or question passengers, Greyhound has yielded to longstanding pressure and agreed to withdraw its consent for warrantless bus boardings by police. […]
The highest court of the European Union will be reviewing the legality of the directive adopted by the EU in 2017 requiring airlines to send Passenger Name Record (PNR) data to the government of each EU member state, and requiring each EU member state to establish a “Passenger Information Unit” to carry out PNR-based surveillance […]
As we’ve seen in the ongoing debate over biometric identification of travelers at Sea-Tac Airport, and as we’ve seen before elsewhere, airlines and government agencies want to pretend that each of their initiatives to identify and track travelers is a discrete, limited project, not part of any common agenda for government and commercial surveillance. Don’t […]
This week the Port of Seattle Commission — a special-purpose government body elected by the voters of King County, Washington, to administer both the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and the maritime Port of Seattle — became the first airport operating or oversight body in the US to publicly discuss any policy for use of facial recognition […]
In an opinion issued late today in Alexandria, VA, US District Court Judge Anthony Trenga has upheld the complaint by 23 victims of US government blacklisting that the system pursuant to which the government has designated them as “suspected terrorists” on the basis of secret algorithms applied to secret datasets, without notice or an opportunity […]
Fragmentary and jumbled records related to the REAL-ID Act of 2005 released by the US Department of Homeland Security in response to one of our Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests don’t reveal much about DHS policy, but do provide a glimpse of DHS practices and plans. The DHS has been threatening to harass, interfere […]
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 […]
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 […]