The growth of a homeland-security industrial complex funded by single-source contracts and shielded by knee-jerk invocation of “security” as an excuse for secrecy has created huge opportunities for cronyism and collusion between lobbyists, contractors, and government officials. The poster child for this revolving door and its invidious effects on government policies and spending is former Secretary […]
A report by the Office of the Inspector General (OIJ) of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sheds more light on how the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) pays workers for airlines, Amtrak, bus companies, and package delivery services to spy on their customers, troll through reservation and shipping records, and finger travelers and senders and […]
Today we submitted formal comments to U.S. Customs and Border Protection objecting to its proposal to start asking visitors to the USA to list all their “social media identifiers”. USCBP (a division of the Department of Homeland Security) proposes to add this question to the I-94W form for international visitors arriving in the U.S., and […]
Congress is again debating the proposals we wrote about last year to deny firearms licenses or permits to anyone “suspected of supporting” terrorism. We stand by our earlier analysis and our condemnation of this proposal as (1) another step from sanctions against criminal conduct to pre-crime predictive policing, and (2) an expansion of the collateral […]
Since the start of the post-9/11 shift from case-by-case government access to travel reservations to dragnet surveillance of all reservations and pre-crime profiling of all travelers, the government has claimed repeatedly that the information to which it has demanded access was already “routinely” provided by travelers to airlines and other travel companies. We’ve recently received […]
This week the European Parliament is scheduled to debate (Wednesday) and vote (Thursday) on a resolution (PDF) to approve, with amendments, a proposed compromise on a directive “on the use of Passenger Name Record [PNR] data for the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of terrorist offences and serious crime.” What does this mean, why does […]
The curious incident of the dog named “Dash” has spotlighted a type of outsourced surveillance and control of our everyday activities that typically operates invisibly but that is much more pervasive than most people in the USA imagine. We were contacted last week by KTVU News to help explain what happened to Bruce Francis, a […]
Yesterday President Obama signed the Judicial Redress Act into law. European Union Commissioner for Justice Věra Jourová described the new law as, “a historic achievement [that] will ensure that all EU citizens have the right to enforce data protection rights in U.S. courts…. The entry into force of the Judicial Redress Act will pave the […]
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 […]
We attended and testified at the first meeting of Minnesota’s “Legislative Working Group on REAL-ID Act Compliance” today in St. Paul. Like other states, Minnesota has been told (falsely) that it’s the only state that isn’t planning to “comply” with the Federal requests in the REAL-ID Act, and (also falsely) that Minnesota residents will be […]