Papers, Please! – Page 78 – The Identity Project

Jun 23 2009

“Clear” registered traveler company fails after wasting $116M

260,000 members down the tubes. No refunds.

Congratulations, suckers! Not only did you sign up for and pay money to a totalitarian program, but as usual, the police state was run by incompetents. Your little attempt to suck up to the TSA gestapo now won’t be doing you any good.

Their competitor “Flo Corp” is working hard to “analyze the implications of this announcement”. We can give them some help. A tiny minority of Americans signed up for the National Security State you offered them. You lost the election, the people voted with their wallets and their feet. Your fly-by-night stock is hovering right near 1cent per share. So get a clue and get out of the business while you still can pay your debts. What the public deserves is reform of the whole TSA system, so it provides real rights and real service and real accountability to EVERY traveler — not just to rich guys happy to have their iris and fingerprints on file. TSA’s culture of impunity needs to end, then we’ll all get along a lot better.

Oh, and to investors in Clear? It’s charming how you hoped to profit from funding the totalitarian tracking of the movements of all the citizens. (You couldn’t hope to make money at it unless pretty much every traveler signed up for it.) We’re so glad that every dollar you gave Clear is now a dollar that you can’t waste on your next socially destructive idea.

Jun 04 2009

Are there any rules at airport checkpoints?

We had a chance to ask some questions (starting at 55:00 of the video, although the entire panel is worth watching) of the TSA’s Chief Privacy Officer, Peter Pietra, when he showed up at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference to talk about the SPOT program, under which roving teams of TSA agents watch people in airports for a (secret, of course) checklist of “suspicious” behavior, question some of those people, and finger some of them for more intrusive search or further questioning when they reach the “screening” checkpoints.

Petra claimed that, “There isn’t any search or seizure … until the checkpoint”, even if you decline to respond to questions from the SPOT teams or other TSA agents. But, “At the checkpoint, it’s a different story … There’s a ‘special circumstances’ exception that would permit at least a reasonable search.”

But what does the TSA consider “reasonable”? In particular, once we get to the checkpoint, are we required to answer questions from the TSA?

“I don’t know,” Petra said.

If we decline to answer questions at a TSA checkpoint, does the TSA claim the authority to detain us, prevent us from traveling, or impose administrative sanctions? Or is the maximum penalty for declining to answer TSA questions having to submit to a pat-down search and hand search of our carry-on baggage (“secondary screening”)?

“Once you get to the checkpoint, you have to ‘cooperate’ with screening.”

What does “cooperate” mean? Are there any guidelines that tell us what we are required to do to consitutute “cooperation” with screening at a checkpoint?

“I don’t know,” Petra again answered.

We asked Petra to try to find out, but we won’t hold our breath waiting for an answer.

Jun 03 2009

Congress to vote on virtual strip searches

The U.S. House of Representatives will vote this week on a proposal to (1) restrict the use of virtual strip search machines at airports, (2) prohibit their use as a “primary” screening method (i.e. in place of curent metal detectors) or “unless another method of screening, such as metal detection, demonstrates cause for preventing such passenger from boarding an aircraft,” and (3) require that people selected for “secondary sccreening” be told what the “Whole Body Imaging” machines do (a TSA agent out of your sight in a back room examines and can zoom in on any area of a picture taken using microwaves that pass through your clothes and show your body as though naked) and be offered the choice of a pat-down instead of a virtual strip search.

This proposal doesn’t go nearly far enough, but it’s an important first step. Currently, no law or published regulation places any restrictions on any aspect of TSA activities at checkpoints. What’s needed is to subject the TSA’s domestic Guantanamo at every airport to the rule of law and the standards applicable to search, seizure, interrogation, and detention in any other context.

As travel commentator Charlie Leocha wrote in his column yesterday, “The last time I checked, there was a law about ‘reasonable suspicion’ before subjecting someone to a strip search. Is simply the act of getting on a plane now considered ‘reasonable suspicion’?” (Today Leocha reports on the result of an informal online survey of his readers, showing that more than two-thirds of respondents think this is “an invasion of privacy”.)

The proposal was originally a standalone bill (H.R. 2027) introduced by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), but will now be voted on as an amendment to H.R. 2200, the TSA Authorization Act.

What can you do? Visit StopDigitalStripSearches.org and sign the online petition endorsed by the Identity Project. More importantly, call and/or email your member of Congress today and urge them to vote FOR the “Chaffetz amendment on Whole Body Imaging” to H.R. 2200, the TSA authorization bill.

Rep. Chaffetz’ point person on this issue tells us they expect the House floor vote will most likely be Thursday, June 4, 2009.

Jun 01 2009

Today we’re all prisoners in the USA

As of today, June 1, 2009, even U.S. citizens are officially prisoners in the USA, or exiles barred from entering our own country without the government’s permission.

We are now forbidden by Federal regulations from leaving or entering the USA, anywhere, by any means — by air, by sea, or by land, to or from any other country or international waters or airspace — unless the government chooses to issue us a passport, passport card, or “enhanced” drivers license (any of which “travel documents” are now issued only with secretly and remotely-readable uniquely-numbered radio tracking beacons in the form of RFID transponder chips), or unless the Department of Homeland Security chooses to to exercise its standardless “discretion” to decide — in secret, with no way for us to know who is making the decision or on what basis — to issue a (one-time case-by-case) “waiver” of the new travel document requirements.

If you’re in the USA without such documents — even if you were born here, or are a foreigner who entered the USA legally without such documents (a Canadian, for example, who entered the USA by land yesterday when no such documents were yet required), or your document(s) have expired or have been lost or stolen — you are forbidden to leave the country unless and until you procure such a document, or unless and until the DHS gives you an exit permit in the form of a discretionary one-time waiver to leave the country — but not necessarily to come home, unless they again exercise their discretion to “grant” you another waiver.

If you are a U.S. citizen abroad without such a document (for example, if you entered Canada legally without it yesterday by land, when it wasn’t required, or again if your document(s) are expired, lost, or stolen) you are forbidden to come home unless and until you can procure a new document acceptable to the DHS, or unless and until the DHS gives you permission to come home in the form of a discretionary one-time waiver. Read More →

May 26 2009

TSA releases (censored) ID checking procedures

In response to a request by the Identity Project under the Freedom of Information Act, the TSA has for the first time given us a (redacted) version of the section on Travel Document and ID Checks from the TSA’s “Screening Management SOP” (Standard Operating Procedures) manual. Our request was made June 21, 2008, the day the TSA announced what they claimed were changes to ID “requirements” for air travelers. It took the TSA almost seven months to respond.

The version of the SOP manual which the TSA has now made public is dated June 30, 2008, so it ought to reflect the changes announced in the TSA’s June 21, 2008 press release. But there is nothing at all in the sections of the manual the TSA has released about the new procedures and new ID verification form which the TSA had, in fact, started using. Rather than requiring people who don’t have or don’t choose to show government-issued ID credentials to execute affidavits stating who they are under penalty of perjury, the TSA procedures manual requires that such people be allowed to proceed through secondary screening as “selectees”, and specifically directs screeners and other TSA staff not to make any attempt to detain or delay them.

Add your name to the campaign against TSA “Virtual Strip Searches”

The Identity Project has joined with the Privacy Coalition in a campaign to stop “Whole Body Imaging” in U.S. airports.

The TSA is in the process of substituing these “Virtual Strip Search” machines as a replacement for, or an addiiton to, metal detectors for primary screening of all travelers. You’ll be able (at least at first) to opt out of the virtual strip search “Whole Body Imaging”, but then you’ll automatically get the full secondary screening pat-down, as though you had set off the metal detector. The “Whole Body Imaging” machines use microwaves that go through your clothes and reflect off your skin to display a detailed picture of your naked body to a TSA operator, in a back room where you can’t see who they are or what they are doing while they ogle your as-though-naked image.

Individual travelers as well as organizations can sign up until May 31, 2009 (Sunday) to endorse a joint letter (scroll ot the bottom of this page for the sign-on form) calling for on Secretary of Homeland Security Napolitano to suspend the use of “Whole Body Imaging” for primary screening. Read More →

May 18 2009

GAO moves the goalposts to “approve” Secure Flight

We were surprised last week to see that the GAO has issued a report certifying that, “As of April 2009, TSA had generally achieved 9 of the 10 statutory conditions related to the development of the Secure Flight program and had conditionally achieved 1 condition (TSA had defined plans, but had not completed all activities for this condition).”

Surprised, that is, until we we saw how the GAO had defined (re-defined?) those statutory conditions in ways very different from what we thought they meant, or what we think Congress thought they meant: Read More →

May 18 2009

Time to stop tinkering with “watchlists”

This month the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Justice has released a report on their recent audit of the FBI’s “Terrorist Watchlist Nomination Practices”.

The OIG report contains far more detail than has previously been made public about how and by whom (although very little about why) the government’s watchlists are compiled. It’s must reading for anyone interested in how the US government is deciding who to allow, and who not to allow, to travel or to engage in other activities for which these watchlists are used as blacklists.

As we discuss in our FAQ about Secure Flight, these watchlists serve as the primary determinant of who the DHS (both the CBP for international flights and the TSA for domestic flights, although eventually the TSA under Secure Flight for both) gives permission to fly.

Unfortunately, because it is confined to the “nomination” component of the system, the OIG report fails to address the more fundamental problems with the watchlist system — problems that cannot be resolved by the sort of tinkering with the watchlisting process that is suggested by the OIG’s recommendations. A much more fundamental change is required in how the watchlists and their use are conceptualized.

Air France passenger data and “no-fly” orders

Follow-up reports have provided more details but also raised more questions about the incident last month in which the US government refused to allow an Air France flight en route from Paris to Mexico City to follow its normal route through US airspace, because the passengers included a journalist on the US “no-fly” list. The orders from the US authorities, coming while the plane was already in flight, resulted in a lengthy detour to avoid overflying US territory, and an unscheduled refueling stop in Martinique. (Air France’s Paris-Mexico flights used to stop in Houston, but these days they are scheduled to operate nonstop, in significant part to spare through passengers the need for US transit visas and US-VISIT processing including fingerprinting and photgraphing, now required even for foreign passengers merely transiting a US airport.)

As with previous incidents of blacklisted passengers and delayed, diverted, or canceled flights, this episode should be a reminder that the problems with the “no-fly” list are not limited to mistaken for other people on the watchlist. The problem, in this case, is that one of the passengers actually was on the list of people administratively banned from the US, without any way of knowing why, confronting his accusers or the evidence (if any) against him, or obtaining judicial review of their decision to deny him the right of passage by common carrier through US airspace (a right guaranteed by international treaties to which the US is a party).

Also at issue has been how, when, and through what intermediaries or data pathways US authorities learned who was on the plane, espcially since it wasn’t scheduled to touch US soil. Read More →

May 14 2009

California DMV plans crackdown on “look-alikes”

Has anyone ever looked at your face and mistaken you for someone else?

If so, and if you live in California, you could be a victim of a proposal by the California Department of Motor Vehicles which is now under consideration in the state legislature.

At a hearing yesterday (May 13, 2009) before the Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 5 on Information Technology/Transportation, the Director and Chief Information Officer of the DMV pleaded for more money (in spite of the desperate state budget crisis) to hire a contractor to digitize and store the photographs taken for every California drivers license or state ID, and then use “biometric” facial recognition and matching software to compare each new photo of an applicant for a license or ID with every photo in the database. (The DMV proposal next goes before the Senate Budget Subcommittee No. 2 on Resources, Environmental Protection, Energy and Transportation on Wednesday, March 20th.)

If the computer thinks your picture looks like any other picture in the database, both you and the other person whose photo the robot thinks looks like yours would be placed under suspicion of fraud, identity theft, or worse. Read More →