During its online annual general meeting this week, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) rolled out a new proposal for an app-based system of control over air travel that IATA is proposing for use by its member international airlines and by governments. The scheme is being promoted as a response to the COVID-10 pandemic, but […]
While we were watching US election returns, our neighbors to the north were adopting new travel regulations that incorporate some of the worst aspects of the US system of surveillance and control of air travel, and in some respects go even further in the wrong direction. Canadian authorities don’t generally want to be seen as […]
According to a solicitation to potential contractors published last week, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) wants to outsource its current questioning of airline passengers without ID, and its decisions about which travelers without ID to allow to travel and which to prevent from flying, to a fee-based system operated through a cellphone app provided by […]
We are pleased that legislation has been introduced in Congress to end “qualified immunity“, one of the main judicial theories that has enabled Transportation Security Administration checkpoint staff to violate travelers’ rights with de facto impunity. H.R. 7085, introduced yesterday in the House of Representatives, is a simple and straightforward bill to end qualified immunity: […]
Imagine that you are a US citizen living or traveling overseas, and find yourself in a place of possible danger. The US government, as part of its “services” to US citizens abroad, offers to charter a plane to evacuate US citizens and repatriate them to the US, and you agree to pay a pro-rated share […]
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 […]
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) […]
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?
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 […]