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 […]
The TSA may try to prevent (some) people who can’t or won’t submit to virtual strip-searches from traveling by air, according to a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) update quietly posted on the DHS website a few days before Christmas: TSA is updating the AIT [“Advanced (sic) Imaging Technology”] PIA to reflect a change to the […]
When we reported last week on the passport provisions in the new “Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act”, we focused on the details of the rules for denial or revocation of US passports of citizens alleged to owe more than $50,000 in Federal taxes. We should, perhaps, have put more emphasis on the other new basis […]
Last Thursday, December 3rd, the US Senate rejected a proposal to authorize the Attorney General to deny firearms licenses or permits to anyone the Attorney General suspects to “be or have been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to terrorism, or providing material support or resources for terrorism.” Just […]
The most recent documents released in response to one of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests may have identified the data broker powering the TSA’s “ID verification” system as Accurint — the current incarnation of a component of the discredited and supposedly disbanded Total Information Awareness program — rather than Acxiom as we had […]
If you exercise your right to travel, will the US government use your past travel as the basis for denying you the right to travel in the future? Reading between the lines of the redacted public versions of recent filings in one of the ongoing legal challenges to US government no-fly orders, the answer appears […]
Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice (DHS), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI, which includes the NSA). The winner of an Oscar and a Pulitzer […]
Independent legal experts commissioned by the Council of Europe (COE) to assess proposals for surveillance and profiling of air travellers throughout the European Union have returned a detailed and perceptive critique of the proposed EU directive on government access to, and use of, Passenger Name Record (PNR) data from airline reservations. Before the revelations by […]
The US Department of Homeland Security has announced plans to expand its data mining and “sharing”of DHS files about travelers, while removing some of the limited access controls and audit logging that it had only recently claimed to be putting in place for its Department-wide surveillance data framework: Privacy Impact Assessment for the DHS Data […]