Last Thursday, September 10th, Judge Anthony Trenga of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia heard arguments on whether his temporary restraining order (TRO) barring the bulk transfer of commercial driver’s license records from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) to the U.S. Deopartment of Transportation (DOT) should be converted […]
Know your rights Your rights as U.S. citizen (“Do I have to show ID as a pedestrian, passenger in a car, at my home, or at the airport for a domestic flight?”) Your rights as a non-U.S. citizen (from the American Immigration Lawyers Association) Exceptions and limitations to your rights Travel and ID requirements “TSA […]
The US government is seeking direct access to police databases in other countries, as a condition of inclusion in the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP). Citizens of countries in the VWP are allowed to enter the US for limited short visits under the without having to apply or pay for standard visas to the US. […]
The Airlines Reporting Corporation — the financial clearinghouse that processes payments between U.S. travel agencies and hundreds of airlines in the U.S. and worldwide — plans to sunset the program through which it has given Federal agencies and an unknown range of other customers access to searchable archives of billions of agency-issued tickets for past […]
The case of Rutgers University professor Mark Bray and his family provides an object lesson in the importance of being able to travel anonymously, and how the practices of governments and airlines endanger travelers by making them identifiable. Dr. Bray, his partner Dr. Yesenia Barragan (also a professor at Rutgers), and their two young children […]
On September 30, 2025, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs held a hearing on Examining the Weaponization of the Quiet Skies Program. Coming just hours before the partial shutdown of Federal government operations, this hearing was sparsely attended, even by members of the committee, and got little press attention. The hearing opened […]
We’ve often pointed to China as exemplifying modes of government surveillance and control of movement that we don’t want replicated in the USA. But a new report by independent journalist Yael Grauer and a team from the Associated Press, based on documents provided by courageous whistleblowers in China and the US, shows that US technology […]
New tools deployed and offered to law enforcement agencies by Flock Safety, the largest US aggregator of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data from both government and private cameras, are moving Flock from data mining into profiling and pre-crime predictive policing. This marks the expansion to road travel of the profiling and predictive policing that […]
A company you’ve probably never heard of is selling copies of every airline ticket issued by a travel agency in the US to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a plethora of other Federal law enforcement and immigration agencies — and who knows who else. Records of all airline tickets issued by travel […]
Does SAAS stand for “software as a service” or “surveillance as a service”? As we’ve reported previously, the UN Security Council and ICAO have illegally ordered all UN and ICAO members to create national agencies for surveillance of airline passengers and global sharing of airline reservations (PNR) and passenger manifest (API) data. Through bilateral and […]