By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:09am
The TSA has issued a “Market Research Announcement” in which the agency expresses a desire to expand its Pre-Check whitelist program by allowing private companies to carry out risk analysis of Americans that would determine whether they are “trusted” enough to participate in the trusted traveler program. This would be a major step toward turning the agency’s Pre-Check whitelist into the insidious kind of passenger profiling system that was proposed under the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11, and a confirmation of our longstanding warnings that the logic of the risk-assessment approach to security will drive the government toward the use of more and more data on individuals. It would be the most significant of the new initiatives the TSA is looking at this year.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:21pm
November 25 marked the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Homeland Security Act, which created the sprawling Department of Homeland Security. Included in this new behemoth agency was another agency that had been created a year earlier, the Transportation Security Administration. It’s worth taking a look back at the short history of this agency.
The first and biggest conclusion we can reach is that the vast bulk of the increased security that we’ve obtained since 9/11 has been due to two factors: the securing of airplane cockpit doors, and the fact that no planeload of passengers in a hijacked aircraft will ever again sit back placidly and wait to land in Cuba or whatever. We’ve been saying this for years and it remains true. It’s hard to believe in light of all that has followed, but a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the ACLU issued a press release with the headline, “ACLU Applauds Sensible Scope of Bush Airport Security Plan.” What we were reacting to was a set of commonsense steps the administration had taken such as increased baggage screening and securing those cockpit doors.
By Mitra Ebadolahi, Legal Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 10:24am
The ACLU is appearing today before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to argue on behalf of our client, Nick George.
In August 2009, Nick went to the Philadelphia International Airport to catch a flight to California and begin his senior year at Pomona College. At the airport, he was detained, abusively interrogated, handcuffed, and jailed for several hours in a holding cell – solely because he was carrying a set of Arabic-English flashcards for his language studies, and a book critical of U.S. foreign policy.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:26pm
Salon has a nice piece on how research shows the difficulty of detecting lies—the impossibility, really—and how people consistently overestimate their ability to do so. And, how people consistently misidentify signs of stress (from a variety of causes) as proof of lying. Of course, an entire TSA program has been built on the premise that people can be trained to detect lies with a reasonable level of certainty.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:36pm
On July 30, the Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia announced a review of license plate scanning programs by law enforcement in the province. If the United States had an analogous institution embodying /enforcing our privacy values, maybe we’d see something like that here instead of untrammeled expansion and retention of license data. We’re still waiting for the “missing in action” Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) to turn into something real. From 2007 until late 2011, neither President Bush nor President Obama even nominated anyone to fill the independent oversight board; we finally now have four members—but still no chair.
By Devon Chaffee, Legislative Policy Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:51pm
I was scheduled to return from my summer vacation at 6 a.m. Sunday morning flying out of Vermont’s Burlington International Airport in a state most often thought to be ahead of the civil liberties curve. If you’ve ever had a crack-of-dawn flight, you can relate to my blurry eyed exhaustion after waking up at 3:30 a.m. to make it to the airport with enough time for what we now consider to be the standard, if annoying, airport security rigmarole. I expected to have to strip off my belt and sweatshirt, take off my shoes, show my ID, and be subjected to a naked body scan or all-too-personal pat down. What I didn’t expect was a full-on TSA interrogation about my summer vacation before I even reached the identification checkpoint.
By Carol Rose, Executive Director, ACLU of Massachusetts at 6:10pm
Reports that the so-called "behavioral detection program" at Logan Airport leads to racial profiling is front-page news in today's Sunday New York Times. You have to admire the courage of the TSA screeners who raised the alarm that pressure from TSA management to meet quotas leads to targeting of passengers based on their race, ethnicity, and religion-- even when they clearly pose no terrorist threat.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:26pm
Here are some links that have caught our eye recently:
The FBI’s “Next Generation Identification” biometrics database is starting to plan for the inclusion of iris scans. Iris scans raise more issues than some other biometrics (such as fingerprints) because they can be used at a distance without a subject’s participation, permission, or even knowledge. Hand-held iris scanners are being sold to police around the country for identification uses. We were assured in a meeting with the FBI last year that biometric scans in situations such as traffic stops would not be used to enroll individuals into the database, just to check their identity.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:24pm
Yesterday I posted about the debate over profiling Muslims at the airport, and how Bruce Schneier persuasively argued that the concept, which seems so intuitively sensible to so many Americans, is a terrible idea even just from a security point of view. He also commented on the other, less tangible costs that such a scheme would impose, such as the alienation of Muslims from American life, and the corruption of our values.
