By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:27pm
Does your government trust you? You may find out. The TSA wants to resurrect "airline passenger profiling" schemes from the Bush era, which would gather data about everyone who flies to label them as "trusted," "normal," or "un-trusted."
If you've traveled through Boston's Logan airport lately, you'll surely have noticed a few changes at the security aisles. Most notably, ominous "naked body scanner" machines now dot each entrance to the gates, and, as was noted in a minor media fury this weekend, more invasive pat-downs are now the norm, rather than the unlucky exception. Even Comedy Central has picked up on the story, satirically condemning the ACLU for opposing "sexytime patdowns at the airport."
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:23pm
The Miami Herald and the Smoking Gun are reporting that a Miami TSA officer has been charged with aggravated battery after he attacked a coworker. The assault was reportedly sparked by the fact that the man's colleagues were making fun of the size of the officer's genitalia seen as he walked through a full-body airport scanner.
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.
Today, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a new report (PDF), and really, the title says it all. Called "Transportation Security Administration's Management of Its Screening Workforce Training Program Can Be Improved," the report finds it took years to get the current passenger screening program off the ground. And when it finally did, let's just say proper TSA screener training was not the emphasis. Well, there's a shocker to anyone who's been reading the news about the TSA lately.
By Nusrat Choudhury, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 9:39am
Last week, we got some good news in the case of Adnan Tikvesa, an airline employee whose security clearance was unexpectedly suspended by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) without any reason or reasonable opportunity for him to defend himself – leading Delta to suspend him without pay. After eight months of limbo, Mr. Tikvesa was finally permitted to return to work at Delta Airlines at Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport. His co-workers welcomed him back with a party.
By Chandra Bhatnagar, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Human Rights Program at 5:43pm
In the 1993 film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character finds himself repeating the same miserable day over and over again. For Indian film star Shahrukh Khan, last week was Groundhog Day for racial and religious profiling. In 2009, Khan — a huge global celebrity whose likeness is immortalized in wax at Madame Tussaud's — was traveling to the United States to celebrate Indian independence day and to promote a movie about a Muslim man who is the victim of profiling called My Name is Khan. In a case of life imitating art, Khan who is also Muslim, was detained and questioned at Newark airport.
The New York Times had a great editorial in its Sunday paper that outlined the continuing issues with terror watch lists.
As if traveling weren't a hassle already (now even more so with invasive body scanners), imagine if your name were placed on a terrorist watch list. The lists are secret so the only way of knowing would be to find out when, perhaps, you're already late to your flight and suddenly pulled out of line for extra screening — or even denied boarding altogether. And there are no solid and trustworthy mechanisms to remedy mistaken identification and absolutely no way to remove your name from the list; the so-called "redress" process involved complaining to a government entity without authority to fix the problem and hoping that a faceless bureaucrat will correct a mistake or change his mind.
Last week, we got some 
