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 was developed and has until now been applied primarily to air travel.| Papers, Please!
One of the biggest beneficiaries of the expansion of the homeland-security industrial complex since the second inauguration of Donald Trump has been Palantir. Shares of Palantir stock have doubled in value since Trump’s re-election.| Papers, Please!
Late yesterday President Trump proclaimed a new ban on entry to the US or issuance of new US visas to citizens of twelve countries, and ordered drastic restrictions on entry or issuance of visas to citizens of seven others.| Papers, Please!
A cable yesterday from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, first reported by Nahal Toosi and Eric Bazail-Eimil of Politico, directs US embassies and consulates to “conduct a complete screening of the online presence of any nonimmigrant visa applicant seeking to travel to Harvard University for any purpose.” The cable implies that the main although not the exclusive […]| Papers, Please!
“Data matching” may seem abstract, but its consequences can be life-changing: visa revocation, deportation, sudden cessation of Social Security payments, all without warning or opportunity to present argument or evidence to a human fact-finder.| Papers, Please!
Surveillance didn’t disappear after the Cold War—it evolved. Instead of trench coats and wiretaps, today’s watchers come in the form of data brokers, predictive algorithms, and AI-powered behavioral tracking. The new spies don’t need to tail you through the streets; they already know where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going next. And […]| Krypt3ia
Introduction: Surveillance isn’t what it used to be. The days of trench coats and dead drops have given way to a world where the watchers don’t need to be human, and the tails don’t need to have legs. The Cold War spooks who wrote the original Moscow Rules played a game of human tradecraft; today, […]| Krypt3ia
After five years of foot-dragging in responding to our Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has finally released the pitch it made to the Future Travel Experience airline industry conference in 2019 on why airlines and airport operators should “partner” with CBP on automated facial recognition of airline passengers.| Papers, Please!
There are elections today in the USA. But we don’t need to know their outcome to predict many of the issues that the Identity Project and our supporters and allies will continue to face in the coming years. For what it’s worth, everything that was on our agenda for the first Obama Administration, following the 2008 elections, remains on our agenda today.| Papers, Please!