Doubling down on its attack on anonymity and disregarding comments from the Identity Project and more than a thousand other organizations and individuals, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has renewed its request for blanket authorization to require applicants for US visas, visa-free entry, residency, or citizenship to disclose every social media platform and identifier […]| Papers, Please!
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has announced plans for changes to its procedures for processing information sent to CBP by airlines (and possibly also train, bus, and ferry operators) about passengers on international routes with non-binary or non-gendered “X” gender marker passports, to take effect on Tuesday, October 12, 2025. The planned changes were […]| Papers, Please!
After twenty years of resistance by individuals and state governments; twenty years of failed threats, intimidation, and extortion by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to get states to administer and participate in a distributed national-ID scheme; twenty years of construction of an outsourced, unaccountable national ID database; and […]| Papers, Please!
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 […]| Papers, Please!
How can your movements be tracked? The Penlink surveillance company counts some of the ways: Penlink was brought to our attention by a report from Joseph Cox in 404 Media that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the US Department of Homeland security (DHS) is entering into a contract with Penlink as a […]| Papers, Please!
Earlier this month, as part of a lengthy and complex bill to reauthorize the US State Department, the Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) revived a proposal that had been rejected but came close to passage in 2017 to authorize the Secretary of State to summarily deny or revoke the […]| Papers, Please!
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is threatening to step up enforcement of Federal laws that require each foreign citizen present in the US for more than 30 days — even as a tourist or other visa-free visitor — to register with the US government and “at all times carry with him and have […]| Papers, Please!
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 […]| Papers, Please!
Tourists and business visitors to the US from most of the world will have to pay additional fees or post bonds of from $250 to $15,000 per person — over and above the current $185 per person visa fee — under provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act enacted last month and separate regulations under a preexisting law published today in the Federal Register.| Papers, Please!
[Illustration from CBP website. The claim that facial recognition “helps to prevent the spread of germs” is especially bogus, since facial recognition requires travelers to remove their face masks wherever it is used.]| Papers, Please!
Today the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced that it has launched a “pilot” at Washington National Airport (DCA) of yet another scheme for biometric identification and tracking of domestic air travelers.| Papers, Please!
Air travel in the US has been reduced by more than 90%, measured by the numbers of people passing through checkpoints at airports operated by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and its contractors.| Papers, Please!
On the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, the Freedom to Travel Act of 2021 (H.R. 6030, “To protect the right to travel by common carrier”), has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and referred to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and the Committee on Homeland Security.| papersplease.org
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!
We’ve heard a lot of talk in recent months about “extreme vetting” of immigrants, Muslims, and foreign visitors to the US. But what does “extreme vetting” really mean?| papersplease.org
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!
Recent events have focused attention on the asymmetry of police demands for ID:| Papers, Please!
The real story of REAL-ID is that more people than ever are flying in the US without REAL-ID, with ID the TSA considers “unacceptable”, or with no ID at all.| Papers, Please!
[The REAL-ID “hub” connects state and Federal agencies, private commercial third parties, and centralized, national database files. AAMVA SPEXS Master Specification (AMIE), r6.0.8, page 5]| Papers, Please!
On Wednesday, May 7, 2025, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) plans to start treating driver’s licenses and state IDs that don’t comply with the REAL-ID Act as “unacceptable” ID at TSA checkpoints. That doesn’t mean that travelers without REAL-ID won’t be allowed to fly. What the TSA has said is that it will subject travelers without REAL-ID on or after May 7th to its current procedures for airline passengers with no ID or unacceptable ID.| Papers, Please!
[Summary of TSA procedures for airline passengers with no ID or unacceptable ID, from DHS Office of Inspector General report OIG-2024-65, September 2024]| Papers, Please!
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have planted a story with Fox News falsely claiming that enforcement of the REAL-ID Act of 2005 at airports will prevent “illegal aliens” from boarding domestic airline flights within the US:| Papers, Please!
A bipartisan proposal to withdraw the state of Maine from compliance with the Federal REAL-ID Act of 2005 had its first hearing today (archived video) before the Joint Standing Committee on Transportation of the Maine State Legislature.| 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!
The US State Department is withholding passports from some US citizens, effectively denying them the ability to leave or return to the US, without any basis in law or regulations.| Papers, Please!
A bipartisan group of six Maine state legislators has introduced a bill, L.D. 160, which would repeal all of the provisions of Maine law enabling the state to issue driver’s licenses and state ID cards potentially compliant with the REAL-ID Act of 2005.| Papers, Please!
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!
[“The welcoming, friendly and visually pleasing appearance” of the TSA’s headquarters at 6595 Springfield Center Drive, Springfield, VA.]| 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!
Brushing off objections from the Identity Project and others, the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has issued regulations creating the framework for an all-purpose smartphone-based national digital ID and tracking system.| Papers, Please!
[“How do you get on the no-fly list?” Larger image; PDF with legend.]| Papers, Please!
We got a pleasant surprise this week: a phone call from Eric F. Stein, the head of the State Department’s FOIA-processing office.| Papers, Please!
In the latest episode of the FOIA follies, we recently received a bizarre letter letter from the U.S. State Department asking us whether we are “still interested” in receiving a response to one of several of our requests for State Department records that have each gone unanswered for more than five years.| Papers, Please!
The most frequently asked question in the ongoing discussion about the State Department’s proposed new “Biographical Questionnaire” for (some) passport applicants has been, “Is this a hoax?”| Papers, Please!
The U.S. Department of State is proposing a new Biographical Questionnaire for passport applicants. The proposed new Form DS-5513 asks for all addresses since birth; lifetime employment history including employers’ and supervisors names, addresses, and telephone numbers; personal details of all siblings; mother’s address one year prior to your birth; any “religious ceremony” around the time of birth; and a variety of other information. According to the proposed form, “failure to p...| Papers, Please!
[CommuteAir routes operated as “United Express”]| Papers, Please!
On the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, the Freedom to Travel Act of 2021 (H.R. 6030, “To protect the right to travel by common carrier”), has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and referred to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and the Committee on Homeland Security.| Papers, Please!
Edward Hasbrouck of the Identity Project will be speaking at a free, public forum on Travel Surveillance, Traveler Intrusion from noon-1 p.m. EDT next Tuesday, 2 April 2013, at the Cato Institute in Washington DC (with a live webcast):| Papers, Please!
Putting government surveillance and control of travelers ahead of what is supposed to be their mission of protecting of the public against infectious diseases, the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has ordered that, effective today, all air travelers must risk their lives by removing their face masks on demand of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint staff or airline ticketing or gate agents.| Papers, Please!
Inspired by this debt-collection windfall, Congress next added a section to another unrelated section of the statute book, 26 U.S. Code § 7345, effective in 2015, to deny a US passport to any US citizen reported to the State Department by the IRS as having been assessed $50,000 or more (increasing each year in step with the cost of living) in unpaid taxes.| Papers, Please!
[CAIR Senior Litigation Attorney Gadeir Abbas speaks to press conference in front of the U.S. Supreme Court following oral argument in FBI v. Fikre.]| Papers, Please!