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
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 […]| Papers, Please!
Earlier this week the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation postponed a scheduled hearing on a bill that would limit some uses of facial recognition by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), while authorizing the TSA to carry out “identity verification” of airline passengers and take mug shots of all those air travelers who don’t […]| 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!
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.| papersplease.org
After a white-supremacist hacker got access to digital records of old applications for admission to Columbia College and passed them on to the New York Times, the Times reported that in 2009 Zohran Mamdani checked boxes identifying his national origin and ancestry as African-American (he is a US citizen — an American — and was born in Uganda — the country in Africa where his paternal ancestors had lived for generations) and Asian (his mother was born in India, where her ancestors had li...| Papers, Please!
In its worst decision ever on demands for ID, the Supreme Court today upheld a Texas law that requires all visitors to some websites to provide the site operator with evidence of their identity and age. In an opinion by Justice Thomas, six Justices found that requiring ID for age verification as a condition of […]| Papers, Please!
Recent events have focused attention on the asymmetry of police demands for ID:| Papers, Please!
[Excerpt from the REAL-ID Act of 2005]| Papers, Please!
Today the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) published new regulations for the REAL-ID Act in the Federal Register, finalizing a bizarre and clearly illegal proposal the agency made in September 2024.| Papers, Please!
[Flowchart of “goTravel” software package developed by the government of the Netherlands and offered to U.N. members through the Countering Terrorist Travel Programme of the U.N. Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT)]| Papers, Please!
Invoking memes that we’ve seen and warned about before under both Democratic and Republican administrations, President Trump has attributed the latest version 3.0 of his “Muslim ban”announced today (proclamation, FAQ, explainer) with the need to comply with ICAO and INTERPOL standards for passport issuance, “identity management”, and data sharing about travelers — as though US immigration and asylum policy should be determined by an international technical body for aviation opera...| Papers, Please!
New U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) regulations took effect this month that combine two bad ideas — fees to encourage foreigners to visit the US by charging them more to do so, and fees for the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) — in a way that creates new possibilities for travel surveillance and control that are far worse than either component alone.| Papers, Please!
The governments of both Canada and the US are threatening or testing measures to further close off the Canadian border as the escape route of last resort for those fleeing the US. Representatives of a coalition of more than 300 refugee rights, civil liberties, gender justice, and migrant advocacy groups came to Parliament Hill in […]| 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!
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!