Favorite EFF joined a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo opposing a proposal to deploy stronger vetting procedures against Chinese students intending to study in the United States because the procedures would threaten the free speech interests of both Chinese students and their American associates. Reuters reported that the Trump administration is considering “checks…
All posts tagged Travel Screening
Border Spy Tech Shouldn’t Be a Requirement for a Path to Citizenship
Favorite The Border Security and Immigration Reform Act (H.R. 6136), introduced before Congress last week, would offer immigrants a new path to citizenship in exchange for increased high tech government surveillance of citizens and immigrants alike. The bill calls for increased DNA and other biometric screening, updated automatic license plate readers, and expanded social media…
HART: Homeland Security’s Massive New Database Will Include Face Recognition, DNA, and Peoples’ “Non-Obvious Relationships”
Favorite So why do we know so little about it? The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly building what will likely become the largest database of biometric and biographic data on citizens and foreigners in the United States. The agency’s new Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) database will include multiple forms of biometrics—from…
EFF and Other Groups Fight State Department Collection of Social Media Information … Again
Favorite EFF and 54 civil liberties organizations joined comments this week written by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) standing up against the U.S. government’s plans to collect social media information from foreigners entering the United States. This is the fifth time we’ve fought this battle in the past…
EFF to New York Appellate Court: No Warrantless Searches of Devices at the Border
Favorite In a month of court victories for travelers’ digital privacy, EFF continues its legal fight for Fourth Amendment rights at the border. We filed an amicus brief yesterday, along with the ACLU and NYCLU, urging a New York State appellate court to rule that border agents need a probable cause warrant to search the…
State Dept. Wants to Expand Social Media Collection to All Visa Applicants
Favorite The State Department has alarmingly declared that it wants to collect social media information from all visa applicants. This appears to be an expansion of a 2017 program that sought social media information only from a subset of initially suspicious visa applicants. This is also the latest effort in a troubling trend of conducting…
Keep Border Spy Tech Out of Dreamer Protection Bills
Favorite If Congress votes this month on legislation to protect Dreamers from deportation, any bill it considers should not include invasive surveillance technologies like biometric screening, social media snooping, automatic license plate readers, and drones. Such high tech spying would unduly intrude on the privacy of immigrants and Americans who live near the border and…
Stop the Newest Border Screening Bill
Favorite Biometric screening, surveillance drones, social media snooping, license plate readers—all this and more would be required by new federal legislation to expand high-tech spying on U.S. citizens and immigrants alike at and near the U.S. border. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) introduced “the SECURE Act” (S. 2192) on December 5. It borrows liberally from two…
TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports
Favorite The “PreCheck” program is billed as a convenient service to allow U.S. travelers to “speed through security” at airports. However, the latest proposal released by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reveals the Department of Homeland Security’s greater underlying plan to collect face images and iris scans on a nationwide scale. DHS’s programs will become…
DHS Should Stop the Social Media Surveillance of Immigrants
Favorite The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last month issued a notice that it is storing social media information on immigrants, including lawful permanent residents and naturalized U.S. citizens, apparently indefinitely, in a government database that contains “Alien Files” (A-Files). This is an invasive new feature of DHS’s previously known programs on collecting social…