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'A Non-Starter': Critics Slam Amtrak Request for DHS Watchlist Screening of Passengers
One digital rights advocate called the expanded surveillance a "terrifying" development that could lead to people "facing some really negative outcomes."
Apr 06, 2022
Civil liberties defenders sounded the alarm Wednesday after Amtrak asked the Transportation Safety Administration to start screening passengers against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's federal master terrorism watchlist.
"From our decades of work on the watchlisting system, we know it's a due process nightmare and prone to error."
Hearst Televisionreports the train service's request is part of the Amtrak Rail Passenger Threat Assessment, by which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reviews a targeted individual's "personally identifiable information" against the federal Terrorist Screening Database, commonly called the watchlist.
Personally identifiable information includes but is not limited to Social Security, Alien Registration, and driver's license numbers; financial or medical documents; biometrics; and criminal records. DHS may also collect and review targeted travelers' publicly available social media information.
"This request raises significant civil liberties and rights concerns," ACLU National Security Project director Hina Shamsi said in a statement. "From our decades of work on the watchlisting system, we know it's a due process nightmare and prone to error."
\u201cOur @sairahussain87 is featured in @Hearst TV\u2019s exclusive that @Amtrak is asking @TSA to start screening some rail passengers against Terrorist Screening Database watchlist: \u201cIt\u2019s terrifying to me.\u201d https://t.co/E3h2ktXZ93\u201d— EFF (@EFF) 1649282871
"The standards the government uses to place people on its massive master watchlist are vague, overbroad, and based on secret evidence," she added. "People on the watchlist are disproportionately people of color or immigrants, and can be wrongly stigmatized as terrorism suspects with no notice of their placement on the list or a meaningful opportunity to challenge it. Amtrak's request should be a non-starter and it needs to reverse course."
In an interview with Hearst Television, Saira Hussain, a staff attorney at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the expanded watchlist surveillance a "terrifying" development that could lead to people "facing some really negative outcomes when it comes to a contact with law enforcement should they be stopped for, you know, for like a broken tail light or something like that."
ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley said that "it's a classic example of mission creep."
"Pretty soon we're going to have people walking through, you know, body scanners to go to a Little League game," he told Hearst Television. "We don't want to turn America into an airport."
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Are Mass Plane Travel and Mass Tourism Unsustainable?
The coronavirus pandemic is just a symptom of systemic problems the industries cannot resolve.
Mar 26, 2020
"Ah, for the days when flying was a gentleman's pursuit! - before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and 'jet off' to Raleigh-Durham." --Robert ("Sideshow Bob") Terwillinger, The Simpsons, "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming."
In recent weeks, the coronavirus pandemic's devastating effect on the airline and tourist industries has been graphically evident. Airlines cutting flights by 50 percent or more while hurtling towards bankruptcy; passengers in chaotic airport scenes as they try to get home before travel bans; Venice, Paris, Rome-- for once-- resembling ghost towns; leviathan cruise ships forlorn and empty, like Wagner's Flying Dutchman.
This might not be a temporary bump in the road for these industries, but a precursor to their long-term viability if they do not radically change their business models. Observers have for many years questioned the environmental sustainability of both industries. What's more, airline travel has become so onerous for passengers that a consumer rebellion could be brewing even without fears of infectious disease.
Tourism has long been cursed with an inherent paradox that recent events have thrown into sharp perspective. Since about 1980, airline travel has gradually ceased to be an adventure (in the positive sense), and come to resemble the Stations of the Cross. From nonexistent cabin service, to checked bag fees (causing the need to shoehorn everything into the overhead, forcing delays both entering and exiting the plane), to intricately tiered fees imposing a rigid class system (like the accommodations on the Titanic), to shrinking, jammed-in seats making the airliner resemble a winged sardine can, the lot of the traveler is not a happy one.
And all of that is simply what happens on the plane. Since 9/11, airports have come to resemble mini-Soviet Unions, with every passenger under quasi-military discipline (including the requirement to "hurry up and wait," familiar to every GI). There are subtle indignities like removing belt and shoes, and what has been described as "security theater" (it is in practical terms all-but impossible to take inert liquids into an aircraft restroom and mix them into an explosive, given the need for a pressure vessel and freezing temperatures, but maybe the vast wastage of water bottles is economic stimulus for the concessionaires' $2 water on the other side of the checkpoint).
Is all this flying really necessary? Perhaps the current virus outbreak will teach businesses sending their employees hither and yon that all the fancy teleconferencing gear they've bought is actually usable. And possibly the reason business travel has heretofore not been perceived as a burden is because it can be expensed. That may change as the health, as well as environmental, costs of plane travel become more pressing.
Under a distance of about 400 miles, airline travel for any purpose makes no sense, either environmentally or in terms of convenience. But Americans, seemingly alone among developed nations, are shackled to airlines if they don't want to go by automobile. High speed trains would solve the problem, but there is no will to build them, given higher priorities like multi-trillion-dollar stalemates in the Middle East and tax cuts for billionaires.
The entire tourism industry faces dilemmas on a similar scale. The paradox of tourism has been around for centuries. Samuel Johnson, the sage of 18th century London, was asked about his trip to visit the Giant's Causeway in Ireland: was it worth seeing? "Oh, it was worth seeing, he replied. "It just wasn't worth going to see."
I was reminded of Johnson's witticism a couple of months ago when I was inveigled to go to Thailand. "Sure," I thought. "Why not?" But interminably long flights across the International Date Line jet lagged me into uselessness for a few days in each direction. And although it occurred significantly before coronavirus peaked in East Asia, a subliminal but nagging fear of contamination accompanied every flight. And that was only the travel portion.
Thailand, slightly larger than California but with 30 million more people, is already a densely populated nation. At best a middle-income country, it simply cannot handle millions of foreign tourists. Resort regions like Phuket are vastly over-touristed and overbuilt with perpetually jammed roads, and showing signs of chronic pollution. And this was after the Christmas peak of European tourism and in the midst of local complaints that tourism was down because of the then-local virus problem in Wuhan.
Bangkok is now a polluted, overgrown Soylent Green stand-in, its city proper more heavily populated than New York. There might be more motor vehicles per capita there than in a comparably-sized U.S. city, with two-stroke motorcycles and tuk-tuks spewing out massive amounts of pollution in addition to noise that would wake the dead. (A single afternoon's use of one two-stroke leaf blower emits more pollution than a V-8 Ford F-150 Raptor driven cost-to-coast; keep that in mind when contemplating that the GOP dearly wants to abolish the EPA).
These phenomena are of course not limited to Thailand. All over the Third World, scenic places have become colonized by a metastasizing, lopsided overdevelopment due to mass tourism, one that not only ruins the point of going there in the first place, but also makes the local people dependent on an economic monoculture as pernicious in its own way to their unique cultures as the Central American banana plantations.
As for the developed world, once our current crisis is over, you'd better forget about contemplating the timeless beauty of the Venus de Milo at the Louvre, or retracing the steps of Thomas Mann's characters in a misty, twilit Venice. The Louvre is as crowded as Times Square on New Year's Eve, while a seven-story tall cruise liner dropping anchor rather spoils the view to the other side of the lagoon where Venice's spires evaporate in the moody dusk like wraiths.
Since at least the medieval religious pilgrimages, tourism has been heavily ridden by the cliched and the formulaic. But since the invention of the jet airliner, mass tourism has been swamped by the kitsch sensibility - the domestication, familiarization, and commodification of the so-called exotic experience. Disneyfication is no longer confined to Anaheim and Orlando, but suffuses African safaris, Icelandic jokull expeditions, and visits to Laotian hill tribes.
Mass air travel and mass tourism are inextricably linked, and you don't have to be Greta Thunberg to acknowledge their environmental unsustainability as currently configured, quite apart from negating the very reason for visiting something that is supposed to be outside of one's routinized experience. We need hardly add that the effects are contributing to the distinct possibility that Venice itself may sink beneath the waves altogether, although in the case of Miami's South Beach, my feelings are more ambiguous.
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New Documents Reveal DHS Claiming Broad, Unconstitutional Authority to Search Travelers' Phones and Laptops
ACLU, EFF Move for Summary Judgement to Block Warrantless Searches of Electronic Devices at Airports, U.S. Ports of Entry
Apr 30, 2019
The American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and ACLU of Massachusetts today asked a federal court to rule without trial that the Department of Homeland Security violates the First and Fourth Amendments by searching travelers' smartphones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry without a warrant.
The request for summary judgment comes after the groups obtained documents and deposition testimony revealing that U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorize border officials to search travelers' phones and laptops for general law enforcement purposes, and consider requests from other government agencies when deciding whether to conduct such warrantless searches.
"This new evidence reveals that government agencies are using the pretext of the border to make an end run around the First and Fourth Amendments," said Esha Bhandari, staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. "The border is not a lawless place, ICE and CBP are not exempt from the Constitution, and the information on our electronic devices is not devoid of Fourth Amendment protections. We're asking the court to stop these unlawful searches and require the government to get a warrant."
The previously undisclosed government information was obtained as part of a lawsuit, Alasaad v. McAleenan, the ACLU and EFF filed in September 2017 on behalf of 11 travelers -- 10 U.S. citizens and one lawful permanent resident -- whose smartphones and laptops were searched without warrants at U.S. ports of entry.
"The evidence we have presented the court shows that the scope of ICE and CBP border searches is unconstitutionally broad," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Adam Schwartz. "ICE and CBP policies and practices allow unfettered, warrantless searches of travelers' digital devices, and empower officers to dodge the Fourth Amendment when rifling through highly personal information contained on laptops and phones."
The government documents and testimony, portions of which were publicly filed in court today, reveal CBP and ICE are asserting broad and unconstitutional authority to search and seize travelers' devices. The evidence includes ICE and CBP policies and practices that authorize border officers to conduct warrantless and suspicionless device searches for purposes beyond the enforcement of immigration and customs laws. Officials can search devices for general law enforcement purposes, such as enforcing bankruptcy, environmental, and consumer protection laws, and for intelligence gathering or to advance pre-existing investigations.
Officers also consider requests from other government agencies to search devices. In addition, the agencies assert the authority to search electronic devices when the subject of interest is someone other than the traveler -- such as when the traveler is a journalist or scholar with foreign sources who are of interest to the U.S. government, or even when the traveler is the business partner of someone under investigation. Both agencies further allow officers to retain information from travelers' electronic devices and share it with other government entities, including state, local, and foreign law enforcement agencies.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to rule that the government must have a warrant based on probable cause before conducting searches of electronic devices, which contain highly detailed personal information about people's lives. The plaintiffs, which include a limousine driver, a military veteran, journalists, students, an artist, a NASA engineer, and a business owner, are also requesting the court to hold that the government must have probable cause to confiscate a traveler's device.
The district court previously rejected the government's motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
The number of electronic device searches at the border has increased dramatically in the last few years. Last year, CBP conducted more than 33,000 border device searches, almost four times the number from just three years prior. CBP and ICE policies allow border officers to manually search anyone's smartphone with no suspicion at all, and to conduct a forensic search with reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. CBP also allows suspicionless device searches for a "national security concern."
Below is a full list of the plaintiffs along with links to their individual stories, which are also collected here:
- Ghassan and Nadia Alasaad are a married couple who live in Massachusetts, where he is a limousine driver and she is a nursing student.
- Suhaib Allababidi, who lives in Texas, owns and operates a business that sells security technology, including to federal government clients.
- Sidd Bikkannavar is an engineer for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
- Jeremy Dupin is a journalist living in Massachusetts.
- Aaron Gach is an artist living in California.
- Isma'il Kushkush is a journalist living in Virginia.
- Diane Maye is a college professor and former captain in the U. S. Air Force living in Florida.
- Zainab Merchant is a writer and a graduate student at Harvard.
- Akram Shibly is a filmmaker from New York.
- Matthew Wright is a computer programmer in Colorado.
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