Airlines Are Giving Your Face to Homeland Security; Daily Beast, August 9, 2017

Aliya Sternstein, Daily Beast; Airlines Are Giving Your Face to Homeland Security

"The agency admits there are many privacy issues surrounding this “partner process” that need some resolving (PDF). As CBP’s own June privacy impact assessment states, there remains “a risk that commercial air carriers will use the photographs for purposes beyond departure verification” because “commercial air carriers are not collecting photographs on CBP’s behalf or under CBP authorities.”

Delta and JetBlue said they do not store or directly access passenger biometric data...

To Jeramie Scott, national security counsel at the Electronic Privacy Council, her vision of a planet blanketed by interconnected security cameras and computers seemed all too plausible.

“I don’t think that’s a crazy world. It’s just a scary world for us,” Scott said. “The mission creep possibility is a real, real thing.”

ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley said it would be convenient to walk through checkpoints where you have to stop and show papers today, but would you want to take out your passport and show it to authorities every 10 feet?

“If your face is your passport you’re doing the same thing—we end up with a checkpoint society where people are being tracked,” Stanley said."

Your privacy doesn’t matter at the U.S. border; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8/29/16

Noah Feldman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Your privacy doesn’t matter at the U.S. border:

"The lesson from all this isn’t just that you approach a border at your own risk. It’s that major exceptions to our basic liberties should be interpreted narrowly, not broadly. Searching a reporter’s phone or anyone’s data isn’t within the government’s plausible set of purposes.

There are two ways to fix the problem. One is for Congress to pass a law that prohibits such border searches, as was proposed unsuccessfully in 2008 and 2009.

If Congress won’t act, though, it’s up to the Supreme Court to repair the damage it did in 1886 and 1977. It doesn’t need to overturn its precedent, just narrow it to cover the circumstances that Congress actually had in mind in 1789, namely border searches for goods being shipped illegally or without duty. That doesn’t include data. It would be a big improvement in constitutional doctrine — and civil liberties."