Matt Smith reports:
San Francisco travel writer Edward Hasbrouck has sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security over what he says is the agency’s refusal to give a complete accounting of secret files detailing his numerous border crossings around the world.
“This is not something I’m doing lightly, or that I’m doing every day, or that I like doing,” said Hasbrouck, who has long been the U.S. media’s go-to guy on the subject of traveling travails. But “I think it’s important for people to know about this surveillance program, and to understand what kind of dossiers are being kept, and how that information is being used.”
Read more on SF Weekly.
Hasbrouk blogged about his reasons for suing on his web site last week:
Today the First Amendment Project is filing a lawsuit on my behalf against U.S. Customs and Border Protection (one of the divisions of the Department of Homeland Security) for violating the Privacy Act and the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) by refusing to disclose their records of my travels, what they did with my requests for my records, and how they index, search for, and retrieve these travel surveillance records.
According to the complaint in Hasbrouck v. CBP filed today with the U.S District Court in San Francisco:
This complaint concerns the failure to disclose records regarding the warrantless, suspicionless dragnet collection and maintenance of Federal government records of the travel, activities, and other personal information concerning U.S. citizens not accused of any crime….