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Research & Analysis

Bad Trip: Debunking the TSA's 'Behavior Detection' Program

Under the government’s “behavior detection” program, thousands of TSA officers at airports around the country watch passengers for behaviors that the TSA claims are associated with stress, fear, or deception. The officers then flag certain people for additional inspection and questioning.

The program has long been criticized as unscientific, ineffective, and wasteful, and it has been blamed by passengers and TSA officers themselves for racial and religious profiling – but still it continues.

This report, based on documents the ACLU obtained in a Freedom of Information Act , reveals that materials in TSA’s own files discredit this junk-science program.

The report’s key findings include:

The TSA expanded the scope of the behavior detection program and its use of surveillance techniques.
Academic research and other documents in the TSA’s own files reinforce that behavior detection is unscientific and unreliable.
The TSA repeatedly overstated the scientific validity of behavior detection in communications with members of Congress and the Government Accountability Office.
Materials in the TSA’s files raise further questions about anti-Muslim bias and the origins and focus of the TSA’s behavior detection program.
The TSA’s documents reveal details of specific instances of racial or religious profiling that the TSA concealed from the public.

The report recommends that Congress discontinue funding the TSA’s behavior detection program and that the TSA implement a rigorous anti-discrimination training program for its workforce.

About the case

TSA Behavior Detection FOIA Database

Issue Areas: National Security

Research & Analysis

Caged In: The Devastating Harms of Solitary Confinement on Prisoners with Physical Disabilities

This report provides a first-ever national ACLU account of the suffering prisoners with physical disabilities experience in solitary confinement. It spotlights the dangers for blind people, Deaf people, people who are unable to walk without assistance, and people with other physical disabilities who are being held in small cells for 22 hours a day or longer, for days, months, and even years. Solitary confinement is a punishing environment that endangers the well-being of people with physical disabilities and often violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. The report’s revelations about the particular harms of solitary on people with physical disabilities shows the urgent need for far better accounting of the problems they face and the development of solutions to those problems.

Issue Areas: Prisoners' Rights

Research & Analysis

Report: The Confirmation Sessions

The American Civil Liberties Union released an analysis of Sen. Jeff Sessions’ record on civil liberties issues ahead of the Jan. 10-11 confirmation hearings as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general. The ACLU report looks at Sessions’ handling of police reform, voting rights, immigration, mass incarceration, religious liberty, LGBT equality, privacy and surveillance, torture, abortion, and sexual assault issues.

Issue Areas: National Security

Research & Analysis

Report: False Hope - How Parole Systems Fail Youth Serving Extreme Sentences

This report documents the failures of parole systems across the United States and how these systems fail prisoners who were young when convicted of serious crimes and are serving decades or their lives in prison.



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Issue Areas: Smart Justice

Research & Analysis

The 2016 Trump Memos

Donald Trump's statements and policy proposals would blatantly violate the inalienable rights guaranteed by the Constitution. We have undertaken an analysis of his most controversial policy proposals. These include his pledges to deport over 11 million undocumented immigrants, to ban Muslims from entering the United States, to surveil American Muslims and their houses of worship, to torture again, and to revise libel laws. We have found them all wanting, to say the least. According to our analysis, Trump’s proposals taken together would violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution.

Issue Areas: Civil Liberties

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