Freedom Flyers

Freedom Flyers is a participatory-audit campaign launched by the Algorithmic Justice League in 2023 to surface the lived experience of travelers passing through the U.S. Transportation Security Administration's expanding facial-recognition programme at airport checkpoints. The TSA programme — described publicly by the agency as voluntary — has grown from a handful of pilot sites to over 250 U.S. airports as of mid-2025, with a stated 430-airport target, and the agency has indicated it intends to make face scans mandatory for all travelers. The campaign begins from the premise that the programme's voluntary character is meaningful only if ordinary travelers know it is voluntary, are told how to opt out, and can do so without penalty. Its purpose is to test that premise against the public record and to use what the public record shows to slow, regulate, and ultimately halt the deployment.

Campaign actors and tactics

The campaign is anchored by AJL and rests on a single instrument: a TSA scorecard that any traveler can complete after passing through a U.S. airport, recording whether they were notified of the facial-recognition programme, whether they were informed of their right to opt out, whether they saw signage, what happened when they tried to opt out, and how they were treated. The scorecard is paired with a public-rights advisory ("TSA face scans are not mandatory; TSA must inform passengers of their rights") and a social-media campaign organised under the #FreedomFlyers and #OptOutClub hashtags. AJL invites travelers into the #OptOutClub, packages the scorecard for sharing, and equips supporters with shareable social cards to invite others to participate. Alongside the rolling scorecard collection the campaign has used set-piece convenings — most notably the Freedom Flyers Summit on Resisting Airport Face Scans, held online in July 2024 — to widen the audience and bring traveler testimony, civil-society partners, and policymaker engagement onto a single stage.

The campaign also generates direct engagement with U.S. oversight bodies and with Congress. AJL gave testimony at the 8 March 2024 briefing of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on the civil rights implications of federal facial-recognition use; that testimony informed the Commission's September 2024 report. The campaign has been carried by AJL's broader public-education footprint — Joy Buolamwini's 2023 book Unmasking AI is the method-piece on which the campaign rests, and the 29 July 2025 Comply To Fly? report is the campaign's empirical artefact.

Outcome and ongoing arc

Comply To Fly? draws on 420 traveler-submitted scorecards from 91 U.S. airports collected between March 2024 and June 2025. Its central finding is that a programme TSA describes as voluntary is experienced by the majority of travelers as mandatory: 99% did not receive verbal notice of their right to opt out, 74% did not receive any notice of the use of facial recognition, half did not report seeing TSA signage, and 67% of those who attempted to opt out reported verbal abuse, public shaming, or perceived additional scrutiny. AJL recommends that TSA halt the programme to allow public deliberation and that the agency stand up a dedicated biometrics complaint procedure for travelers.

The campaign's findings are now load-bearing in U.S. legislative and oversight activity. The bipartisan Traveler Privacy Protection Act (S. 1691, 119th Congress), introduced in the U.S. Senate in May 2025 by Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR), John Kennedy (R-LA), Edward J. Markey (D-MA), and Roger Marshall (R-KS) — building on Sen. Merkley's earlier S. 3361 in the 118th Congress — cites the Comply To Fly? report for the empirical record of opt-out friction. Sen. Merkley separately led a bipartisan group of senators in a January 2025 letter urging the DHS Inspector General to open an investigation into the programme. The May 2025 Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board oversight report on TSA's use of facial recognition raised concurring concerns from inside the executive branch. As of writing, the TSA programme is continuing its expansion toward the 430-airport target, S. 1691 remains in committee at the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and the Freedom Flyers scorecard remains open: the campaign is in an ongoing, accumulating phase rather than a closed one.

Significance for the broader AI-good movement

Freedom Flyers is the cleanest worked example in the seed of the participatory-audit method AJL describes in Unmasking AI — the evocative audit, pairing quantitative measurement of an AI system's behaviour with first-person testimony from those misclassified, mis-served, or surveilled by it. Compared with the seed's other Campaign entry, the August 2020 Foxglove / Curtis Parfitt-Ford challenge to the Ofqual A-level algorithm, Freedom Flyers operates on a structurally different time scale and through a structurally different mechanism: not a four-day strategic-litigation-and-protest cycle aimed at a single regulatory decision, but a multi-year participatory-data-collection effort aimed at building a public record that holds up against an executive-branch programme that does not depend on judicial review for its expansion. The campaign treats ordinary travelers — rather than a single named claimant or a coalition of professional advocates — as the auditing public, and the published artefact (Comply To Fly?) is therefore not a litigation outcome but a population-level testimony record that legislators, oversight bodies, and the press can each use on their own terms.