Watch out: the watch list is growing

Today the New York Times reports that air travel has gone smoothly for most Thanksgiving travelers. The weather was good -- and prospective airline customers are getting well trained: many began the holiday a day early to avoid the crush.

So how's our "no fly list," our security theater system, doing? According to slew of recent reports on the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and its parent Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), the system is still limping -- and regularly infringes on our expectation that we're innocent until we commit a crime and should expect to be allowed due process to clear our names. Nor does it make us safer.

For starters, the watch list continues to snare absurd victims. In addition to Congressmen and small children, even an airline pilot has a problem:

Captain Robert Campbell was a pilot for the US Navy in Vietnam. He recently retired from a 22-year career as an airline pilot.

And, yep, he's on the list...

"The fact is, I'm authorized by the TSA to fly the airplane and ride the jump seat on air carriers," he said. "But if I want to ride in the back, I'm on the No-Fly List."

Aero News Network,
November 6, 2007

The TSA says this sort of thing happens because people have names very like or identical to people who should be stopped from flying. At the present rate of growth, roughly 200,000 new names a year, pretty soon one million names will trigger special scrutiny. Not surprisingly,

..."It undermines the authority of the list," says Lisa Graves of the Center for National Security Studies. "There's just no rational, reasonable estimate that there's anywhere close to that many suspected terrorists."

Though the government wins breathless hype from student reporters for its Terrorist Screening Center which selects these names, the office of the Inspector General was less impressed when it examined a sample portion of the list:

Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said its management by the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) "continues to have significant weaknesses," producing a high error rate and a slow response to complaints from citizens.

In an examination of 105 records, for example, the auditors found that 38 percent of the records contained errors or inconsistencies that the TSC's own quality-assurance efforts had not found. They also discovered that the TSC is operating two versions of the database in tandem without ensuring that their contents are identical, which they said could result in missed opportunities to identify terrorists. ...

The review found that nearly half the initial name matches against the watch list proved worthless, suggesting that the government should consider misidentifications a priority and develop policies to address them, Fine said.

Washington Post,
September 6, 2007

Security expert Bruce Scheier got a chance to explain the results of bad matches to TSA head Kip Hawley:

The main problem with the list is that it's secret. Who is on the list is secret. Why someone's on is secret. How someone can get off is secret. There's no accountability and there's no transparency. Of course this kind of thing induces paranoia. It's the sort of thing you read about in history books about East Germany and other police states.

Not everyone gives the government the benefit of the doubt about its list collecting. As reported in Travel Management,

First Amendment rights activist Edward Hasbrouck, working for The Identity Project, during the TSA meeting said that the "core of the proposed rule" is a requirement for "would-be air travelers to obtain permission from the government before they can travel." That, he said, infringes on freedoms of assembly of movement.

And all this mass of names and data the government is collecting isn't just used to hassle people who want to fly. The government uses it in multiple other contexts.

The State Department queries the list before issuing visas, customs and border agents use it to vet incoming travelers and a subset of the list is exported to airlines for their passenger rating systems. More than 800,000 local and state police can also query the database when they pull over a speeding car or run a detained person's name through their computer system.

Wired Security News

The ACLU warns that the TSC envisions additional uses:

There was considerable discussion in today's [Congressional] hearings on whether the watch list should be checked for anyone trying to purchase a firearm. One can imagine the watch list, once thought of as merely a "No-Fly List," being used increasingly as a screening method to determine eligibility for a wide array of privileges and rights. A move in this direction would make it a true blacklist, with hundreds of thousands of Americans wrongly denied full participation in society because of erroneous placement on the list.

This certainly seems possible if the powers-that-be feel the need for more coercive controls over some of their opponents. For the moment, most of us are not threatening enough to invoke such a response. And for the moment, we can and must still defend whatever political space we can make. But something cancerous and evil is growing among us, exemplified in those airport security checks.

News from the no fly list front

The smiling gentleman pictured above is Abousfian Abdelrazik, a naturalized Canadian who has been stranded in his native Sudan since 2003. On a visit to his sick mother, the Montreal resident was twice imprisoned and tortured by the local government, according to him at the instance of Canadian and U.S. authorities who suspected him of ties to terrorism. The Canadians and Sudanese eventually cleared him, but then he found himself with an expired passport and placed on a United Nations no fly list. For the last 14 months, he slept on the floor of the Canadian embassy in Khartoum. Canadian activists helped him go to court to get their government to fly him home. Under court order, they finally did this last Saturday. No wonder he looks happy,

Despite being cleared by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canadian Security Intelligence Service (that's like being cleared by the FBI), Abdelrazik may not be done with his troubles.

Paul Champ, one of Abdelrazik's lawyers, said being on the UN no-fly list means more than travel restrictions.

"It's not simply a no-fly list. I guess you can call it a UN black list. That means an asset freeze," Champ told CBC News. "When he gets back to Canada, he's going to be subject to all kinds of conditions.

"He's unlikely to be able to open a bank account. He likely will not be able to have a job, because anyone paying him or giving him money in any way could be regarded as a crime. So he's going to be living with some severe restraints that we're going to be working very hard to lift by whatever means possible," he said.

This case isn't going away for Canadian civil libertarians.***
Critics of U.S. government no fly lists and watch lists are on the way to picking up some not entirely comfortable bedfellows these days.

It seems that the gun lobby has succeeded in so restricting federal oversight of gun purchases, that individuals on the various government lists can't be impeded from buying weapons. According to the June 20 New York Times:

WASHINGTON — People on the government’s terrorist watch list tried to buy guns nearly 1,000 times in the last five years, and federal authorities cleared the purchases 9 times out of 10 because they had no legal way to stop them, according to a new government report.

In one case, a person on the list was able to buy more than 50 pounds of explosives.

Thanks to the efforts of the National Rifle Association, it's nearly impossible for the government to regulate guns, though they can ban your shampoo and toothpaste when you travel ... I don't quite get it.

Anyway, recognition of this odd legal anomaly has led some Congresscritters to try to deny guns to people on the watch lists. New York Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy and Congressman Steve Israel led off the push for a new law in May. After the report cited above came out, New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg jumped into the project.

The NRA isn't about to let their pro-gun legal regime get infringed on by a little wimpy fear of purchases by bad guys. They are up in arms about the (well-documented) deficiencies of the lists.

However, the National Rifle Association said the terrorist watch list was too poorly maintained to justify preventing gun sales to people on it.

"The integrity of the terror watch list is poor," said Chris Cox, the NRA's chief lobbyist. "To deny law-abiding people due process and their Second Amendment rights based on a secret list is not how we do things in America."

Hmm ... wonder if Mr. Cox applies that standard Muslim-Americans?

I'd bet on the gun nuts in this one -- politicians are probably more scared of Mr. Cox than they are that a terrorist incident will happen "on their watch." It's all one more demonstration that this stuff is theater, not security.

Last name leads to watch list

During my long-past brush with the "no fly list," I remember feeling just as Amanda Malik does. What does the government mean by sticking miscellaneous citizens on a "watch list"?

Usually I only quote bits of stories that appear elsewhere on the net. However this is such a clear account of what it means to a very ordinary, middle American individual who finds herself enmeshed in the workings of the "Homeland Security" regime that I want to share a lot of it.

"It has to do with your last name."

At those words, I burst into tears. My husband, Mike, and I were standing in the airport in Islip, Long Island, trying to check into a flight on Southwest Airlines. The attendant behind the counter was filling out a form that said "Watch List" at the top.

My husband and I were the subjects of profiling.

To most, Malik looks like Ma-leek, which in Arabic means "king." It is a very common Arabic name. To us, it looks like Ma-lick, a Czech name that we share with many who are Eastern European. But because of our Arabic-looking name, we are now on the terrorist watch list.

To those who have been discriminated against because of their ancestry for their entire lives, this story might sound naïve. And I freely admit that up until this point, I was naïve. But I have a new sympathy and respect for people who have dealt with this for their entire lives, because I'm here to tell you that it is humiliating. Right down to the core. It is one thing to suspect that you are being discriminated against. It is another to be told flat-out that you are. This is a new and very unsettling experience for us, but one I'm afraid we're going to have to get used to. ...

Mike and I have always had to have a rather nonchalant attitude when it comes to airport security. Since Sept. 11, we've always been searched what seems like more than the average person or been pulled aside at the metal detector more than seemed to be normal. We've had our bags searched. I've had a rather large female security guard pat me down and feel underneath the underwire of my bra. We always joked that it was because he and, more recently I, had an Arabic-looking last name.

Apparently we were right.

It was funny until it was true.

It's embarrassing to have people look at you with suspicion when you have done nothing wrong. Innocent until proven guilty doesn't apply to the Homeland Security Watch List. You're at the mercy of a government agency that doesn't have to tell you anything about anything. ...

From now on, Mike and I will always travel with our passports and copies of our birth certificates. My fear is that someday we won't be allowed to board a flight or we will be detained by security for having the wrong name. It's so sad to me that in an effort to make it's citizens feel safer -- even if they actually aren't -- the U.S. is treating what I can only assume is millions of its citizens this way.

Amanda Malik has an advantage in taking on "Homeland Security" that most citizens don't have. She is a copy editor for the Lafayette-West Lafayette Journal and Courier where this was published. When my partner and I found ourselves on the no-fly list, we happened to be traveling to visit the sister of a pretty senior journalist. He took an interest in our experience. What do people without such connections do? Probably just shut up and know there is little they can do.

The latest in security theater

Last year the ACLU estimated that number of names on the U.S. government's watch list (people requiring special scrutiny when traveling) had reached one million. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said something like "oh no, not nearly so many..." They did say though they had a "terrorist watch list." Now they've apparently 'fessed up to the current number. USA Today reports

WASHINGTON -- The government's terrorist watch list has hit 1 million entries, up 32 percent since 2007.

Federal data show the rise comes despite the removal of 33,000 entries last year by the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center in an effort to purge the list of outdated information and remove people cleared in investigations.

It's unclear how many individuals those 33,000 records represent -- the center often uses multiple entries, or "identities," for a person to reflect variances in name spellings or other identifying information. The remaining million entries represent about 400,000 individuals, according to the center.

The new figures were provided by the screening center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to requests from USA TODAY.

At least under the new regime they answer some questions. There is still nothing to suggest that a list so large, based on so many suspect sources of information, assembled by a huge, inefficient, self-referential bureaucracy, serves any purpose except to remind air travelers to be very afraid of the terra-ists. ***
The stories of ordinary harmless people who find their travel impeded still surface too frequently. Here's a recent one.

Erich Scherfen was boarding a plane at Harrisburg International Airport to visit a sick friend in San Francisco when the ticket agent told him he was on "the list."

Days later, his wife, Rubina Tareen, was removed from a plane by a government agent, who went through her bags before letting her back on to travel back to Northeast Pennsylvania. Two months later, their vehicle was searched and they were questioned for hours before being allowed back into the United States after attending an Islamic conference in Canada.

The couple were never told why their names made it onto a terrorist watch list and their efforts to get an explanation have been largely unsuccessful, according to a lawsuit filed in Scranton's federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union.

New Haven Republican Herald,
Feb. 28, 2009

Scherfen is a veteran of 17 years in the U.S. military as a helicopter pilot. His wife, a naturalized citizen originally from Pakistan, sells books on Islam from their home. Guess someone thought that was a threat. ***The people of rural Alaska think the whole TSA rigmarole is a threat -- to their way of life. If you want to get around in much of the state, you fly small planes. But the TSA wants to enforce the security theater we go through in big commercial airports on these small planes and tiny towns they serve. According to KTVA in Anchorage,

Proposed TSA regulations devastating for Alaska pilots
Imagine every time you got in your car having to check with police to see if your passengers have a clean record and if they have an ID all because you drive an SUV or truck and are going out for a joy ride. That's basically what will happen to pilots who fly larger planes in Alaska, where skies replace roads as the main form of travel, if new TSA regulations pass as they are.

The Alaska Air Carriers Association describes it as a "one size fit's all" approach to air safety.

The Transportation Security Administration says for planes over 12,500 pounds to fly into or take off anywhere, there needs to be proper security measures taken like checking passengers against the "No Fly List" and having security screeners on site.

It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade airports and hire personnel to implement a regulation that makes no sense. What's a small plane going to attack out there: a glacier? Alaskan pilots are furious and are pushing back through their legislature.

UPDATE: The link above went dead since this post went up, but the Fairbanks News Miner reports the same issues.***The TSA says they are going to fix the ongoing absurdities in the system -- by collecting more information from air travelers. Soon, you'll have to hand over your birth date and sex as well as a credit card to buy plane tickets. They say they'll erase the data after seven days -- still I can see some identity thieves finding a bonanza when they get into this stuff. Airlines will have to spend millions upgrading their reservation systems to capture the new data. The Chicago Tribune reports the some doubts:

However, some experts concerned about invasion of privacy contend that Secure Flight works from the misguided premise that Americans do not have the right to travel and, to receive permission to travel, they must be checked out by the government. They say one danger is the airline security rules could be expanded to Amtrak, intercity buses like the Greyhound Lines and other common carriers.

Sobel, of the Cyber Privacy Project, argued that "a first-time bad guy or bad woman is not going to be on the list. The better, more cost-effective approach is good police work, good intelligence work, not tarring everybody with the same bad intentions."

That would be too sensible for the massive collection of spooks and paranoid cranks now clustered in the security theater employment growth sector.

Canadian no fly list after three months -- a round up

The Canadian no fly list went into operation in June -- and rapidly ran into similar problems and criticisms to those which dog the U.S. watch list.

First there were the Butts
Apparently Transport Canada is concerned that someone named "Alistair Butt" might try to bring down an airplane. The first two Alistair Butts who presented themselves to fly turned out to be a 10 year old from Saskatoon and a 15-year old from Ontario. [Pictured left. Photo by Jana Chytilova.] Neither seemed much threat to aviation. The Saskatchewan family was furious to hear the airline's proposed remedy:

Butt was on a list, labelled as a person of interest, said his dad, Usne Butt. ...

What is particularly galling, Major Butt said, is the suggestion from the airlines that perhaps it would be best to change the child's name.

Civil libertarians point out obvious flaws
With the U.S. list as an example, it was easy for concerned Canadians to focus on likely problems. Paul Berton spelled on the problems in the Edmonton Sun:

Just how much is domestic flight safety in peril? How good is the list, developed with the help of the RCMP and CSIS, and will it actually work? How else might it be used? What are the criteria for it?

It's not just racial profiling we should be concerned about, but bureaucratic bungling.

He wrote before the Butts' experience came to light.

The Victoria Times Colonist [some name for a paper!] honed in on what in the States would be called "due process" issues.

Canada's new no-fly list won't make air travel safer, but it will violate basic principles of justice and fairness. ...

Your name could be on the list already. The government won't allow you to check.

The result is that you could be presumed guilty of an offence serious enough to keep you from boarding an airplane without having the opportunity to hear the allegations against you, confront the accusers or provide evidence to clear your name.

But while you are denied access to the information, the government says it can be shared with foreign governments and agencies, exposing Canadians to a real risk of detention or harassment in other countries. ...

It's important to guard against terror attacks. But it's also important to remember that the purpose of the exercise is to protect our way of life and our values.

Privacy commissioners weigh in
Unlike the United States, Canada has government officials charged with protecting citizens' privacy. They called for suspension of the no fly list program.

Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart and the 12 provincial and territorial information and privacy commissioners and ombudsmen, meeting in Fredericton, unanimously endorsed the call to suspend the no-fly list yesterday. ...

They said the no-fly list involves the secretive use of personal information in a way that will "profoundly impact" privacy and other rights such as freedom of association and mobility rights.

Maher Arar knows about watch lists
To their considerable credit, Canadians are ashamed and angry that Canadian Maher Arar [pictured with his wife; CP PHOTO/Fred Chartrand] was snatched up by U.S. authorities when in transit through New York and shipped off to Syria to be tortured based on false suspicions emanating from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Canada's FBI equivalent). The Canadian government has paid the Toronto resident $12 million in compensation. He is still on the U.S. no-fly list.

Recently Arar has been speaking out against the Canadian list.

"The security agencies are telling us, 'You should trust us,"' Arar told a group of university students Tuesday.

"My answer to that would be: 'Well, we've seen good examples at the inquiry where we trusted them'."

Documents from the Arar inquiry suggest Canada's spy agency knew he would be tortured in Syria, and then tried claiming national security as an excuse for keeping their involvement secret. ...

He says he's certain that the no-fly list will encounter problems and excesses - and that they will primarily affect Muslim Canadians. ...

"We don't know the names on those lists but it's a fact of life that after the events of 9-11 the Muslim community have been targeted.

"It's safe to assume that most of those names are names of people who have a Muslim background."

Most Canadians don't want to be pushed around by the angry colossus to the south. Their no fly list sure looks like a concession to the U.S. security theater charade.

Security pipedreams

Can I just point out that U.S. gun laws are nuts?

The AP reports:

More than 200 people suspected of ties to terrorism bought guns in the U.S. last year legally, FBI figures show.

The 247 people who were allowed to buy weapons did so after going through required background checks as required by federal law. ...About the same number of people suspected of ties to terrorism also successfully purchased guns in the U.S. in 2009.

The government can only prevent people from buying guns for any of 11 reasons. Convicted felons and illegal immigrants, for example, cannot buy weapons. But the terrorist watch list is different. People become convicted felons only after a court process and an opportunity to defend themselves.

The watch list is secret and generated at the government's discretion. It is not a list of people convicted of terrorism crimes. The list of about 450,000 people includes suspected members of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations, terror financiers, terror recruiters and people who attended training camps. People's names are added to and removed from the watch list every day, and most people never know whether they're on it.

***I've pretty much stopped writing about no fly lists and watch lists because everyone who cares has noticed that they make no sense and constitute an ongoing abuse of arbitrary power in the name of "security." (Click the "no fly list" label in the right column for more than you want to know about this madness.)

Patrick Smith who writes "Ask the Pilot" for Salon recently described an experience that illustrates the utter absurdity of security theater, not to mention the bullying behavior of some TSA workers. Since he's often flying the plane, therefore uniquely well placed to accomplish any nasty plot he might be planning, his repeated brushes with this nonsense clarify how insane the security obsession has become. He concludes:

In the United States alone, more than 2 million people fly every day, subject to all manner of tedium and humiliation, yet there is virtually no protest either from citizens or their leaders. Certainly there is no political will to get things changed. People grumble, shake their heads, and move along in a woozy capitulation to a security apparatus that is both repressive and ineffective.

This will continue, presumably, until disaster strikes, at which point the screams for accountability will be shrill and righteous and entirely too late.

Separately, perhaps, from all of this, we need to acknowledge the reality, however unfortunate, that no amount of airport security is going to stop a terrorist who is clever and resourceful enough. There will always be a way to circumvent whatever measures we put in place, no matter how draconian. ...

TSA shifts blame to airlines

For several years, this blog tracked Transportation Security Administration (TSA) doings closely. (See No Fly Follies on the blog sidebar.) After all, I'd had my own rather dramatic brush with security theater as practiced during U.S. air travel.

In the past year everyone has been writing about it. No terrorists are impeded, but absurdities pile up. In just the last month, it took an act of Congress to get Nelson Mandela off the list. A CNN reporter tries to shed some light and gets hassled by "security." The ACLU has pointed out the famous list is now up 1,000,000 names. It's not just the elite media that have taken notice. The Muskogee Phoenix points out that implies there 133.3 people from the Oklahoma town of 40,000 on the list.

But today's news from USA Today surpasses previous heights of surrealism.

Airlines may face fines over mistaken terrorist IDs
WASHINGTON — The Transportation Security Administration is threatening to fine airlines up to $25,000 when they erroneously tell passengers they are on a terrorist watch list. ...

Airlines compare passenger names to government watch lists before a flight. When airlines find an apparent match, passengers cannot print a boarding pass at home or at airport kiosks and must go to an airline check-in counter with ID to show they are not a suspected terrorist. ...

"We will not tolerate anyone saying to a member of the public that you're on a watch list," [TSA Director Kip] Hawley told the House aviation subcommittee. "That undercuts the credibility of the system."

The mind reels. They create a list (and won't really tell anyone how they assemble it.) They demand the airlines enforce their list. Then they threaten the airlines with fines if the airlines tell people they've been snared by the list.

That's some mighty public, transparent ass-covering Mr. Hawley.

Depressingly honest

The Toronto Globe and Mail notes:

Canada puts Guantanamo on torture watch list
[The ministry of] Foreign Affairs has put Guantanamo Bay on a watch list for torture, despite Ottawa's assertions that it will not intervene with claims that Omar Khadr has been abused while in detention, CTV News reported last night.

Mr. Khadr, 21, has been held at Guantanamo Bay for more than five years as he awaits trial for the alleged killing of a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan.

His U.S. military lawyer, William Kuebler, says Ottawa's move to name the detention camp on the watch list - outlined in documents released as evidence in a court case - contradicts Prime Minister Stephen Harper's assurances of fair treatment for the Canadian man.

Two lawless governments -- one brutal, the other cowardly -- play out their roles.

UPDATE: January 19 -- Well, Canada didn't stick to its principles very long. Reuters reports:

Canada's foreign ministry, responding to pressure from close allies, said on Saturday it would remove the United States and Israel from a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured.

Both nations expressed unhappiness after it emerged they had been listed in a document that formed part of a training course manual on torture awareness given to Canadian diplomats.

Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier said he regretted the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual, which also classified some U.S. interrogation techniques as torture.

Update on "no fly list" lawsuit

On Friday, April 22, my partner and I hauled ourselves down to federal court to watch arguments in our lawsuit, brought by the ACLU and cooperating attorneys, demanding that the Transportation Safety Administration and the FBI explain the "no fly list." In August, 2002, the two of us were told at the airport that we were on the "FBI no fly list," detained by San Francisco police, and subjected to special search procedures. We've sporadically had various kinds of special scrutiny at airports after this episode. Meanwhile, the lawsuit has been bumping along in the courts since April 2003. Several times the judge scolded the government for not turning over relevant documents.
Last fall the TSA released 300 pages, heavily blacked out, that showed that the administration of this list of persons thought to be a danger to aviation was haphazard and subjective. The ACLU went back to court, asking that the government provide legal justification for blacking out most information about the list -- blanket claims of national security aren't good enough to justify sticking labels on people

Friday's hearing didn't produce anything startling. Judge Charles Breyer seemed to be having attorneys for both sides appear so that he could ask them a few more questions.

He asked Tom Burke, our lawyer, whether we had flown since the initial incident -- Tom said yes, but the question gave him a chance to tell the court that the TSA is admitting that the list has now grown from 16 names in September 2001 to some 31,000 names now. Tom then pointed out that in March, his own name had turned up on the "terrorist watch list!"

The judge then asked the government to explain why they had blacked out the names of the mid-level bureaucrats who compile the list. He asked whether the government had considered whether "the public has the right to know who is doing the public's business." The TSA lawyer claimed "national security."

Later Burke suggested what government lawyers might be trying to hide:

Burke pointed to a February 2003 FBI e-mail first released last October. It read: "Criteria are confidential but involve things passengers might do which also might be things a terrorist would do, e.g., pray to Allah right before the flight that you might have 90 virgins in heaven."

Burke argued, even if the specific e-mail was only an insensitive joke, the public has the right to know who wrote the e-mail. Both the sender and recipient had been redacted.

Judge Breyer will be issuing his final opinion on what the government must disclose about the no fly list sometime in the next few months.

In view of right wing attacks on federal judges, it was interesting to spend a morning watching one work. Our case came up last on the mornings' docket, so we got to watch Breyer in action. He seemed quite devoted to discerning what law might apply in the cases before him and extremely knowledgeable about the facts of each case. In one case he admonished an attorney to give him a legal argument, insisting: "you can't just come in here and talk to me as if I were Judge Judy." On the other hand, in two cases plaintiffs were acting as their own attorneys (yikes!); he was very careful to make sure they really understood what motions they had to file and what procedures they had to follow. His patience was impressive.

One attorney attempted to plead his client's ignorance of one of the judge's earlier findings and consequent lack of a responsibility to comply. Breyer was stern: "you are bound by an order of this court -- that is the way it was last summer when I made the order; that was the rule when these matters happened; that is how it has been for 200 years."

I wouldn't want to try to make wingnut arguments in Judge Breyer's court -- and at the same time I am confident that in our case he will do his best to do justice to both plaintiffs and the government. Very impressive guy.

UPDATE [12/02/2005]: The lawsuit ended inconclusively. Judge Breyer made the government produce more and more documents that it didn't want to reveal, ascertained that we were able to fly normally, and finally ruled that it might endanger "national security" to require that they tell us completely why we turned up on their list. Other cases with other plaintiffs continue.

Now they are after our lawyer…

Thomas Burke represents my partner and me in our odyssey with the US government's "No Fly List." Now he has joined the club. Airlines tell him he is on the "terrorist watch list." Tom, we're sorry if we'd dragged you into a crazed wonderland we've come to know too well.

"From the TSA's perspective, the screening is just one of the many new layers of increased security that are designed to thwart terrorist activity. The inconvenience is regrettable, but a price that society has to pay for security. And for national security reasons, the FBI and other government agencies responsible for supplying names to the lists will not divulge the criteria they use. They say that would amount to tipping their hands to the terrorists.

"'People on the lists are known threats to civil aviation or suspected threats,' says Amy Von Walter, a TSA spokeswoman."

Burke makes the same complaint we do: "The underlying danger is not that Tom Burke can no longer get a boarding pass to get on an airline," says the First Amendment lawyer. "It's that the Tom Burkes in the world may forever more be associated [with the terrorist watch list]."
…

In August 2002, my partner and I were stopped and detained at the San Francisco airport and told we were on the "FBI no fly list." Although we were eventually able to fly, the experience was distressing even to long time political activists.

Since the TSA wouldn't (or couldn't) tell us how our names got on their list, we sued.

In October 2004, the government released some documents about the "no fly" list that revealed a picture of great uncertainty and embarrassing inefficiency in compiling agencies. Once your name gets on this list, an event that seems pretty random, there seems to be no formal process to remove anyone, nor any guarantee that some agency here or abroad may not carry on for years with the notion that you pose a threat.

The next hearing in our lawsuit is currently scheduled for April 22. If this thing ever gets finished, now we'll have to agitate to get Tom off the list. Stay tuned…

Bugaboo

Ramzi Hashisho photo

What to do if local students are acting out? Threaten to put them on the national terrorist watch list.

That's just what's happening in Oglethorpe County, Ohio. Students have been making phony bomb threats. After Virginia Tech, Colombine and the efforts of the National Rifle Association to ensure wide availability of lethal weapons, authorities have to do something.

So they held an assembly at a middle school to warn the kids:

"Even though you're a juvenile, your name goes on the terrorist list for the United States of America for the rest of your life," sheriff's Investigator Steve Jones told an assembly of middle school students on Wednesday. "That's how serious this is."

Eight students between 10 and 15 years old were charged with terroristic threats and acts for leaving threatening notes in school hallways.

Athens Banner-Herald
March 30, 2008

The FBI isn't sure it wants the work of tracking the pranksters.

"If someone gets nominated (for the list) and they see it's a 10-year-old kid, common sense would hopefully prevail," said Special Agent Richard Kolko, the FBI's chief spokesman in Washington.

But the ACLU isn't quite so confident about the government's good judgment.

But an ACLU representative said she wouldn't be surprised to see a 10-year-old branded a potential terrorist because criteria for getting on the terror watch list - which now includes nearly 1 million names - is so secretive.

"It is not exactly clear how an individual is placed on a watch list," said Azadeh Shahshahani, National Security/Immigration Rights Project director for the ACLU Foundation of Georgia.

"Placement appears to be a highly subjective process subject to the discretion of invisible and unaccountable security officials," she said.

Big brother is watching you, kids.

Babies now on TSA "no fly list"

According to the August 15, 2005 Guardian our Security Theater bureaucrats have bravely carried their performance into a new arena.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Infants have been stopped from boarding planes at airports throughout the U.S. because their names are the same as or similar to those of possible terrorists on the government's "no-fly list.''

It sounds like a joke, but it's not funny to parents who miss flights while scrambling to have babies' passports and other documents faxed.

Ingrid Sanden's 1-year-old daughter was stopped in Phoenix before boarding a flight home to Washington at Thanksgiving.

"I completely understand the war on terrorism, and I completely understand people wanting to be safe when they fly,'' Sanden said. "But focusing the target a little bit is probably a better use of resources.''

What are the TSA gnomes thinking? Looking for suicide bombers in diapers?

There is nothing about the "no fly list" that plausibly is making us safer. Some recent adult "no fly" episodes that have trickled into the media:

• Lately TSA has repeatedly stopped a former US diplomat who travels abroad often doing nonprofit work.

• The Grand Forks (ND) Herald reported in some consternation that a local accountant had been "selected" when flying home from Chicago.

• Former Presidential candidate John Anderson was told an airline would not issue him a ticket to Germany because he was on a "watch list."

• And then there was the lawyer who represented this blogger and her friend who had sued the government to find out why they were on the list -- and that attorney himself ended up on the list.

None of this is making any of us safer. Fenton Johnson, the author of Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey, spoke for many of us when he described his reactions to finding himself on the list in the LA Times:

Why am I on the TSA list? Because I have a common first and last name? Because I snapped at a security screener who confiscated my nail clippers? Because I write critically of the administration? Because I vote Democratic?

Once I would have thought these questions paranoid — then I found myself on the list. If it's a mistake, why not remove my name, thereby making the list more efficient and effective? If a law enforcement agency somewhere thinks I'm dangerous, shouldn't it question me, let me clear myself? Don't bother asking these questions, because "national security" answers all questions and justifies all actions, including wars abroad and civil rights restrictions at home.

I believe in the possibility of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, but I think there's a better chance that hackers will penetrate the TSA's computers or that a TSA employee will sell access to confidential records. I am even more concerned that a chaotic bureaucracy — which has had four directors in three years — is ripe for manipulation by snoops, politicians, data thieves and even law enforcement agencies eager to know more and control more about us.

Everyone cited in this post is white, a US citizen, and relatively entitled (at least.) We can only imagine what the knowledge of being constantly inspected and listed does to the lives of Muslim, Arab, and Asian people in the US who have done nothing that could rationally warrant suspicion.

Futile as it sometimes seems, we must continue to resist a power hungry Administration's drive to enmesh us all in a culture of fear.

"Are you still on the no fly list?"

From "Inside Job: My Life as an Airport Screener" in Conde Nast Traveler. Don't miss Barbara Peterson's fascinating tale. Photo by Marc Asnin.

Friends ask me this periodically. As far as I can tell, the answer is "no." Since our lawsuit concluded, airline clerks no longer respond to my ID with the telltale start and the phrase "there is something wrong with my computer." My boarding passes no longer get marked with a hand-scrawled red "S" (early days) or the current printed "SSSS" that means you are a "selectee" subjected to special search.

Of course the government never told us we off the list -- in fact, they refused throughout the lawsuit to say whether we were on the list. But my anecdotal evidence is that they've decided I'm harmless to air traffic (though possibly not to the T.S.A.)

What's important is that a lot of other harmless people are put through various levels of harassment by the U.S. audience-participation airport security theater. Not too surprisingly, an awful lot of them have Arab or South Asian names. A recent rant about being stopped on KABOBfest, an English language Arab blog, evoked these stories:

I have a little over a hundred boarding passes with the SSSS. I'm hoping to go into the Guiness book of records as the person with the largest such collection.

It's alright. I've never flown once without the SSSS. The last time I flew, I was so sure I was gonna get the SSSS that before the alaska airlines lady printed my ticket, I said, "How much do I have to pay you to remove that SSSS off my ticket?"

You know-after writing this piece, I realized that after returning from Venezuela in January (entering the US through Houston, where the infamous statue of George Bush Sr. is prominently displayed in the middle of the main terminal), where they interrogated me over the Lebanon stamp in my passport, that I haven't had a hassle-free airport experience since. After the customs booth issues, I was taken to a sequestered, hidden facility in the airport's baggage claim area where my luggage underwent additional screening. They were disappointed to find out that all I had in there were anthro papers and clothes! [This one strikes home for me because I too have the Lebanese visa stamp and recently returned to the country through Houston --probably an "Anglo" last name enabled me to walk right in, unhindered.]

***Today Josh Marshall is chewing over the story of distinguished law professor Walter Murphy who had a brush with the "selectee list." Airline personnel casually agreed with his suggestion that perhaps he was listed because of peace activities or vocal opposition to the Bush regime. Marshall was a greatly concerned:

Given who Professor Murphy is, I have no doubt this is an accurate account of his particular experience. And it would seem that the people who actually work with the list on a daily basis treat it as a given that the most innocuous and obviously protected forms of criticism of the Bush administration routinely get you on the watch list.

The T.S.A. has always insisted that any innocents on the list are cases of mistaken identity, not political persecution. But the sort of things airline folks told Professor Murphy are exactly what they told us about the list we found ourselves detained, way back in 2002. At that point, we assumed we were victims of a sort of "round up the usual suspects" phenomenon: after 9/11 all the various federal spy outfits threw together everyone they'd ever considered "suspicious." We probably turned up in a lot of categories having lived long lives of activism, so we were thrown on a list.

A recent Washington Post article headlined "Terror Database Has Quadrupled In Four Years: U.S. Watch Lists Are Drawn From Massive Clearinghouse," suggests wide-ranging collection of names is still the rule. The so-called Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) is now up to 435,000 names.

TIDE is a vacuum cleaner for both proven and unproven information, and its managers disclaim responsibility for how other agencies use the data. "What's the alternative?" [official Russ] Travers said. "I work under the assumption that we're never going to have perfect information -- fingerprints, DNA -- on 6 billion people across the planet. . . . If someone actually has a better idea, I'm all ears."...

The 80 TIDE analysts get "thousands of messages a day," Travers said, much of the data "fragmentary," "inconsistent" and "sometimes just flat-out wrong." Often the analysts go back to the intelligence agencies for details. "Sometimes you'll get sort of corroborating information," he said, "but many times you're not going to get much. What we use here, rightly or wrongly, is a reasonable-suspicion standard." ...

Every night at 10, TIDE dumps an unclassified version of that day's harvest -- names, dates of birth, countries of origin and passport information -- into a database belonging to the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center. TIDE's most sensitive information is not included. The FBI adds data about U.S. suspects with no international ties for a combined daily total of 1,000 to 1,500 new names.

Sure sounds like they just throw in "all the usual suspects" -- and everyone named Mohammed.

This isn't security. It is a combination of data collection gone cancerous, permanent welfare for government bureaucracies, and theatrical posturing to convince the population that Big Brother is on the job.

Security in the time of the underwear bomber

Given this blog's past interest in the TSA no fly list, I suppose I ought to have some commentary on the Nigerian underwear bomber. Actually the subject seems mostly boring -- it is not exactly news there are people who want to kill people -- but here goes:

• This aspirational terrorist was on some "watch list," but that didn't do anything to protect anyone. Why? -- well, a million or so names, many of them shared with perfectly harmless people, makes the list useless. When almost all matches are false, those charged with using the list will begin to ignore it. The U.S. can "watch list" people all it likes, but that's just for show, not to protect anyone.

• As security guru Bruce Schneier has been saying for years, the episode proves that the most important security improvement since 9/11 works: passengers and crew, at whatever risk to themselves, will jump to incapacitate anyone doing anything that seems suspicious. Now that we know that there are nuts who are willing to bring themselves down along with us to get the world's attention, we won't sit around to let it happen. This may not stop a more competent terrorist, but it worked with this asshole and the shoe bomber.

• Concern over full body image scanning is not new. See this and this.

• It's still worthwhile to terrorist masterminds to send incompetent clowns to create air travel terror incidents, even if they fail, because international air travel is easy to screw up. I passed through Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires on December 28 -- what a miserable mob scene! In addition to the apparently common two hour check-in lines, we were all subjected to extra personal wanding, hand luggage searches, individual questioning ... by harried airline personnel who also were also expected to carry out their usual duties. I'm pretty sure that a smart terrorist would have slid right through, but thousands were inconvenienced and even humiliated in long lines. You have to really want to travel to go through this kind of thing; do we really want a society made up of United States residents who have been convinced that visiting the rest of the world is so difficult? Or a United States that no sensible foreigner would visit because getting in requires abuse and humiliation? We're working on it.

When "security" is just theater, it helps the terrorists more than it serves us.

The photo is from a Sydney Morning Herald travel blog that labels Ezeisa one of "the world's worst airports." That was in "normal" times; I concur. Given the atmosphere on the 28th, I didn't think it a good idea to shoot my own photo of the chaos.

Guns and the no-fly list

On Sunday night the Prez suggested that

"Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun. What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon? This is a matter of national security."

I have to admit that I momentarily enjoyed the politics behind the suggestion. When Republicans are pissing in their pants at the idea of admitting desperate escapees from the Syrian war and ISIS, they refuse to vote to prevent people designated as dangerous from acquiring guns? That's low.

But hey, I was once told I was on the no fly list which was always a crock. Certainly I was never any danger to aviation or much of anything else. And much as the spooks like to tout their "success" at preventing terrorism, people who actually know something about security have long thought watch lists were mere "theater."

So I don't mind that that Jamelle Bouie has reminded anyone inclined to enjoy the Prez's thrust against gun lovers' hypocrisy that we're putting ourselves on the wrong side of rights we normally care about.

... civil libertarians—and liberals, at least during the Bush administration—think [the terrorist watch list] is constitutionally dubious. They’re right. “The list contains the names of people who the government thinks are a threat to civil aviation—terrorists,” writes University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner for Slate. “These people are denied passage. … Yet the government does not have proof that these people have committed crimes nor, since it can’t see into the future, that they will commit crimes.” If you’re on these lists, you’re presumed guilty until proven innocent, with no due process and little recourse.

The list is conceptually flawed, and using it to deny gun ownership is wrong on its face. Add racial and religious profiling to the mix—the people on the list, including Americans, are disproportionately Arab or from Muslim countries—and you have an anti-gun measure with deep disparate impact.

He's right; my politically convenient pleasure is wrong. Schadenfreude at Republican discomfiture is no excuse.

Listed while Muslim

Security photo from Fly Away Café.

These days, it is all too easy to think of the U.S. government's airport security and watch lists as a kind of joke. After all, the infamous "selectee list" has ballooned to some 900,000 names, "security" serves as an excuse for TSA inspectors to engage in non-consensual S&M, even federal air marshals find themselves listed and barred from flights, and school authorities use the threat of the list to scare unruly kids. People ask whether my partner and I are still on the list; I think not. If you can manage to cost the government money, you can get removed.

But for some people, getting listed by the U.S. government leads to ongoing harassment, perennial "lost" luggage when they fly, long questioning when they cross borders, and efforts to get them to express "dangerous" opinions.

Mustafa Malik is a Washington-based journalist who was born in India, practiced his trade in Pakistan, and whose opinion articles have appeared in such outlets as the Washington Post and the Austin-American Statesman. Today in Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper, he has catalogued what it is like to live "Under suspicion, American style." The consequences of making "the list" range from inconvenient to very threatening. Here are some instances from Malik's article.

• "'I got my boarding pass from that machine but couldn't get my husband's!' Pat told a woman behind a Northwest Airlines desk. The clerk checked out my ticket in her computer and said, 'You're on the watch list, sir!' I had suspected that for five years."

• "...federal agents could have learned about my meetings with some Muslim activists and academics from published articles in which I had quoted them. But they also quizzed me about those whom I had contacted by phone and e-mail but had not mentioned in any writings. I realized that my phone conversations and e-mails could have been intercepted."

• "Homeland Security appears to have circulated my profile to airlines. This past March 31 I boarded a British Airways flight in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to return to Washington. A flight attendant handed me a lunch packet about 10 minutes before the lunch carts rolled in to serve lunch to everybody else. I asked her why she had served me before other passengers. She said mine was a 'Muslim meal,' meaning the meat was kosher. I said I did not request a kosher meal and asked how she knew that I was a Muslim. 'I also know,' she whispered, 'that you speak four languages!'"

• "During my international flights, my luggage is held up, apparently for special scrutiny. Since 2003 I have flown out of the US four times. On every occasion my luggage arrived one to five days late."

• "On my return to New York on June 17 I had to spend 20-25 minutes answering questions about where I went, whom I met, what I did, and more, while my companions breezed through without any hassle. I was the only Muslim among the group."

• "There have also been discernible attempts to provoke me into criticizing Israel and America. Several suspicious characters have sought me out to discuss Palestine and Israel and Muslim militancy."

I think we can assume that if this list of some 8 million people the U.S. government might round up in a crisis really exists, Mr. Malik is on it.

And why is Mr. Malik the subject of so much government interest? He's pretty sure he knows:

A Homeland Security terrorism investigator visited me again. He asked me about some of my other Muslim contacts, and even though I had been writing about a variety of issues, he asked my views only on terrorism and Palestinian militant groups. I reiterated that the Palestinian guerrillas were doing what Massachusetts Minutemen had done during the American Revolution: fighting for national liberation.

Yes, that will do it.

Her "day in court" (she's barred) is Kafkaesque

Lately I've been writing rather cavalierly about the abusive treatment our post 9/11 Heimat Security regime inflicts on people in the process of trying to fly.

But thanks to Nell writing in the comments, I'm now following more closely Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim's ongoing challenge to her no-fly list status through the excellent series of accounts at Papers Please! (Should you follow this link and find that Dr. Ibrahim's story is no longer the lead item, just enter "Ibrahim" in the search box in the right column.)

Ibrahim is not some no-count, anonymous foreign Muslim. According to the Associated Press' trial coverage, she's

... 48, lives in Malaysia with her husband and four children and is dean of the architecture and engineering school at the University of Malaysia.

She was apparently added to the no-fly list when a graduate student at Stanford over ten years ago

The current trial is beyond Kafkaeque. Ibrahim can only testify on videotape. The U.S. government barred Ibrahim's U.S. citizen daughter from flying in from Malaysia to testify by putting the daughter on a no-fly list. This intervention was revealed by the Malaysian airline, then the U.S. spooks implausibly denied their actions. More here. Lawyers for Ibrahim were subjected to a clearance process under an order from the trial judge and thus allowed to learn what the government says is Ibrahim's watch list status -- but they are barred from telling their client.

The theory about what caused Ibrahim to be barred from flying that is presented in her legal briefs is that 1) linguistically-challenged Feds confused the similar names of a Malaysian academic association with an Islamic terrorist outfit and 2) the FBI wanted to recruit her to spy on Muslim mosques while she was grad student in California, but she stiffed them, so they stuck her on a barring list and still refuse to admit they screwed up.

The AP summarizes

"Once you're in the system it's almost impossible to get out," Ibrahim's lawyer Elizabeth Pipkin told the judge Monday during opening statements at the trial. Pipkin said Ibrahim landed on the no-fly list through inadequate training of list administrators and their bias regarding religious and national origin.

I find that totally plausible. We always refused to speculate on why the government once apparently briefly listed a couple of San Francisco peace activists. But it always seemed likely that our awkward detention was the product of a "round up the usual suspects" impulse after 9/11. Having made the initial mistake, the government was willing to devote huge resources to avoiding any kind of scrutiny, as much to avoid embarrassing itself as to maintain any legitimate "state secrets."

The judge in Dr. Ibrahim's case seems frustrated and appalled by the government's evasions of ordinary legal procedures. (Our judge, Charles Breyer, the brother of the Supreme Court judge, acted equally critical of the Feds. Experienced federal court judges don't like to be handed lies and gobbledegook.) Let's hope he forces this story into the open. He'll take a lot of shit if he does, but under our current surveillance state regime, only occasional courage on the part of fortuitously placed individuals seems to impede the rush to pervasive tyranny.

Meanwhile, testimony in this trial taught me that I better get hold of a copy of Jeffrey Kahn's book,Mrs. Shipley's Ghost: The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watchlists, to keep up on these issues. More to come.