The US government’s notorious No Fly List supposedly contains about 47,000 names. The only clue that anyone might have as to whether their name is on that list as when they go to the airport and are refused boarding without any explanation. If you ask whether your name is on the list or the reason it might be on it, you receive no response. That meant you had no way of getting off the list.
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I have railed against the abuse of the US government’s notorious ‘No Fly List’, where the government keeps a secret list that tells airlines not to let people fly without telling them why they have been forbidden, what they need to do to get their names removed, nor even (in the early days) that they have such a list at all. This is such an arbitrary abuse of government power and due process that it boggles the mind
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I have written many times before about how the US government abuses is infamous ‘no fly’ list. People arrive at an airport either within the US or abroad to come to the US and are told that they cannot board the plane. No reasons are given for the denial and the affected people cannot find out why they are on the list or whether they are on the list at all or what they can do to try and get off it. It is as perfect an example of the arbitrary denial of due process as one can think of.
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I reported earlier about a federal judge who had slapped down the government over the way they abused their no-fly lists to harass people who had little or no recourse, because they were not told they were on the list or how they could get off it. [Read more…]
Ryan Devereaux reports that five people have now sued the government for infringing on their civil liberties by placing them on no-fly lists and otherwise harassing them using its massive database to put them on watch lists and used it to pressure them.
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The US blacklists people in many ways, with such people being subjected to snooping and harassment and being put on no-fly lists. And once you are on those secret terrorist watchlists it is almost impossible to get off. Investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux at The Intercept have obtained a key government document that explains how the government decides who goes on the list. They have published the 166-page document in full. The document is unclassified but the administration had vigorously resisted any disclosure about it.
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The Los Angeles Times published a grim tale of someone who got trapped in the Kafkaesque world occupied by those on the infamous ‘no fly list’.
For two weeks, Rehan Motiwala, a 29-year-old medical student from Pomona, sat stranded at the Bangkok airport, sleeping for 10 nights on a roach-infested mattress in a dank, windowless detention room reserved for deportees. [Read more…]
In all the focus on the NSA, we should not forget that the FBI is also part of the massive government intrusion into people’s privacy and in the violation their rights. The ACLU in a new report titled Unleashed and Unaccountable: The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority describes the many ways that the relaxation of rules governing how the FBI can operate (justified as always by the ‘war on terror’) has resulted in an explosion of abuses. [Read more…]