Terrorist watch list deemed unconstitutional

The 32-page decision, written by Judge Anthony J. Trenga of United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, detailed how individuals can be “nominated” to the watchlist as “known or suspected terrorists” even if there is no evidence the person is engaged in criminal activity, committed a crime, or is expected to commit a crime in the future. Having noted that the watchlist included roughly 1.2 million people as of 2017, among them about 4,600 U.S. citizens or green card holders, Trenga wrote that when it comes to due process, inclusion on the watchlist carries “an inherent, substantial risk of erroneous deprivation.”

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“The general right of free movement is a long recognized, fundamental liberty,” Trenga observed. “While inclusion in the TSDB does not constitute a total ban on international travel in the same way that inclusion on the No Fly List does, the wide-ranging consequences of an individual’s watchlist status render it more closely analogous to the No Fly List than to the types of regulations that courts have found to be reasonable regulations that still facilitated access and use of means of travel.”

Being added to a watchlist can seriously damage a person’s reputation, Trenga went on to write, describing the cascading effects inclusion on such a list can have on an individual’s interactions with important, often powerful, institutions. When a person is placed on the watchlist (typically unknowingly and frequently without suspicion of links to criminal activity), the judge wrote, that information is shared with more than “18,000 state, local, county, city, university and college, tribal and federal law enforcement agencies,” not to mention an additional “533 private entities” and foreign governments.

“These private entities include the police and security forces of private railroads, colleges, universities, hospitals, prisons, as well as animal welfare organizations; information technology, fingerprint databases, and forensic analysis providers, and private probation and pretrial services,” the judge wrote. “The dissemination of an individual’s TSDB status to these entities would reasonably be expected to affect any interaction an individual on the Watchlist has with law enforcement agencies and private entities that use TSDB information to screen individuals they encounter in traffic stops, field interviews, house visits, municipal permit processes, firearm purchases, certain licensing applications, and other scenarios.”

In other words, Trenga wrote, inclusion on such a widely shared, yet secret and potentially consequential list, raised the possibility that the traumatizing experiences the plaintiffs had at the border and the ports — “being surrounded by police, handcuffed in front of their families, and detained for many hours” — could be replicated in the interior of the country as well. “In short,” he wrote, “placement on the TSDB triggers an understandable response by law enforcement in even the most routine encounters with someone on the Watchlist that substantially increases the risk faced by that individual from the encounter.”

[...]

In 2015, Trenga found that the government’s redress system for getting off of its no-fly list — which is almost as opaque as the system for getting on the list — was constitutionally inadequate. Trenga’s ruling on Wednesday built on those proceedings, which had previously found that the government’s watchlisting category of “suspected terrorists” was “based to a large extent on subjective judgments.”

“There is no evidence, or contention, that any of these plaintiffs satisfy the definition of a ’known terrorist,” Trenga wrote. “None have been convicted, charged or indicted for any criminal offense related to terrorism, or otherwise.” They were instead designated “suspected terrorists,” he wrote, and given the shakiness of that category, they were at a “grave risk” of seeing their rights erroneously deprived.

[...]

Trenga ordered attorneys for the plaintiffs and the government to file briefings in the coming weeks aimed at providing a remedy that will “protect a citizen’s constitutional rights while not unduly compromising public safety or national security.”

  Intercept

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Watch List Leak

Nearly half of the people on the U.S. government’s widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group, according to classified government documents obtained by The Intercept.

[...]

The documents, obtained from a source in the intelligence community, also reveal that the Obama Administration has presided over an unprecedented expansion of the terrorist screening system. Since taking office, Obama has boosted the number of people on the no fly list more than ten-fold, to an all-time high of 47,000—surpassing the number of people barred from flying under George W. Bush.

[...]

The top five U.S. cities represented on the main watchlist for “known or suspected terrorists” are New York; Dearborn, Mich.; Houston; San Diego; and Chicago. At 96,000 residents, Dearborn is much smaller than the other cities in the top five, suggesting that its significant Muslim population—40 percent of its population is of Arab descent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—has been disproportionately targeted for watchlisting.

[...]

“To my knowledge, there have been no Muslims in Dearborn who have committed acts of terrorism against our country,” Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told The Intercept.

[...]

[...]

According to the government’s watchlisting guidelines, published by The Intercept last month, officials don’t need “concrete facts” or “irrefutable evidence” to secretly place someone on the list—only a vague and elastic standard of “reasonable suspicion.”

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Most people placed on the government’s watchlist begin in a larger, classified system known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE). The TIDE database actually allows for targeting people based on far less evidence than the already lax standards used for placing people on the watchlist.

[...]

In the summer of 2013, officials celebrated what one classified document prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center refers to as “a milestone”—boosting the number of people in the TIDE database to a total of one million, up from half a million four years earlier.

[...]

In 2006, CBS News obtained a copy of the no fly list and reported that it included 44,000 names, including Bolivian President Evo Morales and the head of Lebanon’s parliament. Faced with a widespread public backlash, the government cut the list down to just 4,000 names by late 2009.

The next year, after the so-called “underwear bomber” tried to bring down a commercial airliner bound for Detroit, Obama loosened the criteria for adding people to the no fly list. The impact was immediate. Since 2010, the classified documents note, the National Counterterrorism Center has “created more than 430,000 terrorism-related person records” while deleting only 50,000 people “whose nexus to terrorism was refuted or did not meet current watchlisting criteria.”

[...]

“You might as well have a blue wand and just pretend there’s magic in it, because that’s what we’re doing with this—pretending that it works,” says former FBI agent Michael German, now a fellow at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. “These agencies see terrorism as a winning card for them. They get more resources."

[...]

According to [one] document, which notes that the numbers are “approximate,” 680,000 people have been watchlisted, with another 320,000 monitored in the larger TIDE database. As of August 2013, 5,000 Americans were on the watchlist while another 15,800 were targeted in TIDE.

  The Intercept

And unless someone leaks the names, we won't know who those people are.

16,000 people, including 1,200 Americans, have been classified as “selectees” who are targeted for enhanced screenings at airports and border crossings.

[...]

According to the documents, the government does much more than simply stop watchlisted people at airports. It also covertly collects and analyzes a wide range of personal information about those individuals –including facial images, fingerprints, and iris scans.

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In 2013, the directorate’s Biometric Analysis Branch (BAB) launched an initiative to obtain biometric data from driver’s license records across the country. At least 15 states and the District of Columbia are working with the directorate to facilitate access to facial images from driver’s licenses.

Next up: Number tattoos.

“We’re getting into Minority Report territory when being friends with the wrong person can mean the government puts you in a database and adds DMV photos, iris scans, and face recognition technology to track you secretly and without your knowledge,” says Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “The fact that this information can be shared with agencies from the CIA to the NYPD, which are not known for protecting civil liberties, brings us closer to an invasive and rights-violating government surveillance society at home and abroad.”

It's a Brave New World.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

A Small Step in the Right Direction

The government has long maintained that it could not tell anyone whether or not they were on the No Fly List or provide reasons for inclusion, claiming that doing so would expose national security secrets, but the court rejected that argument.

[...]

Following [the] court order, the government today notified seven people who were on the No Fly List that they are cleared to fly.

The six men and one woman are part of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit filed in 2010 on behalf of 13 Americans challenging their inclusion on the No Fly List.

A federal judge recently set deadlines ordering the government to notify all of the plaintiffs of their No Fly List status, give reasons to those still on the list, and provide an opportunity for them to challenge those reasons. The first of those deadlines is today, and the government must complete all of the notifications by January 16.

  ACLU

Confirmation: There Is Indeed a Second Leaker

Towards the end of filmmaker Laura Poitras’s portrait of Snowden – titled Citizenfour, the label he used when he first contacted her – [Glenn] Greenwald is seen telling Snowden about a second source.

Snowden, at a meeting with Greenwald in Moscow, expresses surprise at the level of information apparently coming from this new source. Greenwald, fearing he will be overheard, writes the details on scraps of paper.

The specific information relates to the number of the people on the US government’s watchlist of people under surveillance as a potential threat or as a suspect. The figure is an astonishing 1.2 million.

  Guardian

That really is astonishing.

In his first comment about the documentary, which Poitras had shown to him in advance, Snowden told the Guardian: “I hope people won’t see this as a story about heroism. It’s actually a story about what ordinary people can do in extraordinary circumstances.”

The Guardian

So then, ordinary people can be heroes.

Muslim-Ameircans File Lawsuit Against Government

Relying in part on recent Intercept reporting on the vast breadth of the government’s watchlisting system, several Muslim Americans filed a complaint in a Michigan federal court today, arguing that they have been wrongly ensnared in an unaccountable system without any opportunity to defend themselves.

[...]

One of the plaintiffs, Yaseen Kadura, claims that, after he was placed on the no fly list, a Department of Homeland Security official contacted him and tried to pressure him to become a government informant in Libya, holding out the possibility of being removed from the list as an inducement.

  The Intercept: Jeremy Scahill

By Association

Unaffiliated Terrorists

Created especially for the hundreds of thousands of people on the USG Watch List who don't belong to a terrorist organization:

Source:  Jeremy Scahill Twitter Account

Source:  The Intercept

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Was Greenwald Right? Is Courage Contageous?

The federal government has concluded there's a new leaker exposing national security documents in the aftermath of surveillance disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, U.S. officials tell CNN.

Proof of the newest leak comes from national security documents that formed the basis of a news story published Tuesday by the Intercept [Reporter: Jeremy Scahill], the news site launched by Glenn Greenwald, who also published Snowden's leaks.

[...]

The article cites documents prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013, which is after Snowden left the United States to avoid criminal charges.

  CNN

How to Render a Terrorist Watchlist Meaningless

Put everybody on it.

Nearly half of the people on the U.S. government’s widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group, according to classified government documents obtained by The Intercept.

Of the 680,000 people caught up in the government’s Terrorist Screening Database—a watchlist of “known or suspected terrorists” that is shared with local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and foreign governments—more than 40 percent are described by the government as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” That category—280,000 people—dwarfs the number of watchlisted people suspected of ties to al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah combined.

[...]

The documents, obtained from a source in the intelligence community, also reveal that the Obama Administration has presided over an unprecedented expansion of the terrorist screening system. Since taking office, Obama has boosted the number of people on the no fly list more than ten-fold, to an all-time high of 47,000—surpassing the number of people barred from flying under George W. Bush.

[...]

The government adds names to its databases, or adds information on existing subjects, at a rate of 900 records each day.

  The Intercept

Information overload, you think?

A U.S. counterterrorism official familiar with watchlisting data told The Intercept that as of November 2013, there were approximately 700,000 people in the Terrorist Screening Database, or TSDB, but declined to provide the current numbers. Last month, the Associated Press, citing federal court filings by government lawyers, reported that there have been 1.5 million names added to the watchlist over the past five years. The government official told The Intercept that was a misinterpretation of the data.

A government official with whom the reporters for this story were conversing before publishing it  (perhaps that same official who characterized the AP report as a misrepresentation) fed their would-be scoop - with a government twist, of course - to a government-friendly AP reporter, allowing a government-friendly international article to be published first. Probably not a good idea.

According to the source, [Intercept editor] Cook told the [government] official that in the future the agency would have only 30 minutes to respond to questions before publication.

  Huffington Post

That’s gonna hurt.

More Secret Surveillance - the Watch List

[The] federal government’s main terrorist watch list has grown to at least 700,000 people, with little scrutiny over how the determinations are made or the impact on those marked with the terrorist label.

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What’s more, the government refuses to confirm or deny whether someone is on the list, officially called the Terrorist Screening Database, or divulge the criteria used to make the decisions — other than to say the database includes “individuals known or suspected to be or have been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to terrorism and terrorist activities.”

  NYT

We may “never forget 9/11,” but it seems we’ve forgotten McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

"In aid of" could encompass anything short of denouncing terrorists, couldn't it?

Even less is known about the secondary watch lists that are derived from the main one, including the no-fly list (used to prevent people from boarding aircraft), the selectee and expanded selectee lists (used to flag travelers for extra screening at airport checkpoints), the TECS database (used to vet people entering or leaving the United States), the Consular Lookout and Support System (used to screen visa applications) and the known or suspected terrorists list (used by law enforcement in routine police encounters).

[...]

The Terrorist Screening Center, which administers the main terrorist watch list, declined to discuss its procedures, or to release current data about the number of people on various watch lists, and how many of them are American citizens. A T.S.C. official did say that fewer than 1 percent of the people in the main terrorist database are United States citizens or legal permanent residents, but there is no way to confirm that number.

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“When you have a huge list of people who are likely to commit terrorist acts, it’s easy to think that terrorism is a really big problem and we should be devoting a lot of resources to fighting it,” [Professor Bernstein of SUNY Buffalo] said. “As a society, we have choices about what we really think are the important problems.”

No choice if you don’t know what’s happening.

There are a couple of lawsuits currently underway attempting to get people off the list. But for “national security reasons,” they’re not even allowed to know why they got put there.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.