On Tuesday afternoon, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced a rare victory in the ongoing legal fight against the authoritarian excesses of the war on terror: A federal judge in Portland, Oregon, ruled that the insanely convoluted process by which people can get off of the no-fly list is unconstitutional and “wholly ineffective” to boot.
The no-fly list (which is part of a larger thing called the Terrorist Screening Database, or TSDB) is a way for the government to keep off of commercial flights those dastardly, probably foreign fiends whom the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) determines to be “known or suspected to be, or has been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of or related to, terrorism or terrorist activities." There are a lot of these people, according to the government—as many as 21,000 in 2012, including 500 US citizens—and if you are on the list you won’t be able to fly in or out of the United States on a commercial airline.
There are all sorts of civil-liberties reasons to despise the no-fly list, the most obvious one being that there’s no way to find out if you’re on it until you’re told that you can’t fly—and even then you might be on some other kind of secret banning-you-from-travel list. If you suspect you are on the list you may not know why and you can’t find out, though it could be a case of an FBI agent checking the wrong box on a form.
Found on http://www.vice.com/read/the-most-absurd-part-of-the-no-fly-list-has-been-declared-unconstitutional-by-a-judge
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