No-fly lists: do they really work?

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist acts in the United States, great efforts have been undertaken by the United States and Canada to thwart the intentions of terrorists to enter both countries. One of the steps undertaken is called the No Fly List, sometimes called the watch list, which is a secret list created and maintained by the United States and Canadian governments of people who are not permitted to
board a commercial aircraft for travel in the United States or Canada. It includes tens of thousands of names. The list – along with the Secondary Security Screening Selection, tags would-be passengers for extra inspection.

When an airline ticket is purchased, the reservation system of the airlines uses software to compare the passenger's name against the No Fly List. If the name matches, or is similar to a name on the No Fly List, a restriction is placed in their reservation that prevents them from being issued a boarding pass until the airline has determined if they are the actual person whose name is on the No Fly List.

Passengers are not told when a restriction has been placed on their reservation, and they normally do not find out that anything is unusual until they attempt to check in. Passengers who are on the list cannot use Internet check-in or the automatic check-in kiosks in airports. Any attempt to use them will normally result in a message that the check-in cannot be completed and that the passenger needs to see a live check-in agent.

In order to be issued a boarding pass, a passenger whose name is on the list must present identification that sufficiently differentiates himself from the person on the No Fly List. This can include, but is not limited to, date and place of birth, middle name, citizenship, passport number, etc. Depending on the airline, this clearance can be done either electronically, with the check-in agent keying the information into the system, or a manual procedure where the agent telephones a centralized security office to obtain clearance. Once a "false positive" passenger has been cleared for a flight, the clearance will usually, but not always, apply to the remaining flights on that reservation, including the return flight. However, the next time this passenger purchases an airline ticket he will have to be cleared all over again. If a passenger's identification is insufficient to differentiate that passenger from a name on the No-Fly List, the airline will refuse to issue a boarding pass and tell the passenger to contact the TSA.

False positive passengers are at a disadvantage when traveling, due to the fact that their documents must be inspected by airline personnel before they can be issued a boarding pass. Because this permanently excludes them being able to use Internet, kiosk, or curbside check-in, they are, at best, required to appear at the airport earlier than they might normally have, because they must wait in line to be cleared. Some airlines provide a special counter for this purpose; others require the passenger to wait in the line for passengers with checked baggage, even if they have no baggage to check. At worst, passengers have actually missed flights because the flights were oversold and all of the available boarding passes were already claimed by other passengers who were able to check-in via the Internet, or because airline personnel could not contact the airline's security department to obtain a clearance, or because the passenger's identification didn't sufficiently differentiate them from a name on the No Fly List.

In an effort to reduce the number of false positives, DHS announced on April 28, 2008 that each airline will be permitted to create a system to verify and store a passenger's date of birth, to clear up watch list mis-identifications. Passengers can voluntarily provide this information to the airline, which would have to be verified by presenting acceptable ID at the ticket counter. Once this data has been stored, travelers that were previously inconvenienced on every trip would be able to check-in online or at remote kiosks. It will be up to each individual airline to choose whether they wish to implement such a system.

Does this concept of denying terrorists entry into the United States or Canada really work? To answer that question, ask yourself this rhetorical question. What terrorists are going to travel with their own names and passports? Do terrorists really use their real names and if not, do they continuously use their phony names when they know that their real names and phony names are listed on the no-fly list? Real terrorists may not even be placed on the list for fear of tipping them off. According to the U.S. homeland security department, known terrorists are not placed on the list for fear that they would know they are being watched. Creating a no-fly list is about as pointless as posting a most-wanted list at police stations and then waiting for criminals to come to the police stations with their ID to be arrested.

Before 9/11, the American government’s list of suspected terrorists banned from air travel totaled just 16 names; today there are half a million names on the list. And that doesn’t include people the government thinks should be pulled aside for additional security screening. From 2003, there were 75,000 names on it of people who were to be taken aside for extra screening. A spokesman for the interagency National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which maintains the government's list of all suspected terrorists with links to international organizations, said they had 465,000 names covering 350,000 individuals. Many names are different versions of the same identity -- "Usama bin Laden" and "Osama bin Laden" for the al Qaeda chief, for example.

In addition to the NCTC list, the FBI keeps a list of U.S. persons who are believed to be domestic terrorists -- abortion clinic bombers, for example, or firebombing environmental extremists, who have no known tie to an international terrorist group. With that many names on the lists, innocent individuals with no connection to crime or terror are going to suffer for it."

The names of 14 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were also on the list even after they had been dead for five years. There is also found a number of high profile people who aren’t likely to turn up at an airline ticket counter any time soon, like convicted terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, now serving a life sentence in Colorado, and Saddam Hussein, who was executed in Baghdad.

Donna Bucella, who oversaw the creation of the list and has headed up the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center since 2003 was asked by Steve Kroft of the TV show, 60 Minutes why the names of dead people were still on the no-fly list. Her reply was; “Well, just because a person has died doesn't necessarily mean that their identity has died. People sometime carry the identities of people who have died."

Think how stupid that remark was. What fool who wants to be a terrorist is going to get a false passport under the name of Zacarias Moussaoui? Even if the parents of a newborn baby in Iraq named their child Saddam Hussein, why would anyone think that the newborn child is a terrorist?

Suppose a terrorist went by the name of John Smith and he is on the no-fly list and he is shot dead while attempting to commit an act of terrorism. His name would be still on the list. That would not be good news to the 50,247 people in the U.S. named John Smith or the many thousands of other John Smiths in other countries.

Steve Kroft had somehow gotten hold of a copy of the no-fly list used by airport authorities to screen for possible terrorists. He talked to 12 people with the name Robert Johnson, all of whom had been detained and interrogated almost every time they fly. Some of their detentions included strip searches and long delays in their travels. The report that Kroft of the TV show, 60 Minutes got his hands on suggested that the individual whose name was intended to be on the list was most likely the Robert Johnson who had been convicted of plotting to bomb a movie theater and a Hindu temple in Toronto.

There is a Robert J. Johnson, in the United States who is a surgeon and a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, was told in 2006 that he was on the list, although he had had no problem in flying the month before. Johnson was running as a Democrat against U.S. Representative.

Donna Bucella, who oversaw the creation of the list and has headed up the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center since 2003 has said that the name, Robert Johnson will never get off the list. "She regrets the trouble they experience, but chalks it up to the price of security in the post-9/11 world. "They're going to be inconvenienced every time because they do have the name of a person who's a known or suspected terrorist." Scary isn’t it? I hope that some day a terrorist uses her name and this woman then get on the no-fly list. I will pee my pants when I learn that she is on the list.

False positives are innocent persons who have been placed on the no-fly list in error. Consider the following and then ask yourself, why where these people submitted to the problems inherent to being on the no-fly list?

* Numerous children (including many under the age of five, and some under the age of one) have names that have been placed on the no-fly list. For example, Ted Adams -- the publisher of IDW comics -- named his little son "Sam Adams," a good, solid patriotic name. It's also a name on the Transportation Security Administration 's no-fly list, and the five-year-old has spent his young life being harassed by airport security goons who think he's a terrorist. Imagine this kid's life when he's an adult and every flight he takes involves an extra hour of hassle, a search, no assigned seats, being turned away, being humiliated, being harassed. An 8-year-old Kansas boy caused a national security stir after his name popped up on a no fly list and airlines banned him from flying in fear he might be a terrorist. The lady at the counter just bowed her head and said, 'We can’t get you on this plane, you're a terrorist.”

* Daniel Brown, a United States Marine returning from Iraq, was prevented from boarding a flight home in April 2006 because his name matched one on the No Fly List. The rest of his company refused to leave the airport until Brown was allowed to board.

* Asif Iqbal, a management consultant and legal resident of the United States born in Pakistan, plans to sue the U.S. government because he is regularly detained when he tries to fly, because he has the same name as a former Guantanamo detainee. Iqbal's work requires a lot of travel, and, even though the Guantanamo detainee has been released, his name remains on the No Fly List, and Iqbal the software consultant experiences frequent, unpredictable delays and missed flights. He is pushing for a photo ID and birthdate matching system, in addition to the current system of checking names.

* John McHugh, a Republican wondered whether he was on the list because of his opposition to the Iraq War. He stated, "This could just be a government screw-up, but I don't know, and they won't tell me.”

* Canadian journalist Patrick Martin has been frequently interrogated while traveling, because of a suspicious individual with the same name.

* U.S. Representative Don Young (R-AK), the 3rd-most senior Republican in the House, was flagged in 2004 after he was mistaken for a "Donald Lee Young".

* Some members of the Federal Air Marshal Service have been denied boarding on flights that they were assigned to protect because their names matched those of persons on the no-fly list.

* As of April 2008, Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa and other members of the African National Party are on the list, something that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called "rather embarrassing".

* In September 2004, former pop singer Cat Stevens (who converted to Islam and changed his name to "Yusuf Islam" in 1978) was denied entry into the U.S. after his name was found on the list.

* In February 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) stated in a committee hearing that his wife Catherine had been subjected to questioning at an airport as to whether she was Cat Stevens due to the similarity of their names.

* David Nelson, the actor best known for his role on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, is among various persons named David Nelson who have been stopped at airports because their name apparently appears on the list.

* Robert Johnson, an American citizen, described the “humiliation factor” he endured: “I had to take off my pants. I had to take off my sneakers, then I had to take off my socks. I was treated like a criminal.”

What is really frightening is that there is evidence that US government officials are placing the names of people they don’t like on the no-fly list. Dictatorships from Hitler’s Germany to Pinochet’s Chile have employed arbitrary arrests to harass critics. And Bush’s airport detention policies are more of the same. Here are some examples.

* U.S. Representative John Lewis (D-GA), widely known for his civil rights advocacy, has been stopped many times.

* James Moore, an Emmy-winning television news correspondent, co-author of Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush President political activist, and outspoken critic of the Bush administration, was placed on the No Fly List.

* Walter F. Murphy, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, reported that the following exchange took place at Newark on 1 March 2007, where he was denied a boarding pass "because I [Professor Murphy] was on the Terrorist Watch list." The airline employee asked, "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." "I explained," said professor Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, in which I stated that I was highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution." To which the airline employee responded, "That'll do it.” Murphy is a decorated Marine. Even if he had America’s highest medal for bravery, the Congressional Medal of Honour, he would still be stopped.

* Jesselyn Radack, a former United States Department of Justice ethics adviser who argued that John Walker Lindh was entitled to an attorney, was placed on the No Fly List as part of what many believe to be a reprisal for her whistle blowing.

* Citizens who have done no more than criticize the president are being banned from airline flights, harassed at airports’, strip searched, roughed up and even imprisoned, feminist author and political activist Naomi Wolf reports in her new book, “The End of America.” During one pre-boarding search, a TSA agent told her “You’re on the list” and Wolf learned it is not a list of suspected terrorists but of journalists, academics, activists, and politicians “who have criticized the White House.”

* Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s foreign minister, said he was detained at Kennedy airport by officers who questioned him and searched him, notwithstanding the fact that diplomats are protected by law from being searched.

* Favorite targets of the Bush government are peace activists like Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon, detained at the San Francisco airport; a political leader such as Nancy Oden, of the Green Party, prevented from flying from Maine to Chicago; King Downing and David Fathi, both of the American Civil Liberties Union and both detained and Constitutional scholar Walter F. Murphy, of Princeton University, who had attacked the illegalities of the Bush regime. He was put on notice his luggage would be ransacked.

* One ludicrous “no fly” story concerns John Graham, president of the nonprofit Giraffe Heroes Project, an organization that honors people who stick their necks out. A former government careerist who served in Viet Nam, Graham is an inspired speaker that receives standing ovations from groups such as West Point cadets, yet was kept from flying from his Langley, Wash., base by the National Security Agency.

I strongly suspect that I may be on the list also because of my speech in Caracas at a U.N. conference in 1980 and in Lima, Peru in 2005 and in Brussels, Belgium in 2006 in which I chastised the Americans for their abuses of young offenders in their young offender correctional facilities. It seems that for the most part, whenever I and my wife visit the United States by air, we are singled out by the Americans for a search of our carry-on luggage and on top of that, we are asked to take off our shoes. After about fifteen minutes, we are permitted to carry on to our American destination. Of course, it is conceivable, that I am imagining all of this. I hope it is only my imagination.

* Senator Edward Kennedy was detained five times in East Coast airports in March, 2004, suggesting that no person, however prominent, is safe from the abuses placed against people that the government doesn’t like. Between March 1 and April 6, airline agents tried to block Mr. Kennedy from boarding airplanes on five occasions because his name resembled an alias used by a suspected terrorist who had been barred from flying on airlines in the United States. Instead of acknowledging the craggy-faced, silver-haired septuagenarian as the Congressional leader whose face has flashed across the nation's television sets for decades, the airline agents acted as if they had stumbled across a fanatic who might blow up an American airplane. Just days after Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge called Mr. Kennedy in early April to apologize and to promise that the problems would be resolved, another airline agent tried to stop Mr. Kennedy from boarding a plane yet again. The alias used by the suspected terrorist on the watch list was Edward Kennedy.

In August 2004, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) told a Senate Judiciary Committee discussing the No Fly List that he had appeared on the list and had been repeatedly delayed at airports. He said it had taken him three weeks of appeals directly to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to have him removed from the list. Kennedy said he was eventually told that the name "T Kennedy" was added to the list because it was once used as an alias of a suspected terrorist. There are an estimated 7,000 American men whose legal names correspond to "T. Kennedy". (Senator Kennedy, whose first name is Edward and for whom "Ted" is only a nickname, would not be one of them.) Recognizing that as a U.S. Senator he was in a privileged position of being able to contact Ridge, Kennedy said of "ordinary citizens": "How are they going to be able to get to be treated fairly and not have their rights abused?

In my opinion, the no-fly list concept was a hasty and ill conceived national security initiative which was essentially aimed at managing perceptions of terrorists who were going into the United States to commit acts of terrorism. There has to be better ways in addressing legitimate and manageable security concerns that are not harmful to innocent passengers.

As Transport Canada has forged ahead with its Passenger Protect Program. The timing could not be better to seriously reconsider what is for all intents and purposes a no-fly list. Canadian authorities should seriously consider how damaging no-fly list can be when only names are included and nothing more. Canada's no-fly list comes into effect on June 18th as transportation experts and privacy advocates warn that checking domestic airline passengers' names against a list of people deemed to be potential threats could lead to abuses. Fewer than 1,000 names are believed to be on Transport Canada's Specified Persons list, So far, fewer than 1,000 names are believed to be on Transport Canada's Specified Persons list,

The proliferation of the Canadian government watch lists is a troubling development in the “war on terrorism.” The challenges of such lists include differences of opinion on who’s actually a security threat, consolidating information across agencies by making the computer systems communicate the with one another. In fact, Auditor General Sheila Fraser found in 2004 that watch-lists used to screen visa applicants, refugee claimants and travelers seeking to enter Canada were in disarray because of inaccuracies and shoddy updating.

As we consider the need to improve our intelligence and law enforcement systems, we must have an open and informed dialogue about what measures truly make us safer while ensuring that our fundamental values, liberties and rights are not sacrificed.

Making lengthy watch lists based on subjective and political criteria and then giving the power to add and remove names to agencies that have a vested interest in the national security agenda is akin to asking the fox to guard the hen house. Such lists – which will inevitably fill up very quickly with “false positives”, political dissidents, and those whom our friends and neighbours subjectively designate as threats – will not make us any safer or interrupt any terrorists, if the U.S. experience is any indication.

How can such a list provide anything more than a false sense of security while leaving it rife for blacklisting innocent people as well as racial and religious profiling? Indeed, Canadians should be asking the government how an individual can be too dangerous to fly, yet be free to roam the streets and plot terror.

The no-fly list threatens liberty, equality and mobility rights guaranteed in the Charter. It leaves little practical recourse to get off the list. The experience of some individuals who are already encountering difficulties in flying within Canada without even having a list of our own does not give one much confidence.

Transport Canada must not be given a carte blanche to deprive Canadians of our liberty, mobility, equality and privacy rights, even though aviation security has now become a legitimate national security concern. The government’s appeal to national security should not exempt it from due process, principles of fundamental justice, accountability, transparency, oversight and a full Parliamentary debate.

The system envisaged by Passenger Protect is wholly inadequate, as it will be over inclusive, with high likelihood of false positives, pose a serious potential for racial profiling, and completely lack any meaningful redress mechanism or process.

Perhaps, what is needed is not this list, but a series of pictures of suspected terrorists and the equipment that can readily identify the terrorists at the counter by face recognition technology.