The no-fly and terrorist watch lists are full of garbage data and should be abandoned.

Senate Democrats are pushing a bill to ban anyone on the no-fly list or terrorist watch list from being able to purchase a firearm.

There is a lot of criticism of the proposal over due process and transparency concerns, which I think are valid, but not my point in this thread.

The FBI is also concerned that this proposal would tip off suspected terrorists that they’re being watched or investigated (“Hey, if you think the FBI may be on to your plan, go try to purchase a gun. If they deny you because you’re on the no-fly list, then watch out, because they’re probably watching you.”). Also not my point.

I want to focus on how often those lists are wrong, either including people that aren’t terrorists (i.e. the late Senator Ted Kennedy) or more importantly, not including people that are actual terrorists. The government is actually terrible at identifying real terrorists.

Nidal Hassan was investigated by the FBI and they determined he wasn’t a threat. Oops.

Russia’s FSB warned the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a follower of radical Islam. He had managed to get into TIDE, but wasn’t included in the “no-fly list”, presumably because after he was interviewed by the FBI they didn’t have sufficient concerns about him to place him there. As far as I understand Feinstein’s proposal, he still would have been able to buy a gun if her proposal had been in effect back then. His brother Dzhokhar was granted citizenship just a few months before blowing up the Boston Marathon. Oops again.

Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik (San Bernadino shooters) don’t appear to have been on any watch list. We granted Malik a visa just months before the attack. The process supposedly involves a national security check against the FBI databases, so she presumably wasn’t in the database either. Oops again.

There are plenty of other examples, but I’m tired of digging up the details of all of them: why do we, as a country, suck so hard at identifying terrorists and getting them on the watch list? What could be done to improve the process? Is the watch list useful for anything besides toilet paper, or should the whole dismal project be abandoned?

I feel that if we wanted to really catch terrorists, we would need some sort of constant monitoring of our electronic habits (oh wait, the NSA is already doing this…) and for those information collecting agencies to actually comb through and synthesize the information and on top of that actually share the relevant bits with law enforcement at all levels in a timely manner.

But wait, that only might give us a heads-up that they are about to commit a crime. And that assumes they are not bothering to talk in coded “dog whistle” terms to each other, or use normal snail mail written letters.

Maybe the best way to catch a terrorist is to vastly improve our nation’s mental heath care services, and remove the stigma of going to mental health professionals from our society. As well as releasing the restraints we put on our public servants, such as teachers, to report suspicious activity without backlash or censor. Once we accept going to a psychologist as easily as we accept going in for a yearly general health check-up (or just bundle the two with our seasonal flu vaccination), maybe our doctors and other figures of trust can then turn narc and use our own recorded words against us to protect our greater society while we live out our lives in Gitmo over a passing remark.

It is a balance of freedom and control, if we want to be free, that means that some people will be free to express their beliefs and blow us up. If we want to be perfectly safe, we will all live happily in our own velvet prisons -except for the guilty, who get downgraded to bare concrete prisons-

So far from your post, it seems to me that the no fly list is just more security theater like the TSA, meant to scare away only the most timid and those who can’t think creatively. I don’t think that the government even really wants terrorism to stop on our own home soil. How else can it garner the public’s support of new military endeavors, and fool us into allowing it to spend even more on porkbarrel defense contracts? All the while regularly scaring us to the degree that we beg those in power to put in place more restrictions on the freedoms of our 300,000,000 strong individuals in order to stave off the deaths of -at worst- 5,000 at a time.

Based on the conservative reaction to this proposal, finally causing much needed scrutiny of our stupid war on terror policies, I think we should start tying gun control policies to lots of other bad laws. Not only will we end the stupid no-fly list, but maybe we can also solve mass incarceration, Guantanamo, and climate change!

Let’s see, how about: we can take away your guns if you get the same due process as Mohamedou Slahi or the average civil asset forfeiture defendant. Or…if you’ve ever used marijuana, you can’t have a gun. Oh! We could do this all day. Why not wield the NRA’s immense power for good?

I have always been uncomfortable with the concept of a ‘watch list’ as it seems by definition a secretive extrajudicial process to harass whoever is deemed as an enemy of the state. If they’re going to infringe your rights, then they should arrest you on some probable cause. Even if it’s the dubious “ticking bomb” scenario, that’s still better than some random secret list.

Some people feel like the terrorists are always going to be obvious, and they can be placed on a list, and booted off airplanes or deprived of their 2nd amendment rights, and that will address the problem. However, we’ve tried this experiment, and it turned out early on to be a farce (here is the latest and saddest example in a long list of absurd abuses). Note, it doesn’t even have to be law enforcement that finds you dubious… just one of your dumb fellow citizens with an axe to grind. (Happy to be proven wrong on this, if anyone can dig up those elusive watchlist guidelines).

Given that the state has proven itself thus incompetent, are we really comfortable saying that they can take away your civil rights just because some random person or law enforcement officer doesn’t like the cut of your jib? What if it’s your freedom of speech or due process or association? What if the weird behavior is having a dark tan and carrying a bunch of CD’s with you?

I am extremely disturbed about tying gun control to a terrorist watch list. I’m sympathetic to gun control and many of you are familiar with my liberal leanings. But if we disarm, then everybody disarms at the same time, not just all the brownish people that creep out Uncle Herman on the redeye to Pittsburgh. I’m deeply disappointed in the Democrats on this.

sigh… Gun control =/= “take away your guns.” I agree gun control should not be tied to no-fly list though. Common sense control laws like a psych exam and ban on assault weapons or high capacity magazines would have limited this killer’s impact.

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Why are these proto-terrorists allowed to vote? Take 'em off the voter roles!! Why should we allow al Baghdadi to vote by proxy???

Keep them out of their house of worship, too. No religion for you!! It’s where they get radicalized.

In fact, why do we allow them any rights at all?

Using these watch lists to mitigate violence seems like a great idea.

If you believe in the premise that the watch lists are infallible.

Nonsense. They don’t have to be infallible, only useful. The perfect need not be the enemy of the good.

Yep. The resl answer is whether or not being on the list condtitutes “due process”.

Is there a precedent for that?

Being on the list most assuredly does not constitute due process. Due process requires–at the barest minimum–fair notice of the action being taken or the judgment being made and an opportunity to contest it or change your behavior to avoid it.

Watchlists, including the no-fly list, are secret. You only know you’re on it because of the actions taken against you, and even then they do not confirm that you’re on it. There is some limited ability to contest your presence on some lists, but that issue is very much in flux.

As I pointed out elsewhere, one of the problems with transforming a watchlist into a gun ban is that it makes it very easy to find out if you’re on the list. To the extent such lists are useful at all, that usefulness is diminished if a five-man cell just have to see which of them is on the list. Right now, you pretty much have to buy an airline ticket and show up at the airport to find out if you’re on the no-fly list–and these days they mostly just subject you to additional screening and interviews and tell you that you were randomly selected. Being able to just attempt to purchase a gun would make it much easier to learn what’s going on.

This is legal in the land of the free and home of the brave?

What law prevents say 50,000 innocent people travelling wherever the hell they want … Patriot Act?

Thank fuck for the Human Rights Act.

I’m totally fine with the no-fly list.

If airlines want to ignore the no-fly list, as long as other potential customers know, that’s fine with me.

We suck at it because there’s very problematic line between liberty and security, and another between information overload and not gathering enough intelligence. That people are interrogated and they can’t get enough evidence to hold them or charge them with something and so they let them go is a good thing from the perspective of protecting the rights of our citizens and innocent until proven guilty. But if that person HAS done something and we just didn’t find it or couldn’t because of “pesky” things like probably cause, or perhaps they hadn’t done anything wrong yet, that’s a bad thing from wanting to protect people.

Similarly, when we look at data collected by, say, the NSA, there’s a problem of either not collecting enough data so that we can’t make meaningful connections we might otherwise, and collecting so much that we either can’t process it or we start seeing too many tenuous patterns (eg, you have a 6th degree connection on Facebook with a known terrorist, you’re now suspected too).

It’s an extremely difficult problem, and it’s easy to see where we screwed up in retrospect, but it’s not always as obvious looking forward. And even if we COULD have known certain things, we have to ask whether or not those are lines we, as a society, believe are worth crossing. We can’t simultaneously fight against government monitoring things due to privacy concerns AND be then turn around and be upset they’re not doing enough to track known or potential terrorist threats. There is no happy medium here, because one direction costs EVERYONE very tangible freedoms and hte other one costs lives. We have to decide which freedoms and how much of them are worth how many lives.

As it is now, it doesn’t seem like it’s worth much more than that. First, due process isn’t required to get on it, so frankly, I think it’s unethical to deny ANY rights as a result, be it purchasing guns, voting, habeas corpus, whatever. Second, some people who probably should be on it, aren’t, and others have struggled for years to get off of it and can’t.

However, we obviously need SOME sort of data SOMEWHERE that makes social connections, gathers evidence, estimates risk, etc. The only way we can’t is if we don’t want the government doing anything. The problem is, if people get high on that list, then there should be enough evidence to get some kind of actual court order against that person before we start taking away rights, and if there isn’t, then they shouldn’t be that high on the list. But it shouldn’t just be suspected terrorist or not.

It cracks me up. …

2002: of course we need the Patriot act and watch lists and phone taps and no fly lists! Do you want the terrorists to win? Why do you hate America?

2016: what? They’re using the Patriot act and watch lists and phone taps and no fly lists to keep guns away from people? Do away with it now! Why do you hate America?

OK then, let’s stipulate that they need to be useful. How can we know that they are useful?

Yeah, I think that gets back to John Mace’s point about due process (and the transparency that ideally comes along with it). I’m not sure we can know the benefits of a program that is so secretive. Has the no-fly list prevented violence? Prevented terrorism? Fuck if I know.

In a certain sense, how do we know that prisons are useful? Is the alternative to prisons to get rid of them?

This. A thousand times, this.

Your post is intended to be rhetorical, I’m pretty sure. But of course we should be asking that question! We should demand evidence for every policy–especially expensive policies that deny liberty. If the evidence isn’t there, we should experiment with other things and see what happens.

Based on what the evidence says right now, we will probably move away from spending our resources on lengthy prison sentences and instead spend it on increasing the certainty of punishment (more money for detectives, witness protection, rape kits, etc. etc.). Prisons themselves are likely to look very different in the next century. Much less like prison and a lot more like rehab. Again, because of what the evidence shows about what works, and because the half-millennia trend is away from retribution and toward deterrence and rehabilitation.

Well, you’re making my case for me. The best alternative to today’s prisons are more effective prisons, not the elimination of them. The best alternative to a no-fly list is an improved no-fly list.