I think the technical words you’re struggling for are ‘arrested’ and ‘custody’.
The only no-vote list is felons and former felons (and obviously people who are too young or are not citizens). So your suggestion is simply trying to poison the conversation and redirect it.
Gun safety can be regulated. The No Fly List is a list of possible terrorists. That speaks directly to gun safety and regulation. There is nothing at all strange or wrong about tying a gun restriction list to a No Fly List. Again, if you have issues with the list like some people do, then suggest fixes to the list rather than deny its use.
I’ve acknowledge there are mistakes. My solution is to fix them, not play a game of “see who can come up with the longest list” or “find the most egregious example” to exaggerate and fearmonger.
I would love to tie it to other identifying information. Problem is, the sort of national database that would make such a thing possible is usually opposed by the same people who oppose any gun regulations. I see their opposition as being completely insincere and a conflict of interest. But sure, to respond to that, other identifying info should be included.
Definitely something that should be fixed
I disagree with both. I think a No Fly List is perfectly valid as a tool of law enforcement. Its less of a violation than jail, which requires a proper court system to convict you, therefore it should require a lower hurdle to put a person on there such as lack of some due process. We trust the FBI to manage certain aspects of domestic crimes, they have powers that typical police departments don’t have. So to me, its simply paranoia that states the FBI or specifically, the Terrorist Screening Center within the FBI cannot or should not manage the No Fly List. Sure, talk about whether or not it should have more oversight, talk about what procedures are in place to remove innocent people from the list, or what people can do to challenge their own names, but to make a blanket statement like its an illegitimate list when there FBI has all sorts of law enforcement powers is just exaggerated fears. They have the power, they should have the power, but maybe they need better oversight.
Would you be ok with us holding of on using this to deny people’s rights until we’ve fixed those mistakes / problems? Or are you insisting that we start denying rights now, and we’ll fix it later, trust you?
They are held in jail and your lawyer can make them charge you or let you go. habeas corpus
In any case, most of the time, they are arrested due to a warrant- which is due process, since a judge reviews it and determines if there is enough evidence to issue one.
is it? A lot of people on the at seem to be politcal dissidents, like J Edgar Hoovers "Enemies’ List. **There is no requirement that any evidence of terrorist leanings be shown.
**
Sure, it should have a lower hurdle. It should be just like a Warrant. That only requires showing probable cause to a judge. Then, someone cant be put on a list simply due to the fact that some LEO doesnt like that way they express themselves. Nor is it simply the FBI doing the list- the FBI only keeps the list. Other agencies can add you to the list. There is no system of vetting or doublechecking.
The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General has criticized the list for frequent errors and slow response to complaints. An audit by the Office of Inspector General found that 38% of a 105 record sample contained inaccuracies.[4
One guy ended up on the list because the FBI wanted him to turn informant on his Imam. They had nothing on him, mind you.
"Salon reported that the No-Fly program seemed “to be netting mostly priests, elderly nuns, Green Party campaign operatives, left-wing journalists, right-wing activists and people affiliated with Arab or Arab-American groups.”
Newish article:
What you should say is “Can a program like the No Fly List be improved?” Yes, it can definitely be so. The current No Fly List has had few challenges and mistakes considering how many people are on the list. A handful of false positives are insignificant when you realize there are tens of thousands of people on the list. You could randomly pick a thousand people in any database from any corporation or company and you’ll have some errors. That doesn’t mean the existence of the list itself is a wide spread conspiracy to deny people their rights. It just means that humans make mistakes.
Calling it “denying rights” is a catchy soundbite, but to me that implies there’s some purposeful maliciousness that simply isn’t there. If a guy has his name spelled wrong and can’t fly, that’s human error, that’s not a civil rights case. The Terrorist Screening Center should definitely do better in responding to queries by concerned citizens, but that doesn’t mean a frivolous lawsuit must be filed every time somebody spells “Jon” as “John”.
There should be an irony clause somewhere in there though. The same people who claim that just because a person is in Guantanamo, that proves they’re a terrorist, are suddenly gung-ho about the rights of possible terrorists. Which is it, you’re a terrorist because you’ve already been deemed one by the government or you’re not a terrorist even if you’re on multiple government watch lists? I’m sure all the innocent Uighurs that were in Guantanamo are real glad that you’re finally acknowledging they might have been innocently picked up on the battlefield. :rolleyes:
The distant past is irrelevant. Once we considered women unfit to vote and blacks fit to be enslaved. Hoover is dead and gone and so is his version of the FBI. Or is it only relevant when you want it to be? Should we jail Japanese Americans because they might be disloyal too, is that relevant? The government once experimented on blacks by giving them Syphilis, should black people not go to the doctors just in case that’s still going on?
The No Fly List is created from the Terrorist Screening Center which maintains a Terrorist Screening Database which is fed by 2 main sources, one from the FBI, and one from Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center. So I can answer your question in one of two ways, both of which you’re wrong in:
-
You’re wrong because those agencies are specifically responsible for putting together terrorist data to compile a list of suspected persons. That you think there’s some giant conspiracy that links all of the multiple agencies to put Bob Smith on there is not only silly, but doesn’t even warrant a serious response. Sure, some bitter agent might throw his ex-wife’s name on the list, as has happened before, but those are extreme outliers. You’re guilty of being suckered by the GOP’s decades-long campaign against government workers: you think they’re all incompetent or malicious idiots when in fact, given the standards of government work, they are, on average, more educated than comparable private sector workers. These are hard working people who are a cog in a big machine, there very few people who either screw up so badly as to put your grandma on a list or evil enough to do it on purpose.
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You’re wrong because that information is classified and you have no idea what criteria they use.
#2 is what I think a lot of people are betting their debate on. Because you don’t know, you assume the worst. Because some things are secret, you assume its to harm you. I can’t really dispel that paranoia except to say: Get over it. They are doing a very difficult job that REQUIRES secrecy. Just because there are classified information doesn’t mean its all out to get you. Some things need to be secret. You wanna throw a surprise party, you have to keep secrets. You want to test someone’s genuine reaction to something, you have to withhold information. And if you want to identify suspected terrorists who might want to kill people, you have to keep the criteria and the workings of law enforcement classified. That you don’t know isn’t a bug, its a feature, but its the only way to do these things.
The alternative is to placate the conspiracy theorists and put all of this out in the open. Send suspected terrorists a nicely framed letter on the FBI’s letterhead telling them that their call at 2am to Pakistan triggered a watch on them, or their buying of some fertilizer and blasting caps made them suspects. Warn them so they don’t do it again, that’s how you catch terrorists right? Or maybe we shouldn’t even try! Seriously, you tell me a way to identify suspected terrorists without letting them know, but let everyone else know, and do it in a way that’s totally transparent to everyone except the terrorists.
Would a secret court that’s totally non-transparent about the way they do things work for you?
Again, this doesn’t really happen. The insignificant instances where a guy gets mad and puts his ex-wife or somebody on the list is so rare that its completely ignorable. And no regular beat cop is putting anyone on the list, this is done by personnel at these counter terrorism agencies and yes, I totally and completely trust that there’s a vetting process for it and I totally and completely trust that the vast majority of them are not going to jeopardize their careers and risk jail time by putting someone they simply don’t like on the list. And you should trust them too, because at any level of government or private industry, there are tons of people who, with a click of the mouse or a stroke of a pen, can cause things to come crashing down on a person. That it happens so rare is proof that generally people don’t do that and we need to have some trust that people are doing their jobs in an honest way
Otherwise, don’t eat at restaurants, because any cook or waiter can spit in your food (why would they do it? who cares, they can, and nobody’s vetting them, so they’re doing it!). Better not use your computer because the guy at Microsoft or wherever is putting spying software on your computer (just because he wants to know what a random guy is doing with his PC). Don’t drive either, because we all know any construction person could do some shoddy work on the road that your car will flip over, or any of the thousands of people who contributed to your car could have cut corners (someone took a bolt from your wheel so it’ll fall off, a factory worker cloned your key before your car went out so he can steal from it later, some hooligans wanted to play a prank and rigged your brakes to fail). Do you know who’s vetting those people either? Or who’s vetting the vetters? No? Yet you still continue to drive and go out to eat? Taking some big chances aren’t you? :rolleyes:
The FBI adds to the list along with the NCTC. Read your own link
Let me pull up the full paragraph from the wiki link: Follow up audit of the TSC. From page 13:
If you also read the previous paragraph, you can see that what they are talking about here is an audit on the processes the Nominating and Data Integrity Unit within the TSC is doing to ensure accurate records. They found that the “single review queue” process results in more errors than the other two which, as you see above, had “virtually no errors”.
So the TSC is aware of mistakes and have processes in place to fix them. I’m fine with trusting them to manage and continue to maintain their terrorist watch lists because like any big organization, government or private, it will make mistakes, it will be audited, and it will be improved.
And where did you get that info? I’d rather read it for myself than trust that you’re telling me the whole story. I’m sure you understand, you’re not vetted, after all
I am not talking about the distant past, I am talking about today. There are people on the no-fly list due to their political leanings.
And is fed thru the FBI from other agencies and police forces.
- You forget that I was a Fed for 20 years.* Most *of the agents and LEO’s are Good guys. But since the list is not vetted, a few bad guys can add people that they just consider “wrong thinkers”.
- I do. Not all the regs, but it is easier than you think.
Yes, I would be satisfied as long as there is a judge involved.
No, few LEOs or Agents would risk putting their ex-wife on. But putting someone who has published stuff critical of the government? Sure, easy- peasy.
They do, but the info is fed to the FBI by other agencies.
“Abe Mashal, a 31-year-old Muslim and United States Marine Veteran, found himself on the No Fly List in April 2010 while attempting to board a plane out of Midway Airport. He was questioned by the TSA, FBI and Chicago Police at the airport and was told they had no clue why he was on the No Fly List. Once he arrived at home that day two other FBI agents came to his home and used a Do Not Fly question-and-answer sheet to question him. They informed him they had no idea why he was on the No Fly List. In June 2010 those same two FBI agents summoned Mashal to a local hotel and invited him to a private room. They told him that he was in no trouble and the reason he ended up on the No Fly List was because of possibly sending emails to an American imam they may have been monitoring. They then informed him that if he would go undercover at various local mosques, they could get him off the No Fly List immediately and he would be compensated for such actions. Mashal refused to answer any additional questions without a lawyer present and was told to leave the hotel. Mashal then contacted the ACLU and is now being represented in a class-action lawsuit filed against the TSA, FBI and DHS concerning the legality of the No Fly List and how people end up on it. Mashal feels as if he was blackmailed into becoming an informant by being placed on the No Fly List. Mashal has since appeared on ABC, NBC, PBS and Al Jazeera concerning his inclusion on the No Fly List. He has also written a book about his experience titled “No Spy No Fly.” [61]”
Let’s break this down one by one:
1. You could raise “reasonable suspicion” that you’re involved in terrorism. Irrefutable evidence or concrete facts” are not required.
Good. I would hate to be the guy who has to tell the American people that because somebody wasn’t convicted in a court, we couldn’t put him on a terrorist watch list until he blew up that building. Because irrefutable evidence or concrete facts are established in a court, and when you’re simply trying to identify possible terrorist, you should go with something less concrete. You even agree with me, as you said above:
But a warrant is a precursor to action. You could search or detain someone with a warrant. But in this case, the hurdle should be even lower because all the counter terrorism agency is doing is putting you on a watch list. The No Fly List doesn’t even come into play yet. This article is for a “Terrorist Watch List”, of which the No Fly List is a different, actionable list altogether. So in effect, all the government is doing is monitoring you like if you had an ankle monitor or telling you to check in with your parole officer. In actuality, its even less than that, because you won’t even know you’re on a list and it doesn’t impact your life at all.
So no, I wouldn’t want or need evidence to simply be put on a list. The list doesn’t affect your daily life, they’re just agreeing you’re suspicious, end of story. Would you want your doctor to actually wait until he finds cancer in you to tell you that you may have it? Or do you want to be preventative and tell you if he suspects it?
2. You could post something on Facebook or Twitter that raises “reasonable suspicion.”
You don’t think people post illegal or suspicious stuff to their social media accounts? Look under the names of any recent mass shooter or terrorist and for most of them you see either confessions or bragging about the crime. How often do we wait until something happens, either a shooting or a suicide, and say “all the signs were there” or “I wish I spoke up”. To make a blanket statement like “you could be on a list for what you post to Facebook!” and not acknowledge that what people post often have connections to how they behave is simply stupid. Its a buzzy, short, click-baity pronouncement meant to get you to think “OMG, I told Becky she’s a bitch and now they think I wanna kill her!” when in fact its more like Omar Mateen saying he’s a follower of ISIS and pledging to bring “Islamic state vengence” on people. Your cat videos and memes are safe, nobody’s being put on a list for Doge pics
3. Or somebody else could just think you’re a potential terror threat.
Isn’t this what we want, to have ordinary people report suspicious activity? After every Muslim attack, politicians go on TV and say we need to have ordinary Muslims report suspicious activity in their neighborhoods. This is the same thing. This isn’t Bob Mohammed on the poppy fields of Afghanistan turning his neighbor Dave Mohammed because he wants the Americans to take him to Guantanamo so he can steal Dave’s poppy fields. In this country, there’s due process if you get arrested and charged, but you don’t need it if your neighbor thinks you’re buying suspiciously large amounts of fertilizer for your backyard garden plot
4. You could be a little terrorist-ish, at least according to someone.
Again, this is an attack on the necessarily secret criteria of these watch lists. We don’t see them, we don’t know who’s handling them, and we don’t know how they’re managed, so we’re suspicious. Fine, but don’t tell me that its useless to report people that you find suspicious. Or should we just ignore all suspicious activity? Again, innocent people are on nothing more than a watch list where they’ll be checked and watched but otherwise unimpacted without their knowledge. I’m fine with this
5. Or you could just know someone terrorist-y, maybe.
If I’m close to someone like that, I’ll be the first to say I probably deserve to be watched. The thing is, you don’t know for sure and the government doesn’t know for sure, but you’re not responsible for anything that happens while the government is (and probably someone like you will accuse them of the ignorance of not knowing if something happens). Again, this is simply a watch list, I’m fine with watching the close friends and relatives of anyone who’s terrorist-y. That doesn’t mean you round them up at night in a windowless van, it just means you watch them. Perfectly fine solution to me, nobody’s being arrested or impacted
6. And if you’re in a “category” of people determined to be a threat, your threat status could be “upgraded” at the snap of a finger.
Yeah, for 72 hours, boo hoo. That’s a long weekend. And afterwards, there’s a review. What’s the objection here, that you, being on a list you don’t know, that doesn’t impact your life, isn’t getting a fair hearing in front of a judge who will review evidence to determine whether or not the little box next to your name on a list you’ll never see has a plus sign for upgraded?
7. Finally, you could just be unlucky.
Mistakes are not limited to watch lists. This is more of a desire to have a list of 7 items than an actual concern unique to the watch list
Neither are fundamental rights like religion or free speech, but there is a right to travel. You could say that since there is no right to travel by this particular method and that particular method, we soon in practice do not recognize a right to travel. I think that is absurd and chips away at the right incrementally.
It would be like saying that, sure, you have a right to free speech, but have no right to speak on Main Street, on Spruce Street, on the internet particularly, etc. etc. until there is no place that you can speak.
In any event, whether it is a right or not, it is still a liberty interest. Commercial airlines are in business to serve the general public. I am a member of the general public and to restrain my liberty from getting on that aircraft after buying a ticket, there has to be some process due to me for redress.
It might not be the same high standard as to put me in prison (proof beyond a reasonable doubt, counsel, trial by jury, etc.) but it cannot be no process at all, just on the arbitrary or capricious whim of a government official.
I don’t deny that this may have happened, but its nowhere in your cite. Got a source I can read for myself?
So what’s the problem? You don’t trust these other agencies but you would if its from the FBI itself?
I didn’t forget, I never knew that. I could call you out and as you to prove it because I think people should be vetted for such claims, but I’ll trust that you know what you’re talking about 
Anyway, I don’t doubt that its easy, but I do doubt it happens at a significant rate. At my work, I could screw up the computer and access quite easily. But I don’t because why the hell would I do that? Similarly, I’m sure there are people in the FBI and other counter terrorism agencies that can easily add anyone’s name without much vetting, but that doesn’t mean it happens to a significant degree.
In an open society, we assume that our way of life comes at a cost of security, ironic considering what we’re talking about. So too does security come at a cost of oversight. Here’s the overarching question I’d like you to answer: How do we identify and watch potential terrorists without them knowing, without a false positive, on a public database, while allow anyone to challenge it and have it still be effective? Maybe just not have terrorist watch lists, or suspicion lists of any kind? Then that means a guy could come on a one-way visa from Pakistan, say on Facebook he wants to kill Americans, meet with known terrorists, buy bomb-making materials, and the government can do nothing because he hasn’t done anything yet? Or do you acknowledge that there’s a middle ground where we don’t people in jail without warrants, but we have a secret like where if you do something suspicion, someone’s going to double check that, and maybe you’ll be inconvenienced if you happen to fly a lot. I think the watch list and No Fly lists are a good middle ground between absolute government control and total freedom to the point of naivete
Would this list still be secret? Would it still be classified as to how you got on? How does a hand-picked judge on a secret court that tends to rule for the government solve the problems you listed above?
How often has this happened compared to how many people on the list?
Sounds like the FBI needs to create some new internal rules to prevent that, but he was put on the list with reason. The fault of the FBI is they tried to pressure him into being an informant. Just because you have some crooks doesn’t mean you throw out the whole system.
I posted it.
FBI is pretty good. ATF? Not so much.
Like I said, have the agency pass each name by a Judge for Probable cause.
Do we trust a “handpicked” Judge to issue a warrant only under Probable cause?
We cant know, now can we?
You really are not reading before you post. I dont want to " throw out the whole system", I want to add judicial oversight and make it easier to get off any such list if you are on it incorrectly.
*"The problem with the watch list approach is well captured by Alex Pareene:
The no-fly list is a civil rights disaster by every conceivable standard. It is secret, it disproportionately affects Arab-Americans, it is error-prone, there is no due process or effective recourse for people placed on the list, and it constantly and relentlessly expands. As of 2014, the government had a master watchlist of 680,000 people, 40 percent of whom had “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” This is both an absurdly large number of people to arbitrarily target in gun control legislation, and far, far too few to have any meaningful effect on actual gun ownership, let alone gun violence. [Gawker]"*
What?
Did you read what I wrote?
If you have bail set you have been before a judge. If you have bail denied you have been before a judge. If you cannot make bail or have it denied you stay in jail.
And for the pedants here some people awaiting trial are actually held in prison. Not usual but it happens although parsing the difference as I was talking about it (basically the government holding you) was some extreme wiggling and evasion in this thread.
I now some posters are thinking “It’s only the nRA and Guns nuts who arent’ happy with the No-fly list!”
It’s also the ACLU:
*The government still refuses to provide meaningful notice of the reasons our clients are blacklisted, the basis for those reasons, and a hearing before a neutral decision-maker. We’re still fighting for our clients’ due process rights. Read more.
*
Anybody who has any regard for due process in the legal system that should be unhappy about the no fly list. That the NRA, ACLU and “gun nuts” are concerned about lack of due process redounds to their credit.
It seems like there is only 1 proven instance by the Maryland State Police. There’s a suspicious one about a Colombian journalist, one about a former European Parliament member, and weird incident regarding a Bollywood actor. Most of the others are either unexplained, or might be a same name false positive. To be fair, there seems to be a lot of same name false positives, but on a list of tens of thousands of people, those are less than 1%. I’m not seeing a big problem here.
Is this one of those interagency bragging contests? My agency is better than yours? If you don’t trust them, it seems to me the easiest thing would be to not get rid of an important list of potential terrorist suspects, but simply remove names sent to you from the ATF from consideration.
Your response seems odd to me. You said you’d be fine with a warrant and a judge, but I asked if such judges hand-picked for these kinds of secret considerations are any better than no judge. I doubt it, which is why I’m not going to hang my argument on having a judge look at the warrant. If you want a judge, tell me how its better when its done in a secret court.
My stance is until we know there are significant abuses, we should trust the system.
So having those 2 things are your only objections?
No, I was in a different Agency. Confirming the FBI is more professional that the ATf should take a millisecond on the Internet.
We listed significant abuses.
More or less. Perhaps some fine tuning after we get them, but those are critical.
But not in significant numbers
Sure, I’m fine with that
Well, how many can Wiki print?
Ok! Look, compromise and agreement on a hot topic on the SDMB!!!:eek: