Are You on the Government's 'No Fly' List?

[babylonsister]

Are You on the Government's 'No Fly' List?

By Naomi Wolf, Chelsea Green Publishing. Posted September 13, 2007.

A new book reveals how thousands of Americans who do not fit a terrorist profile are routinely harassed and detained at the airport.


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The List

In 2002, I began to notice that almost every time I sought to board a domestic airline flight, I was called aside by the Transportation Security Administration and given a more thorough search. When this was happening on nine flights out of ten, I asked the officials about the special search. They told me that the search was due to the quadruple "S" that routinely came up on my boarding pass. There are several reasons why one might receive a quadruple "S" on one's boarding pass if one doesn't fit a terrorist profile: buying a ticket at the last minute, for instance, or paying in cash. But those circumstances didn't apply to me. I kept asking, but not getting real answers.

This stepped-up search became so routine as I traveled that companions who were flying with me began to simply say, "I'll meet you at the gate," even before we got through the security line.

On yet another preboarding search, I asked yet again. The TSA agent searching me, a young woman, said pleasantly, "You're on the list."

"The list?" I asked. "What list?" Her supervisor abruptly ended our exchange, took over from her, and then moved me on.

Indeed, the TSA Administration does keep a "list." The American citizens on the list who do not fit a terrorist profile range from journalists and academics who have criticized the White House to activists and even political leaders who have also spoken out.

These TSA searches and releases would be trivial in a working democracy. In the 1960s, peace activists found it merely irksome to be trailed by FBI agents, and in the 1980s those who organized The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) on college campuses were even amused sometimes to find, on submitting a Freedom of Information Act request, that there was a file open on them. But once the first steps in a fascist shift are in place, being on "the list" is not really funny any more.

When you are physically detained by armed agents because of something that you said or wrote, it has an impact. On the one hand, during these heightened searches of my luggage, I knew I was a very small fish in a very big pond. On the other hand, you get it right away that the state is tracking your journeys, can redirect you physically, and can have armed men and women, who may or may not answer your questions, search and release you.

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http://www.alternet.org/rights/62407/