ACLU: TSA Now Using ‘Hypothetical Threats’ to Assign Passengers to Watchlists

The Government Accountability
Office (GAO) has put out a new report intended to analyze the
performance of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in the operation of
the watchlists that determine how much abuse passengers have to
suffer before being allowed on a plane (assuming they’re
allowed).

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) read through the
report and was a bit disturbed at what they’ve discovered. The
ACLU, you may recall, has been suing the government (and
winning) over the horrible, opaque way the watchlists and
no-fly lists have been operating in secret. You may also recall a
recent report from The Intercept showing that
hundreds of thousands of Americans placed on watchlists for
extra screening have no known ties to terrorism. In fact, today
Stephen Hayes, a senior writer for The Weekly Standard,
tweeted that he discovered he’d been added to a DHS watchlist
after taking a one-way flight to Turkey in July.  

The ACLU
notes that the TSA has taken to assigning passengers to risk
categories for reasons that have nothing to do with any law
enforcement agency recommending them for review. That may explain
Hayes’ experience:

Thanks to the GAO report, we now know that the TSA has modified
the Secure Flight program so that it assigns passengers to one of
three risk categories: high risk, low risk, or unknown risk. We’ve
long been
critical of this kind of passenger profiling—which the TSA has
proposed in the past—because it inevitably leads to greater
intrusion into individuals’ private lives. And of course, it raises
the question of what criteria and information the TSA uses to sort
people into these categories.

The TSA is keeping those criteria secret, which is part of the
problem. However, the GAO report states that the “high-risk”
passengers aren’t just those who appear to match a name on the
FBI’s No Fly, Selectee, or Expanded Selectee lists (as problematic
as those lists may be). Now, the TSA is also using intelligence and
law enforcement information, along with “risk-based targeting
scenarios and assessments,” to identify passengers who may be
“unknown threats.”

In other words, the FBI’s flawed definition of someone who is a
suspected threat to aviation security isn’t relaxed enough for the
TSA, so the TSA is creating its own blacklists of people who are
hypothetical threats. Those people are also subjected to
additional screening every time they fly. To make matters worse,
another recently
published GAO report indicates that the redress process for
travelers who have been incorrectly caught up in the watchlisting
system does not apply to these new TSA blacklists. So the TSA’s
“unknown threats” are truly without recourse.

Hayes tweeted that when he attempted to file a “redress” form
online, it couldn’t be processed. Imagine that.

The ACLU also noted that there’s a “whitelist” for millions of
government employees, which allows them into the Pre-Check line. We
could potentially join them in that line, if we’re willing to give
the government enough private information to prove to them that we
aren’t terrorists.

Read the full ACLU report
here.