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US Admits No-Fly List is Implementation of Pre-Crime

posted by martyb on Monday August 17 2015, @06:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the minority-report dept.

tt0181689 writes:

In a little-noticed filing before an Oregon federal judge, the US Justice Department and the FBI conceded that stopping US and other citizens from traveling on airplanes is a matter of "predictive assessments about potential threats."

It is believed to be the government's most direct acknowledgement to date that people are not allowed to fly because of what the government believes they might do and not what they have already done.

Last Friday, the ACLU told the court that the administration's predictive assessments pose an "extremely high risk of error".

Marc Sageman, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst and current academic researcher of terrorism, submitted a brief for the ACLU arguing that the government's predictive model underpinning the blacklist inclusion was not responsibly rigorous. Without a "scientifically validated process", Sageman asserted, the government's judgements about who does and does not pose a terrorist threat to aviation "amount to little more than the 'guesses' or 'hunches' that do not meet the standard for reasonable suspicion.

These official revelations confirm Bruce Schneier's criticism of more than a decade past where he called the no-fly list "a list of suspected terrorists so dangerous that we can't ever let them fly, yet so innocent that we can't arrest them - even under the draconian provisions of the Patriot Act."

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Monday August 17 2015, @06:33AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 17 2015, @06:33AM (#223795) Journal

    THIS is why we must jealously guard our freedoms.

    And what better way to guard something than place it in a safe or jail and throw away the key?

    (grin... a very large one) [soylentnews.org]

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by gidds on Tuesday August 18 2015, @01:45PM

    by gidds (589) on Tuesday August 18 2015, @01:45PM (#224405)

    Perhaps ha ha, only serious [catb.org] (or just HHOS) would express your meaning more clearly than the much-abused grin?

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    [sig redacted]

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:27PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:27PM (#224625) Journal

      Nope. Because, by nature, I'm a special unique snowflake which feels the compulsion to be bitter at first and humorous later; the latter may be missing sometimes.

      <small>(grin)</small>

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford