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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."

Original Submission