Fikre alleges that he traveled to Sudan in late 2009 in pursuit of growing an electronics business in his native East Africa. The FBI questioned him while in Sudan, according to court filings, telling Fikre he was on the No Fly List and could be removed if he became an informant.
Fikre allegedly refused and moved to the United Arab Emirates, where he claims he was then abducted and tortured for months by the country’s secret police at the FBI’s request. After leaving the United Arab Emirates, Fikre says he moved to Sweden, filed his lawsuit and sought asylum.
While I’m very much in favor of a No Fly List in principle, the way it is implemented is just obviously unconstitutional.
I get that if you make the list publicly available, or even only available if you ask if you are on it, that lets potential enemies know they’ve been identified and possibly infiltrated. There’s a reason why certain pieces of seemingly inconsequential information is classified, because if the enemy knows we know, then they know we’ve put a spy in their ranks. And depending on the information, it might be easy for them to identify WHO the spy is. But this has real-world impacts on real people, and if you have no idea why you are on there, that you are even on there, or how to get off of there, then that is horribly unconstitutional.
Why have a no fly list? If it was for unruly people that went through the court process that would be one thing (still would be unfair but less so than what we have).
9/11. 80s plane hijackings. Numerous plane bombings.
It’s not just unruly passengers.
And the TSA was put in place for that… No?
And we passed the patriot act.
Those incidents lead to more than one attempt at a solution.
By the 90s, hijackings were already way down, and deaths due to hijjackings were rare. 9/11 shows up as a big blip on the death scale, but other than that, it was already running up against zero.
https://ourworldindata.org/airline-hijackings-were-once-common-but-are-very-rare-today
And those are worldwide numbers, not just the US.
He asked why and I gave 3 reasons. I didn’t say they were good reasons, or that I agree.
Leading up to 9/11 hijackings were mostly for ransom anyway. But just because hijackings were decreasing doesn’t mean that wasn’t a reason they were implemented.
Its hard for me to conceive of a hijacking today with some of the changes that have happened in the airline industry. But that could be a reason that a no fly list might continue to exist.