[PEN-L:30637] Fw: No-fly blacklist snares political activists - SF Chronicle September 27, 2002

["Ralph Johansen" <michele@xxxxxxxx>]

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From: "Ralph Johansen" <michele@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 27, 2002 11:12 AM
Subject: No-fly blacklist snares political activists - SF Chronicle
September 27, 2002


> No-fly blacklist snares political activists
> Alan Gathright, Chronicle Staff Writer
> Friday, September 27, 2002
> ©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.
> URL:
> http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/09/27/MN181034.DTL
>
> A federal "No Fly" list, intended to keep terrorists from boarding
> planes, is snaring peace activists at San Francisco International and
> other U. S. airports, triggering complaints that civil liberties are
> being trampled.
>
> And while several federal agencies acknowledge that they contribute
> names to the congressionally mandated list, none of them, when
> contacted by The Chronicle, could or would say which agency is
> responsible for managing the list.
>
> One detainment forced a group of 20 Wisconsin anti-war activists to
> miss their flight, delaying their trip to meet with congressional
> representatives by a day. That case and others are raising questions
> about the criteria federal authorities use to place people on the list
> -- and whether people who exercise their constitutional right to
> dissent are being lumped together with terrorists.
>
> "What's scariest to me is that there could be this gross interruption
> of civil rights and nobody is really in charge," said Sarah Backus, an
> organizer of the Wisconsin group. "That's really 1984-ish."
>
> Federal law enforcement officials deny targeting dissidents. They
> suggested that the activists were stopped not because their names are
> on the list, but because their names resemble those of suspected
> criminals or terrorists.
>
> Congress mandated the list as part of last year's Aviation and
> Transportation Security Act, after two Sept. 11 hijackers on a federal
> "watch list" used their real names to board the jetliner that crashed
> into the Pentagon. The alerts about the two men, however, were not
> relayed to the airlines.
>
> The detaining of activists has stirred concern among members of
> Congress and civil liberties advocates. They want to know what
> safeguards exist to prevent innocent people from being branded "a
> threat to civil aviation or national security."
>
> No Accountability
>
> And they are troubled by the bureaucratic nightmare that people stumble
> into as they go from one government agency to another in a maddening
> search to find out who is the official keeper of the no-fly list.
>
> "The problem is that this list has no public accountability: People
> don't know why their names are put on or how to get their names off,"
> said Jayashri Srikantiah, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties
> Union of Northern California. "We have heard complaints from people who
> triggered the list a first time and then were cleared by security to
> fly. But when they fly again, their name is triggered again."
>
> Several federal agencies -- including the CIA, FBI, INS and State
> Department -- contribute names to the list. But no one at those
> agencies could say who is responsible for managing the list or who can
> remove names of people who have been cleared by authorities.
>
> Transportation Security Administration spokesman David Steigman
> initially said his agency did not have a no-fly list, but after
> conferring with colleagues, modified his response: His agency does not
> contribute to the no- fly list, he said, but simply relays names
> collected by other federal agencies to airlines and airports. "We are
> just a funnel," he said, estimating that fewer than 1,000 names are on
> the list.
>
> "TSA has access to it. We do not maintain it." He couldn't say who
> does. Steigman added he cannot state the criteria for placing someone
> on the list, because it's "special security information not releasable
> (to the public)."
>
> However, FBI spokesman Bill Carter said the Transportation Security
> Administration oversees the no-fly list: "You're asking me about
> something TSA manages. You'd have to ask TSA their criteria as far as
> allowing individuals on an airplane or not." In addition to their alarm
> that no agency seems to be in charge of the list, critics are worried
> by the many agencies and airlines that can access it.
>
> "The fact that so many people potentially have access to the list,"
> ACLU lawyer Srikantiah said, "creates a large potential for abuse."
>
> At least two dozen activists who have been stopped -- none have been
> arrested -- say they support sensible steps to bolster aviation
> security. But they criticize the no-fly list as being, at worst, a Big
> Brother campaign to muzzle dissent and, at best, a bureaucratic
> exercise that distracts airport security from looking for real bad
> guys.
>
> "I think it's a combination of an attempt to silence dissent by scaring
> people and probably a lot of bumbling and inept implementation of some
> bad security protocols," said Rebecca Gordon, 50, a veteran San
> Francisco human rights activist and co-founder of War Times, a San
> Francisco publication distributed nationally and on the Internet.
>
> Gordon and fellow War Times co-founder Jan Adams, 55, were briefly
> detained and questioned by police at San Francisco International
> Airport Aug. 7 after checking in at the American Trans Air counter for
> a flight to Boston. While they were eventually allowed to fly, their
> boarding passes were marked with a red "S" -- for "search" -- which
> subjected them to more scrutiny at SFO and during a layover in
> Chicago.
>
> Before Adams' return flight from Boston's Logan International, she was
> trailed to the gate by a police officer and an airline official and
> searched yet again.
>
> While Gordon, Adams and several of the detained activists acknowledged
> minor past arrests or citations for participating in nonviolent sit-in
> or other trespassing protests, FBI spokesman Carter said individuals
> would have to be "involved in criminal activity" -- not just civil
> disobedience -- to be banned from U.S. airlines.
>
> Defining an Activist
>
> But, Carter added, "When you say 'activists,' what type of activity are
> they involved in? Are they involved in criminal activity to disrupt a
> particular meeting? . . . Do you plan on blowing up a building? Do you
> plan on breaking windows or throwing rocks? Some people consider that
> civil disobedience, some people consider that criminal activity."
>
> Critics question whether Sister Virgine Lawinger, a 74-year-old
> Catholic nun, is the kind of "air pirate" lawmakers had in mind when
> they passed the law. Lawinger, one of the Wisconsin activists stopped
> at the Milwaukee airport on April 19, said she didn't get upset when
> two sheriff's deputies escorted her for questioning.
>
> "We didn't initially say too much about the detainment, because we do
> respect the need to be careful (about airline security)," the nun
> recounted. "They just said your name is flagged and we have to clear
> it. And from that moment on no one ever gave me any clarification of
> what that meant and why. I guess that was our frustration."
>
> Five months later, the 20 members of Peace Action Wisconsin still
> haven't been told why they were detained. Even local sheriff's deputies
> and airline officials admitted confusion about why the group was
> stopped, when only one member's name resembled one on the no-fly list.
>
> At the time, a Midwest Express Airlines spokeswoman told a Wisconsin
> magazine, the Progressive, that a group member's name was similar to
> one on the list and "the (Transportation Security Administration) made
> the decision that since this was a group, we should rescreen all of
> them."
>
> At a congressional hearing in May, Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold pressed
> FBI Director Robert Mueller about the Milwaukee incident, asking him
> pointedly for an assurance that the agency was not including people on
> the list because they had expressed opinions contrary to the policies
> of the U.S. government.
>
> Mueller's response: "We would never put a person on the watch list
> solely because they sought to express their First Amendment rights and
> their views."
>
> Data Base of Suspicion
>
> The law orders the head of the Transportation Security Administration
> to work with federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to share
> database information on individuals "who may pose a risk to
> transportation or national security" and relay it to airlines, airports
> and local law enforcement. It also requires airlines to use the list to
> identify suspect passengers and "notify appropriate law enforcement
> agencies, prevent the individual from boarding an aircraft or take
> other appropriate action."
>
> In November, Nancy Oden, a Green Party USA official in Maine, wound up
> being a suspect passenger and was barred from flying out of the Bangor
> airport to Chicago, where she planned to attend a Green Party meeting
> and make a presentation about "pesticides as weapons of war."
>
> Oden said a National Guardsman grabbed her arm when she tried to help a
> security screener searching her bags with a stuck zipper. The
> middle-aged woman, who said she was conservatively dressed and wore no
> anti-war buttons, said the guardsman seemed to know her activist
> background.
>
> "He started spouting this pro-war nonsense: 'Don't you understand that
> we have to get them before they get us? Don't you understand what
> happened on Sept. 11?"
>
> Airport officials said at the time that Oden was barred from boarding
> because she was uncooperative with security procedures, which she
> denies. Instead, Oden pointed out that the American Airlines ticket
> clerk -- who marked her boarding pass with an "S" -- had acknowledged
> she wasn't picked by random.
>
> "You were going to be searched no matter what. Your name was checked on
> the list," he said, according to Oden.
>
> "The only reason I could come up with is that the FBI is reactivating
> their old anti-war activists' files," said Oden, who protested the
> Vietnam War as a young office worker in Washington, D.C. "It is
> intimidation. It's just like years ago when the FBI built a file about
> me and they called my landlord and my co-workers. . . . They did that
> with everyone in the anti-war movement."
>
> A Tool for Terror
>
> In his testimony before Congress, Mueller described the watch list as
> an necessary tool for tracking individuals who had not committed a
> crime but were suspected of terrorist links.
>
> "It is critically important," he said, "that we have state and locals
> (police) identify a person has been stopped, not necessarily detained,
> but get us the information that the person has been stopped at a
> particular place."
>
> None of this makes the peace activists feel any safer -- about flying
> or about their right to disagree with their government.
>
> "It's probably bad for (airport) security," said Sister Virgine.
> "Stopping us took a lot of staff away from checking out what else was
> going on in that airport."
>
> Ultimately, she said, "To not have dissent in a country like this would
> be an attack on one of our most precious freedoms. This is the essence
> of being an American citizen -- the right to dissent."
>