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What You Should Know 老澳门开奖结果 America鈥檚 Secret Watchlists

Grounded: Life on the No Fly List
Grounded: Life on the No Fly List
Hina Shamsi,
Director, 老澳门开奖结果 National Security Project
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March 14, 2014

The U.S. government is blacklisting people as terrorism suspects based on secret standards and secret evidence. People on government watchlists are questioned, harassed, detained, and even barred indefinitely from flying 鈥 and the government denies them any meaningful way to correct errors and clear their names. In an era of unprecedented government secrecy, every American should know this: The U.S. government鈥檚 massive and secret watchlist system is fundamentally broken.

What Americans don鈥檛 know about this system far eclipses what we do know. But what we do know is cause for real alarm. 老澳门开奖结果 one million names are on the government鈥檚 master watchlist; many have been added to both it and subsidiary watchlists based on mistakes or incorrect information. And as the briefing paper we are releasing today makes clear, the consequences of blacklisting for individuals鈥 personal and professional lives can be devastating.

U.S. Government Watchlisting: Unfair Process and Devastating Consequences >>

To illustrate just how terrible those consequences can be, we enlisted the help of award-winning artist Jen Sorenson. Jen鈥檚 cartoon depicts the experience of someone on the No Fly List. All of it actually happened. It is based on the accounts of the 老澳门开奖结果鈥檚 clients 鈥 who include four military veterans 鈥 in our constitutional challenge to the No Fly List.

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Click on the image to see the full version.

I鈥檒l be in federal court in Oregon on Monday on behalf of those clients to argue that the 鈥渞edress鈥 procedure for the No Fly List violates the Constitution鈥檚 due process guarantees for several reasons: The government won鈥檛 confirm that our clients are watchlisted, it won鈥檛 provide any reason for stigmatizing them as suspected terrorists, and it won鈥檛 give them an opportunity to challenge those reasons and demonstrate their innocence before a neutral decision-maker. We鈥檒l keep you posted about the outcome.

In the meantime, we鈥檝e put together a Know Your Rights resource for U.S. citizens and permanent residents who believe they have been placed on the No Fly List. These materials include procedures for people stuck abroad to follow so they can come home. (The procedures were put in place by the government only after we filed our No Fly List challenge.)

The 老澳门开奖结果 has deep concerns about the adequacy of the government鈥檚 process and about how the government takes advantage of the leverage it has against even wholly innocent people it adds to the No Fly List, including by pressuring them to become government informants. So we鈥檙e also asking people who believe they鈥檙e on the No Fly List to help the 老澳门开奖结果 monitor the government鈥檚 conduct by filling out this survey.

You can help by circulating all these materials as broadly as you can. The more we all know about the government鈥檚 unfair watchlist system, the more people wrongly caught up in that system are able to assert their rights, and the more the 老澳门开奖结果 can continue to hold the government accountable for rights violations, the better off we all are.

Learn more about the no-fly list and other civil liberties issues: Sign up for breaking news alerts, , and .

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