US government travel blacklists (euphemistically described by the government as merely “watchlists”) are being used to restrict airline travel and target searches of electronic devices of organizers of protests against US support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza, according to a complaint filed this week in Federal court by attorneys for two blacklisted Palestinian-American US citizens, Dr. Osama Abu Irshaid and Mr. Mustafa Zeidan.

It might be tempting to interpret the allegations in this complaint as indicative of the need for oversight or guardrails to prevent “abuse” of the blacklisting and travel control system. But we think it makes more sense to see this case as indicative of the risk of political weaponization inherent in the system of algorithmic, identity-based, extrajudicial administrative control of travel. This case shows why this travel control system should be abolished entirely, and why any restrictions on the right to travel should be imposed through existing judicial procedures for restraining orders and injunctions — adversary procedures that incorporate notice, the right to confront one’s accusers, and the other elements of Constitutional due process.

The heavy lifting that makes this use of travel controls to restrict political dissidents possible was carried out when airlines were required to install communication and control lines enabling the US government to decide, in real time, on the basis of information from airline reservations and travelers’ ID documents, whether or not to give airlines “permission” to transport each would-be passenger. That entailed more than $2 billion, by the US government’s own underestimate, in unfunded mandates imposed on airlines and their IT providers for changes to their reservation and departure control systems.

Now that this infrastructure is in place, only the ruleset needs to be changed to change who is, and who is not, allowed to travel by air, or how they are treated when they fly.

Names and other selectors (phone numbers, IP addresses, etc.) can be added to list-based rules. New category-based rules can be added to the ruleset. New real-time “pre-crime” profiling and scoring algorithms can be applied to fly/no-fly decision-making. New external databases and actors can be connected to the system.

All of this has, in fact, been done, making it harder and harder for anyone to exercise effective oversight over the system or the decisions generated by its secret algorithms.

The potential for targeting of dissidents and political opponents is a feature, not a bug, of secret administrative decision-making, especially in the absence of judicial review.

Here’s how it played out in this case, according to the complaint and other reports: Read More →

In a decision issued last week, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has offered the first appellate opinion on whether there is any basis in law for the U.S. government’s creation and use of a system of “watchlists” (blacklists) to determine who is allowed to travel by air and how they are treated when they travel, as well as to impose other sanctions.

Numerous lawsuits have challenged various aspects of the government’s blacklistsing system and its application to airline passengers, but this is the first time that any U.S. appellate court has ruled on whether Congress has given the various agencies that created, maintain, and use these lists any statutory authority to so so.

The 5th Circuit panel found multiple mentions in Federal law of the use “databases” for “screening” of airline passengers. But that begs the question that was actually presented. As the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) argued in their brief on appeal:

Below, both the district court and the Government presented a mishmash of statutory language, none of which clearly authorizes any of the Defendant agencies to create, maintain, administer, or use a million-name list to infringe on the liberty of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals alike….  High-level congressional authorization of general law-enforcement and national-security activity is self-evidently inadequate to satisfy the major questions doctrine. Even the more precisely-worded statutory provisions that the Government offers to justify specific uses of the watchlist fall short because they nowhere authorize the creation or maintenance of the watchlist in the first place. At bottom, a survey of the Government’s cited authorities reveals that Congress did not create the watchlist—unelected bureaucrats did….

The district court did not conclude that the text of any specific statute clearly authorized federal agencies to create, maintain, and use the watchlist. Instead, the district court followed the Government’s lead and cobbled together (supposedly) clear statutory authorization from a hodgepodge of different laws, none of which—whether viewed separately or together—comes close to supplying clear congressional authorization….

Other cited provisions may grant TSA the power to use the watchlist to screen passengers but nowhere authorize any agency to create, maintain, or administer the watchlist in the first place.

Congress’s after-the-fact acquiescence to an agency’s power grab cannot provide the clear congressional authorization for the agency’s action. Rather, Congress’s clear authorization must come before the agency asserts the power to significantly intrude on the liberty of millions of Americans.

Read More →