No Fly List
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No Fly List

The No Fly List, maintained by the United States federal government's Threat Screening Center (TSC), is one of several lists used by the Transportation Security Administration's Secure Flight program and airlines to decide who to allow to board airline flights. The TSC's No Fly List is a list of people who are prohibited from boarding commercial aircraft for travel within, into, or out of the United States. This list has also been used to divert aircraft away from U.S. airspace that do not have start- or end-point destinations within the United States. The number of people on the list rises and falls according to threat and intelligence reporting. There were reportedly 16,000 names on the list in 2011, 21,000 in 2012, and 47,000 in 2013.

The list—along with Secondary Security Screening Selection, which tags would-be passengers for extra inspection—was created after the September 11 attacks of 2001. The No Fly List, the Selectee List, and the Terrorist Watch List were created by George W. Bush's administration and have continued through the administrations of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden as well as the current Donald Trump Presidency. Former U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein said in May 2010: "The no-fly list itself is one of our best lines of defense." However, the list has been criticized on civil liberties and due process grounds, due in part to its potential for ethnic, religious, economic, political, or racial profiling and discrimination. It has raised concerns about privacy and government secrecy and has been criticized as prone to false positives.

The No Fly List is different from the Terrorist Watch List, a much longer list of people said to be suspected of some involvement with terrorism. As of June 2014, the Terrorist Watch List is estimated to contain over 2,484,446 records, consisting of 1,877,139 individual identities.

Before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. federal government had a list of 16 people deemed "no transport" because they "presented a specific known or suspected threat to aviation." The list grew in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, reaching more than 400 names by November 2001, when responsibility for keeping it was transferred to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In mid-December 2001, two lists were created: the "No Fly List" of 594 people to be denied air transport, and the "Selectee" list of 365 people who were to be more carefully searched at airports. By 2002, the two lists combined contained over a thousand names, and by April 2005 contained about 70,000 names. For the first two and a half years of the program, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) denied that the program existed.

In 2004, then-U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy was denied boarding a flight because his name was similar to an alias found on the No Fly List. Laura K. Donohue would later write in The Cost of Counterterrorism: Power, Politics, and Liberty that "antiwar activists, such as Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordan, and political opponents of the Bush administration, such as Senator Edward Kennedy and civil rights attorney David Cole, found themselves included." In June 2016, Timothy Healy, the former director of the FBI Terrorist Screening Center, disputed the claim that Kennedy had ever appeared on the list, saying that another person with a similar name—who had accidentally tried to bring ammunition on to a plane—was placed on an airline's watch list and Kennedy was mistakenly detained by the airline, not based on the No Fly List. In October 2006, CBS News' 60 Minutes reported on the program after it obtained a March 2006 copy of the list containing 44,000 names.

Many individuals were "caught in the system" as a result of sharing the exact or similar name of another person on the list; TSA officials said that, as of November 2005, 30,000 people in 2005 had complained that their names were matched to a name on the list via the name matching software used by airlines. In January 2006, the FBI and ACLU settled a federal lawsuit, Gordon v. FBI, brought by Gordon and Adams under the Freedom of Information Act in order to obtain information about how names were added to the list. Under the settlement, the government paid $200,000 in the plaintiffs' attorneys' fees. A separate suit was brought as a class action "filed by people caught in the name game." In response, "TSA created an ombudsman process, whereby individuals now can download and print out a Passenger Identity Verification Form and mail it, along with certain notarized documents, to the TSA 'so the agency can differentiate the individual from others who may be on the list.'"

In April 2007, the U.S. federal government's "terrorist watch list" administered by the Terrorist Screening Center (which is managed principally by the FBI) contained 700,000 records. A year later, the ACLU estimated the list to have grown to over 1,000,000 names and to be continually expanding. However, according to Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, in October 2008 the No Fly List contained only 2,500 names, with an additional 16,000 "selectees" who "represent a less specific security threat and receive extra scrutiny, but are allowed to fly."

As of 2011, the list contained about 10,000 names. In 2012, the list more than doubled in size, to about 21,000 names as the list now included people who were a threat to security outside aviation. In August 2013, a leak revealed that more than 47,000 people were on the list. In 2016, California Senator Dianne Feinstein disclosed that 81,000 people were on the No Fly List.

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