People On No-Fly List Can Sue In District Court 241
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to a new ruling, those put on the No-Fly List can challenge their inclusion in federal court. Previously, they had to go directly to an appellate court, which would deprive them of any chance to subpoena documents or witnesses and make gathering evidence difficult or impossible. Knowing the government, they will get around this by creating a 'No-Sue' list and making it even harder to change your name."
Time To Push Back on the Bastards! (Score:5, Interesting)
list easy to circumvent (Score:5, Interesting)
A recent CNN feature story was about 3 American males named James Robinson. Two were professionals, and one was a young boy. The mother of the boy says that she merely changes the form of her son's name (in this case, to J. Pierce Robinson, IIRC) and the family (or the other gentlemen) can fly unhassled.
Terrorism? This stuff is cake compared to before (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but the no-fly list is nothing compared to the forfeiture laws that were passed in the 80s where it has become the norm to sue the property instead of the person owning it in order to circumvent the Constitution and laws protecting person and property.
People act as if anti-terrorism laws infringing on our rights is something new cooked up by Bush and Co. but the fact is we have had a steady erosion of our rights ever since the the New Deal getting far worse with Nixon's War on Drugs which has been perpetuated by each following administration. Hell Clinton went so far as to make it a Cabinet position.
The government has show increasing disregard for the rights of people and when the law proved to be insurmountable they invented new means of accomplishing the same (look up asset forfeiture) Sometimes the good guy wins ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_v._$124,700 [wikipedia.org] ) but the fact that there are judges who think otherwise is scary.
Anyone wanna bet... (Score:1, Interesting)
Anyone wanna bet that people who push back like this will find themselves on a different list accidentally, say a sex offender list, or a criminals sentenced to death row that have escaped list. Accidents happen...
Re:list easy to circumvent (Score:2, Interesting)
My father abbreviated his name from Joseph to Joe, which is what he goes by, when he booked a flight to Europe. Everything was fine until we tried to come back in to the United States. At passport control he was escorted to a separate room where he couldn't take cell phone calls - but could call people from a tapped phone.
He waited in line there for over 2 hours to explain that Joe is the same name as Joseph.
Re:It's Downhill from Here (Score:5, Interesting)
Muslim fundamentalists have never been an enemy worthy of the name. They're a bunch of hopeless dreamers; we're told they want to establish some terrible Caliphate over the whole world, but so what? While we're wishing, I'd like a Ferrari, and the Amish prefer to be called 'sons of the soil', but it's not going to happen.
The chief threats to the US global hegemony are the Chinese government, the Russian gas firms, the European Central Bank, and peak oil. A bunch of fuckwits in suicide vests shouldn't even be on the radar.
As someone who is on the watch list (Score:1, Interesting)
Changing Tactics (Score:2, Interesting)
If, as we surmise, the TSA's brand of 'security theater' is intended to keep the flying public frightened and to 'stay in line', as it were, (because acting out a metaphor is more powerful than most people realize,) then weakening it's effects in this way may simply induce the TSA and its puppetmasters to change their tactics. Another tactic has already been practiced and reported on, as it happens, and I wrote a short story about what might happen if it got out of hand. The story is called "Incident on Concourse B", and it starts like this...
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Lendon Forrester, clattering bags of jumbled canned goods, ran up the steps and opened the door. "Did I miss it?"
"No," Frannie Jurdens called from the kitchen. "They're still in a holding pattern." She capped the jug she'd been filling, and placed it beside the others on the counter.
Len glanced at the reporter on the living room TV in passing. "...the ticket counter behind me, air travel in our city has ground to a halt. This same 'ghost-town' scenario is being played out at airports across the country, in the wake of this morning's thwarted terrorist attack in Cincinnati."
Frannie looked up as he entered. "I don't know, Len. The media's crawling with rumors."
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You can read the whole story here: http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/09/05/short-story-incident-on-concourse-b/ [wordpress.com]
P. Orin Zack
Re:CNN link to someone doing it. (Score:3, Interesting)
I noticed that he's a retired General. This amuses me, because my father is a retired Navy Commander and his name is on the no fly list. Thanks for spending all that time serving your country, you can't fly!
Although, to be honest it rarely takes more than five minutes to get it sorted out. He just happens to have a very common first and last name. Usually it involves his saying "wtf," and showing his military ID.
Re:Time To Push Back on the Bastards! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not James Robinson, but my name is generic enough so that it's on the list. So I'm not on the list, but *my name* is.
This means that I cannot use online check in. I also cannot use a self check-in kiosk. Every time I fly, I have to speak to someone, who then has to look me up and make phone calls to print my boarding pass.
Do you know how they differentiate me from the other people with my name? By my birthday. So if I shared the same name and birthday with someone else, I'd be detained nearly every time I fly.
It used to be that if you had a frequent flier account with the airline you were flying on, they had enough information to know that you weren't the person on the list. That changed last year.
I guess I've been fairly lucky that my last name isn't of middle-eastern decent and that I'm white. But I realize that any one incompetent gate employee can make my day become really bad just because of my name.
Dear Chief Justice Roberts (Score:5, Interesting)
And also Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Alito... oh yeah, and Stevens, wake up, naptime is over.
Let me call your attention to Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 3, of the United States Constitution. "No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed". Now, what is a bill of attainder? Why, it is a law declaring a person or group of persons guilty of a crime and imposing penalties on them without going through the aggravation of a trial. Sound familiar? With this "no-fly" list, we have a law which allows the executive to declare certain persons "terrorists" and impose upon them the penalty of not being permitted to travel by air.
Justice Scalia, stop flipping through the law books for that old excuse about how preventing people from flying is a measure necessary for public safety and not a punishment; that excuse was old when Justice Stevens was young, and it's crap. Even putting criminals in prison is also a measure necessary for public safety, it remains a punishment.
Justice Ginsburg, forget that nonsense about the contents of the list being determined by the executive and not the legislature. The executive isn't granted any power to declare a "no fly" list by the Constitution, so the only power it has in that area is that delegated by the legislature. The legislature is explicitly denied that power, so it doesn't have it to delegate.
Justice Kennedy, forget that stuff about flying not being a right. For one thing, you're treading close to the Ninth Amendment prohibition against disparaging rights not specifically listed. For another, even if flying isn't a right doesn't mean the executive or the legislature has arbitrary powers concerning it.
Re:Military Privilege: Keeping their Rights (Score:2, Interesting)
Sadly I forgot to login before so I posted as an AC :(
Well I guess the assumption is that because he is retired military the likelihood of his being the particular person that isn't supposed to fly isn't very high.
Also, keep in mind that this isn't his DL, so it's not so much that his ID has special privileges attached to it, but that his service to his country has privileges attached to it. Semantics, I know...
That being said, I don't think anyone who's willing to step up and say, "hey wtf?" will be told they can't actually fly. Well if they act like a complete ass, then I guess the airline could be bitches about it.
The (nonsensical) idea is that if someone is the person they don't want flying, then they won't come up and say something (lol, yeah, right).
The odds of there being another 9/11 style hijacking are pretty close to nil, just ask John Walker Lind. The days of passengers being complacent when someone says they're hijacking the plane are gone. The attitude these days seems to be, "well they're going to blow us up anyways, so we may as well try and stop them."
Never mind that the no-fly list is a farce that really doesn't stop anyone from flying if they really want to.