On The Government’s ‘Watch-List’
YOU MIGHT not realize it, but your government might be targeting you for an extra little dose of hell next time you try to board an airplane.
“Not me,” you say, not with your clean criminal record, commitment to community and expressed contempt for Osama bin Laden. You know your name would never pop up on the government’s secret list of people who merit closer scrutiny at airports.
So I thought.
Then, in recent weeks, my attempts to print advance boarding passes have twice been rejected with ominous instructions to “see ticket agent at airport counter.” So, instead of breezing to security with my carry-on bag, I was stuck in long waits among throngs of travelers with temperaments as stressed as the seams of their bulging suitcases. Each time, the agent — after checking my I.D. and asking a few questions and consulting with a supervisor — let it drop that this inconvenience was due to the fact that my name popped up on “the watch list.”
I chalked up the first incident to an obvious mistake that might have been humorous had it not put me in the last-to-board “C” group for one of those flying Muni buses known as Southwest Airlines. The second time, I wanted to know why I was on that list and what I needed to do to get off it.
“You’ll have to ask TSA,” shrugged the United Airlines agent.
He didn’t have to tell me twice; I’m a journalist. But the Transportation Security Administration was not much help. A TSA spokesman said he could not confirm whether I was flagged because I was on the list or because I might have had the same name, birth date or some other characteristic of another person who poses — as the law that authorized the “watch list” put it — “a risk of air piracy or terrorism or a threat to airline or passenger safety.” The TSA will not reveal how many people are on its lists or the criteria for getting there.
“You don’t want to disclose for bad guys what you’re looking for and how you’re looking for it,” homeland-security spokesman Russ Knocke said by phone earlier this week.
So the government can keep a secret list of people subject to scrutiny and delays as they travel without providing the criteria for how it compiles the list — and without any layer of accountability for its accuracy or effectiveness? It makes one wonder who the “they” are when President Bush says, “They hate our freedoms.”
“They have this idea they can wave their arms and say ‘possible terrorist’ and everyone will stop asking questions,” said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, which has been raising concerns about the verified glitches and potential abuses with the watch lists.
I can only assume that the computer confused me with another “John Diaz.” After all, I haven’t even had a moving traffic violation in a quarter-century, I oversee editorial-board meetings with some of the most heavily protected dignitaries on the planet and I have thick files of editorial clippings expressing my antipathy for terrorism generally and al Qaeda specifically. Then again, I admit our page has taken a few rhetorical shots at George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and the war in Iraq. But this freedom-espousing gang would never exercise its powers to complicate the lives of its critics, right? Most likely, this was just one of the many mistakes that have plagued the watch lists. A September 2005 review by the Government Accountability Office found that “about half of the tens of thousands of potential matches” flagged for further scrutiny between December 2003 and January 2006 “turned out to be misidentifications.”
The TSA has been reviewing its most restrictive category — the “no fly” list, for those who are proscribed from boarding airplanes in the United States — with the aim of cutting it in half. The Department of Homeland Security also just set up an online Travel Redress Inquiry Program (or “TRIP”) for those who think they were wrongly flagged on a watch list. My request has been submitted.
While the irritation of a watch-list delay is hardly among the more egregious threats to civil liberties these days — the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detentions of “enemy combatants” without due process and its use of “national security letters” to get financial and phone records without judicial review all come to mind — Americans should be concerned about any government attempt to intrude on an individual’s freedom without having to establish a legal basis and without safeguards against misuse.
The Department of Homeland Security has moved to exempt the TRIP program from the Privacy Act of 1974, which allows individuals to inspect, challenge and correct government records that contain personal information about them. As its alternative approach to “transparency” and “accountability,” DHS will allow Americans access to information submitted by them “in the course of any redress procedure associated with (TRIP).”
In other words, your government will only let you know what you tell them.
This is not the American way.
John Diaz is the Chronicle’s editorial page editor. You can e-mail him at jdiaz@sfchronicle.com.
© 2007 The San Francisco Chronicle
Sucks to be “them”.
It shouldn’t be the American way, but as if now it is. The whole point of these exercises: challenging innocent civilians, enforcing “no fly” rules, etc., is to condition the citizenry to accept the government’s right to do this, to keep us all on our toes, to instill within us all a reluctance to do anything that might go on our records and give any official anywhere the “right” to “hassle” us.
It isn’t very much of a stretch between ending up on a watch list at the airport, as happened to Mr. Diaz, and being grabbed up at the airport and rendered to Uzebekistan for waterboarding. Much of the civilian populace believes that “we have to be safe and if the price we must pay is to have some people occasionally be unjustly rousted . . .”
here’s an updated lyric to brush your teeth by:
you’ll wonder where your freedom went
unless you fight this fascist bent
On a trip last year my husband’s name came up on the watch list for the first time. It turned out that the individual on the list was 12 years younger than my husband, however it took a good 15 minutes of mulling over among the agents before they let us proceed. Hmmmm. We’re traveling again in June, so I’m wondering if it will happen again.
If we weren’t such a land of sheep and wussies, more would start asking questions like: you’ve had six years - why are you still spying of all of us? How long does it take to identify a few crazy people?
And where are the results? Any results? According to Rudy, our “Homeland” security apparatus is so flawed, that if we leave Iraq, terrorists will flood our shores - with the help of those al-Qaeda lovin Dems, natch. The watch lists, email reading, FBI anti-war group infiltrations, DoD illegal military snooping - not a single friggin “sleeper cell,” real “terrorist,” or even a nut job doing phony phone calls.
So the real question is: what is the real plan?
just one more chute added to the sheeple pens.
the Nazi’s restricted public travel by way of travel papers, this is just the new century model
As a 69 year old woman, I never thought I would be on their “Watch List” either. I have given up trying to get my name off and now travel quite confortably by train.
I guess it is because I have been anti-war since the 60’s and have attended numerous peace demonstrations. I also worked on the Kucinich campaign in 2004. What a bummer. I just hope that when there is a death in my family that they can hold off the funeral until I can get there by train.
Living in the Bay Area this got to me this morning when I opened the paper. Having a Muslim name and sons with Muslim names, we go through this all the time. My sons have it worse because they are young, look middle eastern, and have Islamic last names. What a pain in the neck!
“His name is Elwood Blues. He lives at 1060 West Addison.”
You say W and his gang are alooking for the Blues Brothers. Why don’t they look on the map, find Chicago, and the street address above, and send in the army, marines, air force, and national guard and get ‘em.
It’s the Watcher’s that need Watching.
Why do you suppose they hide their nefarious deeds behind a wall of secrecy?
As a public, we need to claim equal rights of scrutiny and bring those nefarious walls of secrecy down.
Maat, Best Wishes and Hope
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk1vEuhBuEU
Then we could all proclaim:
If we had only known!
I am writing this comment while waiting for the operator at TSA to pick up my call (I put my phone on speaker mode and can hear the music playing while I type this. It is that annoying soothing sound). I have been put on hold for 25 minutes, during which I was able to google ‘name on watchlist’, found your article and read it.
Yes, finally somebody picked up the phone. Total wait time: 40 minutes. She was quite nice actually.
As much as I can understand the reason why this watchlist is compiled, I feel that the way it is done done has indirectly disturbed as an individual and a sensible human being, and here is why.
I have been in the watchlist for about 4 years. My last name is ‘Halim’ but I am ethnic chinese, and I am not a muslim. I am originally from Indonesia. Our family’s chinese surname is ‘Lim’. How we ended up with the name ‘Halim’? When the dictator ex-president Soeharto took over the reign in end of 60s, he forced all Chinese in Indonesia to drop our chinese name (and also our culture and tradition) and adopt an Indonesian name (matter of factly, any name as long as it can be spelled in roman alphabet and NOT a chinese name’). My dad’s original name in his birth certificate is ‘Lim Han Hoei’. So he picked ‘Albert’ as his first name, ‘Leomatang’ as his middle name (you see my point? Albert is an english name. Leomatang is also not an Indonesian name, my dad created it. So as long as it is not a Chinese name, you are fine), and he combined ‘Ha’ and ‘Lim’ for the last name. Unfortunately he was probably inspired by the local natives’ name who happened to be a muslim’s name. That’s not all…. in 1997, my ethnic was attacked by crowds who were mobilized by radical Islamic groups. Things are better now in Indonesia for my ethnic, and we also have moved on. But it is not something you can forget easily.
To me, my last name represents the discrimination against my ethnic that I went through almost all my life in Indonesia. And being put on the watchlist because of that last name is like a slap on the face for me. It is bad enough to be on the watchlist. Getting ‘C’ all the time because I can’t check in online when I fly southwest, and also the embarrassment when I have to tell the person at the counter that I am on the watchlist. Moreover, it reminds me of all the injustices and the feeling of helplessness I felt back in my country that I don’t want to remember again. But now, every time I travel, I will have to re-live it.