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'A Non-Starter': Critics Slam Amtrak Request for DHS Watchlist Screening of Passengers
One digital rights advocate called the expanded surveillance a "terrifying" development that could lead to people "facing some really negative outcomes."
Apr 06, 2022
Civil liberties defenders sounded the alarm Wednesday after Amtrak asked the Transportation Safety Administration to start screening passengers against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's federal master terrorism watchlist.
"From our decades of work on the watchlisting system, we know it's a due process nightmare and prone to error."
Hearst Television reports the train service's request is part of the Amtrak Rail Passenger Threat Assessment, by which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reviews a targeted individual's "personally identifiable information" against the federal Terrorist Screening Database, commonly called the watchlist.
Personally identifiable information includes but is not limited to Social Security, Alien Registration, and driver's license numbers; financial or medical documents; biometrics; and criminal records. DHS may also collect and review targeted travelers' publicly available social media information.
"This request raises significant civil liberties and rights concerns," ACLU National Security Project director Hina Shamsi said in a statement. "From our decades of work on the watchlisting system, we know it's a due process nightmare and prone to error."
"The standards the government uses to place people on its massive master watchlist are vague, overbroad, and based on secret evidence," she added. "People on the watchlist are disproportionately people of color or immigrants, and can be wrongly stigmatized as terrorism suspects with no notice of their placement on the list or a meaningful opportunity to challenge it. Amtrak's request should be a non-starter and it needs to reverse course."
In an interview with Hearst Television, Saira Hussain, a staff attorney at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the expanded watchlist surveillance a "terrifying" development that could lead to people "facing some really negative outcomes when it comes to a contact with law enforcement should they be stopped for, you know, for like a broken tail light or something like that."
ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley said that "it's a classic example of mission creep."
"Pretty soon we're going to have people walking through, you know, body scanners to go to a Little League game," he told Hearst Television. "We don't want to turn America into an airport."
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Are Mass Plane Travel and Mass Tourism Unsustainable?
The coronavirus pandemic is just a symptom of systemic problems the industries cannot resolve.
Mar 26, 2020
"Ah, for the days when flying was a gentleman's pursuit! - before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and 'jet off' to Raleigh-Durham." --Robert ("Sideshow Bob") Terwillinger, The Simpsons, "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming."
In recent weeks, the coronavirus pandemic's devastating effect on the airline and tourist industries has been graphically evident. Airlines cutting flights by 50 percent or more while hurtling towards bankruptcy; passengers in chaotic airport scenes as they try to get home before travel bans; Venice, Paris, Rome-- for once-- resembling ghost towns; leviathan cruise ships forlorn and empty, like Wagner's Flying Dutchman.
This might not be a temporary bump in the road for these industries, but a precursor to their long-term viability if they do not radically change their business models. Observers have for many years questioned the environmental sustainability of both industries. What's more, airline travel has become so onerous for passengers that a consumer rebellion could be brewing even without fears of infectious disease.
Tourism has long been cursed with an inherent paradox that recent events have thrown into sharp perspective. Since about 1980, airline travel has gradually ceased to be an adventure (in the positive sense), and come to resemble the Stations of the Cross. From nonexistent cabin service, to checked bag fees (causing the need to shoehorn everything into the overhead, forcing delays both entering and exiting the plane), to intricately tiered fees imposing a rigid class system (like the accommodations on the Titanic), to shrinking, jammed-in seats making the airliner resemble a winged sardine can, the lot of the traveler is not a happy one.
And all of that is simply what happens on the plane. Since 9/11, airports have come to resemble mini-Soviet Unions, with every passenger under quasi-military discipline (including the requirement to "hurry up and wait," familiar to every GI). There are subtle indignities like removing belt and shoes, and what has been described as "security theater" (it is in practical terms all-but impossible to take inert liquids into an aircraft restroom and mix them into an explosive, given the need for a pressure vessel and freezing temperatures, but maybe the vast wastage of water bottles is economic stimulus for the concessionaires' $2 water on the other side of the checkpoint).
Is all this flying really necessary? Perhaps the current virus outbreak will teach businesses sending their employees hither and yon that all the fancy teleconferencing gear they've bought is actually usable. And possibly the reason business travel has heretofore not been perceived as a burden is because it can be expensed. That may change as the health, as well as environmental, costs of plane travel become more pressing.
Under a distance of about 400 miles, airline travel for any purpose makes no sense, either environmentally or in terms of convenience. But Americans, seemingly alone among developed nations, are shackled to airlines if they don't want to go by automobile. High speed trains would solve the problem, but there is no will to build them, given higher priorities like multi-trillion-dollar stalemates in the Middle East and tax cuts for billionaires.
The entire tourism industry faces dilemmas on a similar scale. The paradox of tourism has been around for centuries. Samuel Johnson, the sage of 18th century London, was asked about his trip to visit the Giant's Causeway in Ireland: was it worth seeing? "Oh, it was worth seeing, he replied. "It just wasn't worth going to see."
I was reminded of Johnson's witticism a couple of months ago when I was inveigled to go to Thailand. "Sure," I thought. "Why not?" But interminably long flights across the International Date Line jet lagged me into uselessness for a few days in each direction. And although it occurred significantly before coronavirus peaked in East Asia, a subliminal but nagging fear of contamination accompanied every flight. And that was only the travel portion.
Thailand, slightly larger than California but with 30 million more people, is already a densely populated nation. At best a middle-income country, it simply cannot handle millions of foreign tourists. Resort regions like Phuket are vastly over-touristed and overbuilt with perpetually jammed roads, and showing signs of chronic pollution. And this was after the Christmas peak of European tourism and in the midst of local complaints that tourism was down because of the then-local virus problem in Wuhan.
Bangkok is now a polluted, overgrown Soylent Green stand-in, its city proper more heavily populated than New York. There might be more motor vehicles per capita there than in a comparably-sized U.S. city, with two-stroke motorcycles and tuk-tuks spewing out massive amounts of pollution in addition to noise that would wake the dead. (A single afternoon's use of one two-stroke leaf blower emits more pollution than a V-8 Ford F-150 Raptor driven cost-to-coast; keep that in mind when contemplating that the GOP dearly wants to abolish the EPA).
These phenomena are of course not limited to Thailand. All over the Third World, scenic places have become colonized by a metastasizing, lopsided overdevelopment due to mass tourism, one that not only ruins the point of going there in the first place, but also makes the local people dependent on an economic monoculture as pernicious in its own way to their unique cultures as the Central American banana plantations.
As for the developed world, once our current crisis is over, you'd better forget about contemplating the timeless beauty of the Venus de Milo at the Louvre, or retracing the steps of Thomas Mann's characters in a misty, twilit Venice. The Louvre is as crowded as Times Square on New Year's Eve, while a seven-story tall cruise liner dropping anchor rather spoils the view to the other side of the lagoon where Venice's spires evaporate in the moody dusk like wraiths.
Since at least the medieval religious pilgrimages, tourism has been heavily ridden by the cliched and the formulaic. But since the invention of the jet airliner, mass tourism has been swamped by the kitsch sensibility - the domestication, familiarization, and commodification of the so-called exotic experience. Disneyfication is no longer confined to Anaheim and Orlando, but suffuses African safaris, Icelandic jokull expeditions, and visits to Laotian hill tribes.
Mass air travel and mass tourism are inextricably linked, and you don't have to be Greta Thunberg to acknowledge their environmental unsustainability as currently configured, quite apart from negating the very reason for visiting something that is supposed to be outside of one's routinized experience. We need hardly add that the effects are contributing to the distinct possibility that Venice itself may sink beneath the waves altogether, although in the case of Miami's South Beach, my feelings are more ambiguous.
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Labor Strikes, Once Blunted by GOP and Corporations, are Back and Shaping Public Policy
Even within the private sector there are stirrings we have not heard in many years
Feb 07, 2019
If President Trump does try to start back up the government shutdown this month, he may face an insuperable obstacle. Just days before the (temporary?) ending of the government shutdown long time left scholar and activist Barbara Ehrenreich and former Teamster organizer Gary Stevenson urged TSA workers to go out on strike. Days later Sara Nelson, flight attendant union president, doubled down on Ehrenreich's request by calling for a General Strike.: "Go back with the Fierce Urgency of NOW to talk with your Locals and International unions about all workers joining together - To End this Shutdown with a General Strike."
How much of a role declining air service and/or the possibility of a broad walkout played in ending the shutdown is not clear. These events did, however, illustrate the vulnerabilities of our air traffic systems and the growing leverage workers might enjoy. As Ehrenreich and Stevenson pointed out, these workers actually do possess substantial leverage, something most working class members have been unable to say for over a generation now.
In any future battle TSA workers must balance their leverage against the risks they would face by going on strike. Put briefly, over any labor strike, especially by government workers, the ghost of PATCO hangs heavily. When the professional air traffic controllers went on strike early in the presidency of Ronald Reagan, he ordered the firing of these workers and their replacement by military air traffic controllers.
Though most do jobs requiring less demanding skills, the current TSA personnel are not easily replaced en mass. Commercial air traffic would be brought to a standstill for several weeks. Though some--including me--might hope that such an eventuality would elicit a complete re-examination of the whole airline security system, such a result is unlikely. We are far more likely to die in an auto on our way to the airport than be murdered by a terrorist. Are these pat downs and scans not a serious diminution of our freedom?
What the Ehrenreich op ed as well as the individual actions by TSA personnel (declarations of illness and/or financial hardship) may do is lead to a broader discussion of the role of strikes in labor conflict.
What the Ehrenreich op ed as well as the individual actions by TSA personnel (declarations of illness and/or financial hardship) may do is lead to a broader discussion of the role of strikes in labor conflict. As capital became more mobile and global in the early seventies and as labor made an easy target for concerns about inflation, the strike headed toward extinction. Union density within the workforce steadily shrunk. Givebacks to management became the order of the day. In many states neoliberal legislatures and governors enacted prohibitions on strikes by public sector workers
The ground, however, may be shifting and teachers may be leading the way. Ehrenreich's and Stevenson's friendly suggestion that TSA collectively walk off the job is played against a backdrop of mass teacher strikes in red states, Oklahoma and West Virginia and blue Chicago and LA.
These strikes offer some lessons. Though low wages are one target, the strikes have been focused on demands that have a major impact on the quality of classroom instruction, including class size, modern textbooks, adequate support personnel, especially school nurses. More broadly these strikes have been an occasion to contest the whole issues of charter schools and the threat they pose to the very ideal of public education. When public schools are underfunded, for whatever reason, their poor performance can then be cited as justification for further expansion of the unregulated charter school empires. In an era dominated by neoliberal economics, such a strategy has been applied worldwide to such public health institution as the US VA and Canadian Medicare.
TSA personnel were not making outrageous demands. The request that they receive their already low wages on a timely basis was understood and accepted by public. I would hope that in the event of future strikes there will be more attention to the difficulties in performing one's job as food and childcare become harder to obtain. Will there be a future strike? Perhaps this is another lesson from the teachers. In WV and Oklahoma agitation for collective action came from the rank and file, with leaders only reluctantly tagging along. Whether this will be the case here remains to be seen, but these are volatile times.
Even within the private sector there are stirrings we have not heard in many years. Long time labor activist Kim Moody points out that competition and consolidation of supply chains controls costs by eliminating redundancy but also makes just in time systems vulnerable to work disruptions. Perhaps the strike is not really extinct.
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