Federal No-Fly List Grew Wildly

The list of passengers banned from flying on commercial aircraft in the United States grew from 16 to as many as thousands in the aftermath of the 2001 terror attacks, as the federal government failed to set clear guidelines for managing its growth, according to newly released court documents.

More than 300 pages of Transportation Security Administration and U.S. Department of Justice documents released this month, in response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, said names were added to two terrorist watch lists based on subjective criteria and little coordination between agencies. This led to the inclusion of some people improperly, ACLU said.

"The government documents released today raise serious concerns about how the lists were prepared, whether they are accurate and whether appropriate care was given for our clients who filed this lawsuit based on their concerns about whether or not they were put on this list because of their first amendment activities," said ACLU lawyer Thomas Burke of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in San Francisco.

ACLU sued for the documents on behalf of two California anti-war activists, Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams of San Francisco, who were told by airline officials they could not fly because they were on a no-fly list maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act and are posted on ACLU's Web site, www.aclu.org.

Airlines currently compare passenger names with two different lists created by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2001. One is the official no-fly list, which bans passengers from boarding aircraft. The other is the selectee list, which requires additional screening of passengers by law enforcement officers.

Even FBI agents could not discern the difference between the two types of lists, the documents released this month showed. "I am not the sharpest tool in the shed, so could you explain the difference in the selectee and no-fly lists to me?" according to a 2003 memo by one FBI agent. "What specifically do we do if we have a selectee list hit?"

The documents showed the day after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the number of names on the no-fly list grew from 16 to more than 400. As of December 2002, there were thousands of names on the lists, many of them aliases.

TSA, which assumed responsibility for maintaining the lists in 2002, is in the process of taking over checking passenger names against terrorist watch lists under its new Secure Flight program, which is being rolled out this month (BTN, Oct. 4). The agency said it will address problems with the existing list by crosschecking the names of 2 million passengers each day against a separate list maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, which the U.S. Department of Homeland Security established in September 2003.