The Constitution Applies When the Government Bans Americans From the Skies
Our brief highlighted the utter irrationality of the government's No Fly List procedures. The plaintiffs in Latif all flew for years without any problems. But more than two years ago, they were suddenly branded as suspected terrorists based on secret evidence, publicly denied boarding on flights, and told by U.S. and airline officials that they were banned from flying¾perhaps forever.One of the reasons that I'm not too attached to the specific details of the Snowden story (aside from supporting him, of course) is that it's just a piece of a much larger picture. Snowden's "NSA direct server access" is but a tiny speck in an ocean of civil liberties problems.In this case, the government is effectively using a quasi-military/police force to control who can travel the country. (Yes, I know you can drive, but for business travelers, air travel is many times the lifeblood of their work) People are banned from traveling, in many cases from performing their livelihoods. They do not know how they got on the list. They cannot get off the list.In charge of all of this is an agency, best I can tell, that has a mission of making all transportation safe from random terror attacks.It's insane. Aside from not protecting anybody, can you begin to imagine the ways such a system could be abused? It staggers the mind.There are probably around 100 people in the entire country that shouldn't fly. But the way this no-fly list is constructed, it will continue to increase year-by-year, without any incentive to pare the numbers back. Is anybody doing the math on the kind of economic impact such a system will have over a few decades?I've said it before. We need to completely disband the TSA. Structural adjustments are not going to fix its scope creep, conflict of interest with the military industrial complex, and lack of competence. It's just gotta go.