The #NoFly list is a #MuslimBan list – Papers, Please!
https://href.li/?https://papersplease.org/wp/2023/01/20/the-nofly-list-is-a-muslimban-list/
“The lists found by maia and shared with journalists and researchers confirm the TSA’s (1) Islamophobia, (2) overconfidence in the certainty of its pre-crime predictions, and (3) mission creep.”
The most obvious pattern in the data is the overwhelming preponderance of Arabic or Muslim-seeming names. More than 10% of the entries on the No-Fly list (174,202 of 1,566,062) contain “MUHAMMAD” in either the first or last name fields. “It’s just crazy to me how big that Terrorism Screening Database is and yet there is still very clear trends towards almost exclusively Arabic and Russian sounding names throughout the million entries,” maia told the Daily Dot.
The “NOFLY.csv” file found by maia contains 1,556,062 entries. The “SELECTEE.csv” file contains 251,169. The youngest of those on this version of the No-Fly List, as of 2019, were three four-year-olds. The oldest were twenty-five centenarians.
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That the No-Fly list is six times as large as the Selectee list suggests either that the government wrongly believes that it has near-perfect precogs and that uncertainty as to travelers’ criminal intentions (as inferred from profiling algorithms) is rare, or that the government is erring on the side of saying “no”, and violating the presumption of innocence and the right of access to common carriers, by putting most uncertain or edge cases on the No-Fly list rather than the Selectee list.
To understand why this is problematic, it’s important to keep in mind that decisions to prevent would-be travelers from flying or to subject them to more intrusive search, questioning, or other special treatment aren’t based solely on the No-Fly and Selectee lists. These decisions are made in real time, each time you try to fly, by precrime predictive algorithms and human staff of the TSA (for domestic flights within the US) and US Customs and Border Protection (for international flights to, from, or via the US or US airspace).
Pre-crime predictive algorithms.
Pre-crime predictive algorithms.
If the data about you in an airline reservation is determined to match an entry in the No-Fly list closely enough, the TSA or CBP won’t let you fly. But even if the information about you that the airline sends to the TSA or CBP isn’t found to match an entry on one of these lists, the TSA or CBP may decline to give the airline permission to let you on the plane if the algorithm generates too high a precrime risk score.
(This system is now being globalized under United Nations and ICAO mandates, ignoring the provisions of human rights treaties that recognize a right to freedom of movement.)
Pre-crime risk score.
Exactly how is this not just. Blatant fascism. This literally a police state.