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Government Secrecy Spurs $4 Million Lawsuit Over Simple 'No Fly' List Error
An anonymous reader writes "After a seven-year lawsuit costing nearly $4 million, a judge has concluded that Rahinah Ibrahim's student visa was revoked because an FBI agent checked the wrong box on a form. That simple human error resulted in the detention of Rahinah Ibrahim, the revocation of her student visa years later and interruption of her PhD studies. The Bush and later Obama administrations obstructed the lawsuit repeatedly, invoking classified evidence, sensitive national security information and the state secrets privilege to prevent disclosure of how suspects are placed on the 'no-fly' list. The dispute eventually involved statements of support from James Clapper, Eric Holder and several other DOJ and TSA officials in favor of the government's case. The defendant was not allowed to enter the United States even to attend her own lawsuit trial and in a separate incident, her daughter, a U.S. citizen, was denied entry to witness the trial as well. The case exemplifies how government secrecy can unintentionally transform otherwise easily corrected errors into a multi-year legal and bureaucratic nightmare and waste millions of taxpayer dollars in doing so."
Who said it was unintentional?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'd really like to kick these people in the nuts but I don't want to end up in gitmo.
This kind of abuse must be stopped. The constitutional protections our forefathers put into place were meant to stop these exact types of abuses of the people. The longer this goes on, the more we become injured to the abuses, the harder it will be to redress.
... the state secrets privilege to prevent disclosure of how suspects are placed on the 'no-fly' list.
Brown skin? - check.
Muslim sounding name? - check
Power trippy government grunt? - check.
No Fly For You!
"Ah but that will never happen to me" - The Mainstream American Mentality. Source - American, living in U.S. of America.
Now imagine how many people get to enjoy this sort of thing on a daily basis, and either don't want to go through the trouble of challenging it or can't afford to.
Sometimes I think the biggest weapon against humankind is our inability to admit when we are wrong. An obscene amount of money and time is fucking wasted everyday because we can't man up and admit to being wrong. I understand the need for operational secrecy, but sometimes just saying: "Yeah, I fucked up." Would be a much better approach.
Regards,
MBC1977,
ie, to prevent screw-ups and Buttle/Tuttles from being found out!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Secrets_Privilege#Supreme_Court_recognition_in_United_States_v._Reynolds
to Rahinah Ibrahim, not only for the financial loss that this has caused her but the inconvenience, emotional anguish, etc, etc. This should be paid by the individuals who acted to cover this up - not the organisations that they worked for, where the fine would just be added to the national tax bill. The fine must be high enough so that it really hurts all the individuals who contribute to the fine.
The fine should not be paid by the FBI agent who made the original error, he screwed up (we all do occasionally) and I doubt that he made the mistake maliciously. The fine should be paid by the individuals who were asked to review the case and who conspired to pervert the law of the USA, those who thought it more important to protect a decision by a government department than to see the right thing done. If these individuals are allowed to get away with it then expect this sort of thing to continue.
“...Under this policy, the Department of Justice will defend an assertion of the state secrets privilege in litigation, and seek dismissal of a claim on that basis, only when necessary to protect against the risk of significant harm to national security,...”
They did the right thing. They were protecting against the risk of significant harm to (the reputation of) national security i.e. they'd look like a bunch of incompetent cock-smokers if it ever came out.
..an accident is just an accident.
Or Tuttle?
When will you get around to calling to heel your democratically elected government of your fine republic and shining example of world-class leadership in liberty and civic rights?
It really is no wonder the other 95% of the world's population is getting a little fed up with your country. It's time for you to step up and so something. Like your founding fathers expected you to.
The lawsuit should be dismissed as she is not a US citizen and entry is a _privilege_ not a right. Sure, it was assholish but what-evuh.
I was under the impression that, once one's status is verified and there is no arrest warrant waiting, a United States citizen cannot be denied the right of re-entry.
Or is this yet another basic right that magically disappears when someone utters the "b b but terrorism" incantation, along with your rights to (among others) privacy and due process? (captcha was, fittingly, "rackets")
I once upon a time worked for the agency that does the no fly list. I am sure they are walking around their office saying that the lady is a terrorist and the court just did not understand the information that they had withhold from the court to protect the country. Needless to say these guys have never let truth interfere with their distortion of reality.
So she couldn't fly into the US to testify on her mother's behalf. There's "screwing up" and there's "piling it on higher and deeper." Which one do you think this falls into.
It seems to me we have become the very thing we used to criticize about the rest of the world.
We have become the terrorist, the religious intolerant, the torturer, the nation that spies on its own citizens, the nation with secret courts, the suppressor of voters, and the nation that uses government to quell protesters. When fear is our motivation, the most irrational statements begin to sound reasonable and take on a life of their own and strange combinations of bedfellows develop.
I imagine that even Bin Laden would be surprised the extent to which a single organized attack could inject its backward thinking into a nation that claimed to be so different than the rest.
Just imagine how many people are on the "let's kill them with drones" list by mistake.
That includes the "let's kill the American citizen" list.
"Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence."
- someone or another.
I think it's more likely this was completely intentional on the Government's part, based on dubious intelligence like "Ibrahim's cell phone was tracked using NSA overseas spying resources to a coffee shop where, one time, the third cousin once removed of someone we suspect might have said something positive about Islam purchased coffee. Therefore, she must be a terrorist sympathizer."
"Checked the wrong box on a form" screams cop-out to me. Really - the process to ruin someone's life involves just a form with checkboxes?
I have light skin and a very anglo-sounding name. One day I go to check in for my flight and discover that I can't print my boarding pass. So I go to the ticket counter and after some hushed tone conversations they give me my boarding pass. This happens three weeks in a row and finally I ask someone why I can't print the darn pass at home. It was then I discovered that I'm on the no-fly list.
Eventually I was able to get something called a "Redress number" and was then able to board planes like everyone else.
But what pissed me off was that a) I was never told that I was on the no-fly list b) Nobody was able to tell me why I ended up on it in the first place c) I had to clear my name to get off the list.
In effect I was tried and convicted without even knowing that I was charged with anything. The late Senator Ted Kennedy was famously put on this list as well. Yet another example of blatant government stupidity and waste.
More and more bright foreign students will choose a country with a friendlier climate to study. Let the US continue like this and remember how THEY got their leadership position in research: all those scientists who fled from Europe before, during and just after WW2. If the US becomes a country people don't want to travel to they can do the same for themselves when Germany did when it threw all Jewish scientists out.
Goodbye to the ##altslashdot crowd, and thanks for all the fish...
Maybe now the rest of us who do not see Beta as the end of the world, but rather as an honest attempt to bring Slashdot into the mobile touchscreen 21st century, can enjoy our articles in peace...
A bit off topic...
I know I am supposed to be affraid of muslims (and I am in general) but doesn't she look like the Virgin Mary in that mugshot? I am Catholic and I grew up with pictures and images of the Virgin Mary all around me (particularly when visiting my grandparents). Every time I see a muslim woman with this particular style of headscarf it always makes me think of the Virgin Mary. Not sure if other Catholics feel the same way....
I mean... I'd still lock her up in a freaking dungeon and throw away the key if she poses a threat to our country (despite the fact that she looks like the Virgin Mary).
when I saw this, I thought it was a fantasy film, not a fucking documentary of American civilisation.
Lawsuits will destroy you
Okay, Margaritas for everyone!
Bush, and Obama* where correct in there assertions. Why? becasue their decisions where based on bad data created by someone at the FBI.
*Some one under them, probably. Remember no president run the day to day affairs of the DoJ. It just isn't possible.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I am a US citizen (and hold a Global Entry pass, and participate in "Trusted Traveler" program - anything for the fed :) ). However, I know that no matter what, this could happen to me. My response - *stay the fuck under the radar*. Sad commentary on the state of our formerly great Union, but that's the best I am willing to do. It's not worth losing years of life tilting at windmills of government machinery. They will always win, or at least outlast you. :)
Note that I am even posting this as an "anon"
What puzzles me is the fervor with which the article repeats the word "Obama", even where they have to rather stretch grammatical rules to work it in ("high-ranking President Barack Obama administration officials spent years covering it up." Nice to know which President Obama: the high-ranking one, not the low-ranking President Obama.).
This started in 2004, five years before Obama took office in 2009. So I'd say that they ought to give Bush a bit of the blame; at least, say, for the first five years spent covering it up.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Hanlon was a fool in this regard (if he did say it that way that is).
Its too easy for malicious people to claim stupidity when they are in fact executing something nefarious.
Take for example a simple pick-pocket "mistakingly" bumping into you, using the diversion to lift whatever valuables you have on you.
Or, as someone else said: "For every problem there is a simple solution: neat, plausible and wrong".
Instead of a slap on the wrist. Give her $10 million compensation for inconvenience and smack them in the face. This should never happen whether malicious or not.
That 4 million dollars wasn't "lost". I'm sure whoever was on the receiving end, probably Washington lawyers, are very pleased with the way things played out.
I'll see your lame excuse and raise you a broken window fallacy.
If suspected terrorists were ineligible for health insurance through Obamacare, the Government wouldn't be able to divulge who does or doesn't have insurance nor why, it would all be classified. ACA fixed.
Goodbye to the ##altslashdot crowd, and thanks for all the fish...
Maybe now the rest of us who do not see Beta as the end of the world, but rather as an honest attempt to bring Slashdot into the mobile touchscreen 21st century, can enjoy our articles in peace...
Perhaps Dice could be smart about who's on a mobile device or tablet instead of forcing one interface on all platforms? That's the biggest complaint against Unity and Windows 8. A laptop or desktop with keyboard and mouse is vastly different from a mobile device or tablet with limited screen real estate and touch screen input.
Someone at the FBI didn't create and expand that lawless national "security" state nor did that someone repeatedly try to quash the lawsuit by invoking "state secrets". That would be the responsibility of one George Walker Bush and one Barack Hussein Obama. The buck stops at just one place, and that place isn't the desk of some flunky at the FBI.
not a bug.
On No-Fly List? Yes [ ] No [ ]
What could possibly go wrong?
There was nothing unintentional about the government's actions.
--
Don't like beta? Keep protesting until they listen and change.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I wonder if all this really just about covering up simple human error, or the govt went to all this effort because it wanted to keep the no-fly list unchallengable.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
And if you think what they did to this lady was bad, just remember that these same stupid morons are now in charge of your health care...
Who paid for the defendant? Fighting in a 4 million USD suit against the US government is not trivial game.
Marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity.
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kafkaesque
Usage: At one point, Judge Alsup dismissed the case. A federal appeals court reinstated it in 2012, more than a year after Alsup tossed it. A month before Ibrahim’s trial, the judge said he learned the Kafkaesque truth. “I feel that I have been had by the government,” he said in a November pretrial conference. http://www.wired.com/threatlev...
Once again the government acts like they're supposed to copy Terry Gilliam.
Um, it's saying high-ranking officials in the Obama administration, not that President Obama is high-ranking.
That's what he intended to say, yes. And if they'd phrased it the way you suggest ("officials in the Obama administration") it could have been clear. But they wanted to load in adjectives.
This was a faux-pas regardless of the political party involved (is the FBI linked to a particular party?).
Yes, I'd say. But the writer wanted to make it crystal clear by making sure he put in in Obama's full name and title-- not "Obama administration," but the "President Barack Obama administration."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
We can confirm that there are no, and never were, any swamp-gasses photographed within this region. The swamp-gas-like reflections of venus in the morning sun seen photographed in these here pictures are actually an optical illusion created by photographing high altitude inflatable barometric and precipitation-measuring equipment systems used by local airfields to better protect your children from the new prototype circularly-symmetrical extra-atmospheric invasion combat platforms used by advanced Rigelian assault forces, which occasionally appear like bubbling wetland emissions under the right camera conditions..
Nope. He knew US governmental officials would respond exactly how they did. He had personal experience with CIA higher-ups breaking the laws for the expedience of attacking the Soviets in Afghanistan. Absolute power. That's the reason we're still running Bin Laden's playbook.
to start shooting these people to death?
The government put the daughter, a U.S. citizen, intentionally on the no-fly list without notice to keep her from appearing as a witness as the trial, and then lied to the judge about it, claiming that they did no such thing and that they were informed that the daughter negligently had missed her flight.
The judge was later handed evidence about the lies of the government here, including the "terrorist watchlist" records sent to the airline (which they probably were not supposed to copy and hand to the defendant, but then somebody maybe considered fairness more important than covering bullies' asses).
Then everything in the judgment pertaining to the daughter's harrassment and the government fabrication around it was declared a matter of "national security" and the judgment was redacted, with everything regarding this charade getting blacked out.
If anybody ever had any doubt that the U.S. is a despotic tyranny without working oversight and justice, particularly every time that the "national security" mantra is invoked in the best tradition of Hermann Göring, that should be pretty convincing.
This story sounds like the classic movie Brazil where a fly falls into a typewriter and results in the arrest of an innocent man.
Which Queen? The one married to King George III of Great Britain and Ireland? or Vicky? or Lizzy?
Or are you referring to RuPaul?
I guess we can add, "James Clapper, Eric Holder and several other DOJ and TSA officials" to the global twit list if they are not there already. This incident makes pretty obvious the fact we are dealing with a totalitarian government.