Slashdot Mirror
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writes "After a seven-year lawsuit costing nearly $4 million, a judge has concluded that Rahinah Ibrahim's student visa was revoked because an FBI agent checked the wrong box on a form.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.
"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,
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.
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.
I know. The willful obstruction of justice isn't important. And even if it was, we don't have to worry because they'd never do that to a citizen. I know the summary and article note how a US citizen was also denied travel, but I'm sure there was a good reason for that too, that we don't need to understand.
I'm not sure why we're even talking about this -- it's not like Canadians are human beings in the first place
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.
I don't understand how lawsuits can be "obstructed". If the governement is unwilling to cooperate with the court, then the court should side with Rahinah Ibrahim 100%. Case closed.
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.
Care to explain the Alien and Sedition acts passed in 1798, then?
when I saw this, I thought it was a fantasy film, not a fucking documentary of American civilisation.
The worst tyrants are the formerly oppressed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
The persecution of the person harmed by the accident wasn't an accident.
Learn to love Alaska
90%? So how would that go for the countries in western europe, and most of the Commonwealth? The USA isn't in the top 10% any more. Depending on the metric, they aren't even in the top 50%.
Learn to love Alaska
The issue isn't the blocking of her coming in. It was the lies and coverup after, and blocking her daughter, a US citizen, from entering. Mistakes aren't a big deal. Spending $4,000,000 to blame the victim is. Why spend that much monry to harm her? Lying, breaking the law, denying a US citizen entry.
Oh, and yes, it is "illegal" to deny a non-citizen entry. She had the appropriate papers, and there was no legitimate reason to exclude her. The laws *require* that she be allowed in. If not, then "residency" and "visa" mean nothing.
Learn to love Alaska
Don't worry,
They only have the metadata of this post with your IP address. The metadata probably includes the full http header chunk, which includes your whole post. Also probably the metadata of where that IP address was mapped to at the time of the post. Nothing wrong with that right?
That's okay, Mein Fuhrer... I mean our Prime Minister doesn't have CSEC illegally tracking the metadata here in Canada. Oh wait, thats right, they are!
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
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
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.
Was King George the Third a her?
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.
And this is a huge worry. I post under my real name, but I worry that I may find my (absolutely necessary in my line of work) right to travel revoked. This is the "fear" tactic. I don't know whether my constitutionally protected expression of opinions may result in negative consequences. Fear motivates me and others to remain silent.
My guess is that the government has no interest in stopping people from whining her and on other forums but I don't know .
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.
Care to suggest a *method* for stopping this kind of abuse?
We are clearly headed into an era of coupe d'etats, as the government is acting in ways that remove all belief in it's justice, so there will be small interest among the citizenry if one gang of theives and murderers ousts another. But a way to reform the government before this occurs is not obvious.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Who paid for the defendant? Fighting in a 4 million USD suit against the US government is not trivial game.
When I was a child, most women used to cover their hair in much of Europe. Sometimes headscarves were worn in a way that resembled some of the Hijabs.
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
Neat!
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
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
Said privilege is covered by the rule of law, you know. They can't just arbitrary deny her entry, they have to justify that. Turns out that they didn't have any valid justification so all they could do is scream "national security".
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?
You cannot expect any government to judge itself in the same manner as the Sheeple.
As Orwell said "Some are more equal than others"....
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Go back to Iran-Contra and move forward to operation fast and furious, and operation gunwalker.
Look up barry seal and what happened to him, and slowly you start to understand what is going on.
Watch the online film "The clinton chronicles" and realize that the phone number in dead barry seals
truck was bush sr.
All in all both sides are in it very deep, and this also explains why Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan
by US troops. He threatened to talk, and they burned his clothes and his diary.
When General Wesley Clark was asked if he thought he was murdered, he said it was possible.
Tillman had openly stated he planned to talk to Noam Chomsky, and not long after that he was dead.
Former LA detective Michael Ruppert admitted the government was involved in drug dealing.
Most ppl have no idea how bad the situation really is here in the US, and its bipartisan.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
We spent $4 trillion on a war that was a lie, $4 million is small change.
Don't expect the puppets of the plutocrats to give a damn about spending "other ppls money".
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
You think your Anon, but you are not.
http://www.extremetech.com/com...
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
The "broken window" fallacy is applied to the belief that creating make-work jobs helps the economy (although it can, in certain conditions). GP was claiming that the window was broken/lawsuit dragged on to the benefit of certain crony glaziers/lawyers, which is not the same thing.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
This relies upon the meaning of the amendment being enforced by court decisions. Sorry, but I'm quite skeptical that this will happen.
Court decisions have more frequently extended the power of the federal government than limited it. Frequently at the expense of the state governments, but when the right was supposed to reside in "the people or the state", moving it from the states to the feds is a regressive act. (I'll grant you that many states have given them reasons for the move, but that's a separate issue.)
E.g.: The Warren Court, during the Civil Rights movement, extensively moved power from the states to the feds. They appear to have had the best of intentions, but the long term results are mixed. The result is that instead of having several states with extremely repressive governments, we have a country with a moderately repressive government, and a highly intrusive one. It also helped abate the most extreme racial injustices...though recently we've seen some steps backwards on that ground from the federal level.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.