ACLU seeks government data regarding no-fly list

By DAVID KRAVETS
AP Legal Affairs Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) The American Civil Liberties Union sued the FBI and other government agencies Tuesday on behalf of two peace activists who say they were wrongly detained at San Francisco International Airport because their names popped up on a secret no-fly database.

The ACLU also said that, during the past two years, 339 SFO travelers' names popped up in a database as they were checking into their flights, according to documents the group obtained from the airport via the Freedom of Information Act.

Those travelers, like the ones who sued Tuesday, were allowed to continue with their flights after briefly being detained and questioned by authorities.

The ACLU is asking a federal judge to demand that the FBI, the Justice Department or the Transportation Security Administration disclose who is on the list, how one gets on it and how somebody can get off it.

``If this is happening just at SFO, then thousands of passengers are likely being subjected to the same sort of treatment at airports across the country,'' said Jayashri Srikantiah, an ACLU attorney. ``And the public knows very little about the list.''

The so-called no-fly list was introduced after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and is meant to prevent potential terrorists from boarding planes. The TSA gets names from law enforcement officials and hands the list over to airlines to screen passengers.

But the ACLU wants to know the protocol by which somebody gets on the list and how he can get off the list. The group also wants the government to disclose to passengers who is on the list.

The lawsuit was brought by Rebecca Gordon and Janet Adams, two peace activists who co-publish San Francisco-based War Times, a nationally distributed newsletter critical of the Bush administration. They were stopped last August while checking in for a San Francisco flight to Boston, and detained by authorities until cleared for travel.

``It was very distressing,'' Gordon said.

With the help of the ACLU, the two invoked the Freedom of Information Act to demand the FBI, TSA or Justice Department explain what happened and to disclose why they were stopped.

The TSA, formerly the Federal Aviation Administration, did not respond to their request and the FBI said no files on the two existed, the ACLU said.

``No records pertinent to your ... request were located by a search of manual indices,'' wrote David M. Hardy, chief of the FBI's records division, in a Jan. 6 letter to the ACLU.

FBI spokesman Bill Carter referred inquiries to TSA. He said the FBI and a host of government and intelligence agencies forward names to TSA for inclusion in the TSA-maintained no-fly database.

The FBI, he said, provides names of people ``if they were involved in terrorist activity based on current investigations.''

TSA spokesman Niko Melendez said those on the no-fly list pose, or are suspected of posing, a threat to civil aviation and national security.

``We do not confirm the presence of a particular name of an individual on a list,'' he said. ``It's security information that we just won't do.''

Meanwhile, the government is planning to assign a threat level to all airline passengers.

The Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System was ordered by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks. The plan is to develop a nationwide computer system that will check such things as credit reports and consumer transactions and compare passenger names with those on government watch lists.

Airlines already do rudimentary checks of passenger information, such as method of payment, address and date the ticket was reserved.

Under the developing system, which TSA officials hope to have operating nationwide by the end of the year, the government will rate each passenger's risk potential according to a three-color system: green, yellow, red. When travelers check in, their names will be punched into the system and the boarding passes encrypted with the ranking. TSA screeners will check the passes at checkpoints.

The vast majority of passengers will be rated green and won't be subjected to anything more than normal checks, while yellow will get extra screening and red won't fly.

Tuesday's lawsuit is Gordon v. FBI, 03-1779.

=

Editors: David Kravets has been covering state and federal courts for a decade.

(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)