Under Obama's self-proclaimed "most transparent administration in history," not only did the number of "original classification decisions" rise by 22.6% in his first year in office, but the secret no-fly list has doubled in the past year and now includes 21,000 names, including at least 500 Americans.
As Obama well knows, his predecessor too often used the no-fly list as a punitive measure. I have a bee in my bonnet about this issue, having been placed on the "selectee" portion of the no-fly list after I became the Justice Department whistleblower in the case of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh. While I no longer have that dubious distinction, no doubt other people have been improperly added to the list and still have no reasonable, convenient or comprehensive redress procedure. In fact,
The government will not disclose who is on its list or why someone might have been placed on it.
After the 2009 attempted "Christmas Day" bombing – an attack stopped by alert, courageous passengers, not by a bloated, ineffective no-fly list –
The government lowered the standard for putting people on the list then scoured its files for anyone who qualified. . . .Among the most significant new standards is that now a person doesn't have to be considered only a threat to aviation to be placed on the no-fly list. People who are considered a broader threat to domestic or international security or who attended a terror training camp also are included, said a U.S. counterterrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters.
The news that the no-fly list doubled in the past year adds one more marble to the scale on the side of secrecy, a side Obama campaigned against and still preaches against. The fact that the Obama administration is employing secret standards to place people (including Americans) on a secret list that restricts their freedom without any meaningful redress procedures undermines Obama's rhetoric about open government. The reports that the no-fly list has doubled follow a scathing critique of Obama's record on transparency in The Atlantic, "The Obama Administration's Abject Failure on Transparency."
Real transparency is not simply the government releasing positive or innocuous information. Real transparency occurs when the public is able to obtain information about their government even when the information is embarrassing to the government or evidences government misconduct. More classification when the system is already plagued by overclassification and rapidly-expanding secret no-fly lists do not promote real transparency.
My tenure on the no-fly list is described in Chapter 13 of my forthcoming book, TRAITOR: The Whistleblower and the "American Taliban," which you can 'like' and read a free chapter at www.traitorbook.com. Glenn Greenwald wrote the Foreword.
Jesselyn Radack is National Security & Human Rights Director for the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization.
