And the TSA and DHS have consistently asserted authority and exercised power — legally or not — to blacklist and surveil travelers without needing any suspicion of criminality.
So the surveillance is a 4th amendment search violation and the blacklist is a 5th amendment due process violation. It would be nice to have a government agency to enforce those. And an electorate that cares about them.
Surveillance in a public space is not a 4th Amendment search violation. The police are allowed to follow people around in public and note what they do without any kind of warrant. I'm fairly sure anyone is allowed to do this.
Somehow government made distinction between a machine gun and a rifle in the context of 2nd Amendment, even though they are really the same thing in principle.
Paradoxically, the same government fails to see the same distinction between an individual police officer following a person and a mass scale surveillance using electronic cameras everywhere with automated computer image analysis (the "machine gun" of 4th Amendment).
I absolutely agree with your point that automated surveillance of all public spaces is different than bespoke surveillance of individuals. But does that have anything to do with this article? It appears to cover surveillance of individuals by air marshals.
>The Quiet Skies [sic] program assigned officers from the Federal Air Marshals Service (one of the police agencies within the Transportation Security Administration) to accompany and surveil pre-selected airline passengers on flights and in airports.
I think the government just sees this as a distinction between a revolver and pistol and not a pistol and a machine gun.
Consider the whole FISA system [1].
> (Glenn Greenwald): When it is time for the NSA to obtain Fisa court approval, the agency does not tell the court whose calls and emails it intends to intercept. It instead merely provides the general guidelines which it claims are used by its analysts to determine which individuals they can target, and the Fisa court judge then issues a simple order approving those guidelines. The court endorses a one-paragraph form order stating that the NSA's process "'contains all the required elements' and that the revised NSA, FBI and CIA minimization procedures submitted with the amendment 'are consistent with the requirements of [50 U.S.C. § 1881a(e)] and with the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States'". As but one typical example, The Guardian has obtained an August 19, 2010, Fisa court approval from Judge John D. Bates which does nothing more than recite the statutory language in approving the NSA's guidelines. Once the NSA has this court approval, it can then target anyone chosen by their analysts, and can even order telecoms and internet companies to turn over to them the emails, chats and calls of those they target.
It's hard enough to get police departments to stop pulling people over on the side of the road and literally stealing their money, devices, or anything of value under the ridiculous concept of "civil forfeiture".
> "The Quiet Skies program was ended in June 2025 by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noehm. The same day as the Senate hearing on Quiet Skies last week, the TSA announced that Secretary Noehm was firing five senior TSA officials associated with the Quite Skies program, including the TSA’s executive assistant administrator for operations support and the deputy assistant administrator for intelligence and analysis."
Absolutely not. These jerks are very clearly posturing to consolidate all the power into ICE and private contractors to punish political and ideological opposition to their little ethnic nationalism project.
She gets credit for being complicit in a violent overthrow of the Democratic government of the united States.
Go read the latest national security memo and ask yourself, if they carry that through as written will you feel safe to show up at the airport?
I'm going to take the bold stance that the executive putting their political opponents on a TSA watchlist is bad, regardless of which party is doing it.
It's worse when they sic ICE (and the military for the cherry on top) against them, the TSA at least has the decency to keep its hands in the airport.
---
Using the military against your political enemies, by the way, is a genie that you can never put back in the bottle.
I am very tired of people who are more concerned with scoring points about 'look, both sides!' while turning a blind eye to the actual we-went-through-a-phase-change insanity of what's going on.
The last two hundred years was built on a bargain of the military staying out of politics in exchange for the military not being used politically.
This year, MAGA sent a giant fucking wrecking ball through that.
>executive putting their political opponents on a TSA watchlist is bad
Just wait a year or two and it will become totally normalized.
Remember those Cristie's stuffers which went to prison for closing bridge for several days in the city which went Democratic? It was just few years ago that such political retribution was considered a Bad Thing. Today it is just a new normal in politics.
Are you so nakedly partisan that you can’t accept a win at face value?
Gabbard et al were targeted by Quiet Skies. It was mentioned many times during the campaign and during the administration. I don’t think Noem is Machiavelli; the administration clearly signaled an intent to end this and it doesn’t surprise me that they did so and I think there were valid reasons given and I accept that anything politicians do may ALSO have a political goal in mind but doesn’t make their stated reasons insincere.
This is beyond partisan. In no way does this administration faithfully represent conservative constituents, nor the hostage GOP politicians that prop it up in their total duress.
Wouldn't cleaning up corrupt programs also look exactly like a "takeover"? Do you propose allowing the "quiet skies" program to continue, so that any president can weaponize it again? Like, if your argument has no practical reality attached to it, then we're really waiting our time here.
Assuming your comment is in good faith: I'm not a fan of political weaponization of travel blacklists whether they are called quiet skies or anything like that... please take a step back from the categorical logic and read what I wrote again.
> Wouldn't cleaning up corrupt programs also look exactly like a "takeover"?
No? Policies like perestroika were fully state-driven and never framed themselves as a takeover, violent or otherwise. Glasnost was welcomed by the public after decades of obvious federal coverups.
Looking at partisan actors at face value is just going to lead you to a trap.
Literally from the article: "News reports, presumably based on DHS statements, described Quiet Skies as a “Biden-era” program even though its largest expansion came in 2018 during the first Trump administration. And according to the TSA’s press release last week:".
There's no way a program expanded during Trump1 just disappears in Trump2. Everything Trump2 is doing is just a continuation from Trump1.
I find that naked partisanship is the rule rather than the exception on HN. Papered over with a bit of motivated "logic" but this is mostly just window-dressing.
ICE has extremely little power to punish people who are citizens of the united states, something not true of the TSA. If the federal government consolidates power in ICE and private contractors for ICE, then this is likely marginally better for US citizens than the status quo.
> ICE has extremely little power to punish people who are citizens of the united states
Tell that to yourself while in a holding cell for 24 hours waiting for your ID to be "verified". Police have long used temporary detention to intimidate and spite people, but at least there had to be reasonable suspicion to make an arrest in the first place, and theoretically victims have resort to a civil rights tort claim. But a recent SCOTUS emergency docket decision has effectively given ICE a pass to arrest people on a whim.[1] And it's much more difficult to press civil rights claims against Federal agents; in fact, it may even be impossible to sue ICE agents for false arrests, no matter how egregious.[2]
[1] See the Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo stay at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a169_5h25.pdf. Note that in his concurrence Kavanaugh wantonly mischaracterizes the district court order, then in passing dicta lazily tries to cover his ass by suggesting the rule he just rejected is actually the existing rule. One can only hope the other justices in the majority had different rationales for their decision, and weren't as confused or malicious as Kavanaugh. Sotomayor's dissent is at page 11 (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a169_5h25.pdf#...)
ICE doesn't have legal authority to punish people. Despite that, they are actively doing it all over the country at this very moment. At least if a TSA agent got a bug up his ass and decided to fuck up your day, you'd probably still walk out of the airport unencumbered by handcuffs. ICE might just black bag you and ship you out of the country.
They have immense power to punish anyone they feel like, and they can and do detain and deport US citizens. They don't give a shit that it's illegal, they're doing it anyway and they won't stop until they are removed from power. They have and will continue to ignore any court orders telling them to stop.
They don't deport American citizens even if wiki editors are hoping a low IQ reader won't check references and just read the title. The cases they mention are illegal parents taking their technically American citizen children with them. If you want to blame someone for "deporting citizens" then blame the illegals.
I don't know about the violent overthrow stuff, but you're absolutely right about the simple consolidation of Constitutional violations with respect to travel into FBI and ICE. But that's how politics work, if you wave around a shiny bauble above your head in your right hand, most people are wayyy too slow to remember to look at what you're doing under the table with your left hand. I think that's the dynamic that the original comment is evidence of.
The violent overthrow stuff is reference to current attempts to send the US military into blue states against court orders, to drum up the insurrection act, to the violent arrests of children in their underwear as a publicity stunt, to ICE officers / bounty hunters ramming cars into pedestrians without recourse, to the slamming of non-violent bystanders into the ground, arresting elected officials violently for no reason, to the psychological violence of the rhetoric being broadcast ("Russ Vought is the reaper") along with Stephen Miller's rhetoric in general but specifically about how many 10s of millions of people don't belong in this country in his mind. Brown people is who he's talking about. They want ethnic cleansing and are openly blatant about it if you open your ears to exactly what they're saying. Sure they'll also deny it at other times, opportunistically, but if you listen to what they're saying in full, not just to denials, they're spelling it out.
Go listen to the leaked Russ Vought interview about his strategy and tell me that's not incredibly violent. Listen to Stephen Miller's rhetoric.
These guys are itching to arrest elected officials and political critics, and to go as far as they can to hurt and punish people who push back against the state that they're hell bent on forcing into existence.
If you haven't seen these things I urge you to pay attention.
> I don't know about the violent overthrow stuff […]
Do you mean besides January 6? (You know, all those people that were convicted but were pardoned when Trump return to office. Also: have you noticed that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have stopped marching ever since the ICE raids started?)
Doing one wrong thing is better than doing two. You can oppose the Trump administration immigration policy and this sort of TSA abuse and celebrate one of them ending.
US travel blacklists are now maintained by the TSC at FBI.
What the Trump admin did was political sleight of hand. Calculated specifically to please people who, because we make it intentionally complex, are unable to understand the full spectrum of our military, law enforcement, and intelligence infrastructure. Politically speaking, these kinds of people could be made to believe we got rid of travel blacklists. When in actuality, the lists today are even longer.
Slightly off topic, but this is one of the primary reasons independents will never win an election by the way. The liberals and conservatives can always say, "you're lying", and it would take longer than the average voter is willing to pay attention for an independent explain why they're not lying.
Technically, that was Mussolini. Who didn't even do that.
Hitler's only contribution was killing the great-great-great-grandfather of the time machine, assuring his own birth, but also preventing the worst tourist industry ever developed.
"News reports, presumably based on DHS statements, described Quiet Skies as a 'Biden-era' program even though its largest expansion came in 2018 during the first Trump administration."
More like we're lucky that in blind fury they lashed out and actually crumbled something that was terrible to begin with. A broken clock and all that.
Republican elected officials and members of the present admin, e.g. Tulsi Gabbard, were targeted by the program under Biden. So they had a personal grudge
With context (e.g. no due process) those logs are chilling
> redacted ate sandwich
> redacted and UNK1 purchased head phones
> redacted and UNK1 used their phones to scroll through news
> UNK1 opened settings app and top of phone showed 'redacted iPhone'
All that work being done manually is one thing -- it would be limited to high profile targets. But with AI, its concerning that this kind of detailed transcript could be scaled to mass surveillance.
I'm a little confused by this article. It is facially opposed to extrajudicial blacklists, which, sure, I'm 100% on board with. Those are civil rights violations.
But it seems to spend most of its time and evidence on what seem to me to be totally fine surveillance. It's not a 4th amendment violation for a police officer to be in a public place and pay attention to the public movements of suspects. You don't need a search warrant to write down "so and so went to the bathroom" You don't even need any police powers. I'm pretty sure any random person could make a log of what they can see someone on an airplane they were on did during the flight. What abuse of power is supposed to be involved here?
I’m flagging this post; the discussion went off the rails. I don’t understand how “government ends dubiously legal program that was abused and weaponized” can in any way be perceived as tyrannical.
first class, is the new second class, anybody worth anything flys private, ie: if you have a ticket, you are on the list that way, further restrictions may apply.
at this point it would take an very special and exceptional circumstance to prompt me to fly internationaly
Surveillance in a public space is not a 4th Amendment search violation. The police are allowed to follow people around in public and note what they do without any kind of warrant. I'm fairly sure anyone is allowed to do this.
Somehow government made distinction between a machine gun and a rifle in the context of 2nd Amendment, even though they are really the same thing in principle.
Paradoxically, the same government fails to see the same distinction between an individual police officer following a person and a mass scale surveillance using electronic cameras everywhere with automated computer image analysis (the "machine gun" of 4th Amendment).
I absolutely agree with your point that automated surveillance of all public spaces is different than bespoke surveillance of individuals. But does that have anything to do with this article? It appears to cover surveillance of individuals by air marshals.
>The Quiet Skies [sic] program assigned officers from the Federal Air Marshals Service (one of the police agencies within the Transportation Security Administration) to accompany and surveil pre-selected airline passengers on flights and in airports.
I think the government just sees this as a distinction between a revolver and pistol and not a pistol and a machine gun.
Consider the whole FISA system [1].
> (Glenn Greenwald): When it is time for the NSA to obtain Fisa court approval, the agency does not tell the court whose calls and emails it intends to intercept. It instead merely provides the general guidelines which it claims are used by its analysts to determine which individuals they can target, and the Fisa court judge then issues a simple order approving those guidelines. The court endorses a one-paragraph form order stating that the NSA's process "'contains all the required elements' and that the revised NSA, FBI and CIA minimization procedures submitted with the amendment 'are consistent with the requirements of [50 U.S.C. § 1881a(e)] and with the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States'". As but one typical example, The Guardian has obtained an August 19, 2010, Fisa court approval from Judge John D. Bates which does nothing more than recite the statutory language in approving the NSA's guidelines. Once the NSA has this court approval, it can then target anyone chosen by their analysts, and can even order telecoms and internet companies to turn over to them the emails, chats and calls of those they target.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
It's hard enough to get police departments to stop pulling people over on the side of the road and literally stealing their money, devices, or anything of value under the ridiculous concept of "civil forfeiture".
No shit. I'm tired of this race to give up our Constitutional freedoms as quickly as possible.
> "The Quiet Skies program was ended in June 2025 by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noehm. The same day as the Senate hearing on Quiet Skies last week, the TSA announced that Secretary Noehm was firing five senior TSA officials associated with the Quite Skies program, including the TSA’s executive assistant administrator for operations support and the deputy assistant administrator for intelligence and analysis."
Credit where credit is due!
Absolutely not. These jerks are very clearly posturing to consolidate all the power into ICE and private contractors to punish political and ideological opposition to their little ethnic nationalism project.
She gets credit for being complicit in a violent overthrow of the Democratic government of the united States.
Go read the latest national security memo and ask yourself, if they carry that through as written will you feel safe to show up at the airport?
I'm going to take the bold stance that the executive putting their political opponents on a TSA watchlist is bad, regardless of which party is doing it.
I agree with you.
This is what's happening now: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-commo...
And this: https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:4q6ctl7...
It's worse when they sic ICE (and the military for the cherry on top) against them, the TSA at least has the decency to keep its hands in the airport.
---
Using the military against your political enemies, by the way, is a genie that you can never put back in the bottle.
I am very tired of people who are more concerned with scoring points about 'look, both sides!' while turning a blind eye to the actual we-went-through-a-phase-change insanity of what's going on.
The last two hundred years was built on a bargain of the military staying out of politics in exchange for the military not being used politically.
This year, MAGA sent a giant fucking wrecking ball through that.
Doesn’t change the fact that they’re just changing the mechanism for doing the same thing but even more aggressively.
>executive putting their political opponents on a TSA watchlist is bad
Just wait a year or two and it will become totally normalized.
Remember those Cristie's stuffers which went to prison for closing bridge for several days in the city which went Democratic? It was just few years ago that such political retribution was considered a Bad Thing. Today it is just a new normal in politics.
> Today it is just a new normal in politics.
Yeah because they got released from prison ... When there's no punishment for bad behavior it normalizes it.
Are you so nakedly partisan that you can’t accept a win at face value?
Gabbard et al were targeted by Quiet Skies. It was mentioned many times during the campaign and during the administration. I don’t think Noem is Machiavelli; the administration clearly signaled an intent to end this and it doesn’t surprise me that they did so and I think there were valid reasons given and I accept that anything politicians do may ALSO have a political goal in mind but doesn’t make their stated reasons insincere.
This is beyond partisan. In no way does this administration faithfully represent conservative constituents, nor the hostage GOP politicians that prop it up in their total duress.
"Quiet skies" pales in comparison to what they're cooking up: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-commo...
And this: https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:4q6ctl7...
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:4q6ctl7...
And this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpXX8HPh6nQ
It's a takeover: https://climate-reporting.org/undercover-in-project-2025/
Wouldn't cleaning up corrupt programs also look exactly like a "takeover"? Do you propose allowing the "quiet skies" program to continue, so that any president can weaponize it again? Like, if your argument has no practical reality attached to it, then we're really waiting our time here.
Assuming your comment is in good faith: I'm not a fan of political weaponization of travel blacklists whether they are called quiet skies or anything like that... please take a step back from the categorical logic and read what I wrote again.
> Wouldn't cleaning up corrupt programs also look exactly like a "takeover"?
No? Policies like perestroika were fully state-driven and never framed themselves as a takeover, violent or otherwise. Glasnost was welcomed by the public after decades of obvious federal coverups.
All you have to do is be transparent.
Looking at partisan actors at face value is just going to lead you to a trap.
Literally from the article: "News reports, presumably based on DHS statements, described Quiet Skies as a “Biden-era” program even though its largest expansion came in 2018 during the first Trump administration. And according to the TSA’s press release last week:".
There's no way a program expanded during Trump1 just disappears in Trump2. Everything Trump2 is doing is just a continuation from Trump1.
I find that naked partisanship is the rule rather than the exception on HN. Papered over with a bit of motivated "logic" but this is mostly just window-dressing.
ICE has extremely little power to punish people who are citizens of the united states, something not true of the TSA. If the federal government consolidates power in ICE and private contractors for ICE, then this is likely marginally better for US citizens than the status quo.
> ICE has extremely little power to punish people who are citizens of the united states
Tell that to yourself while in a holding cell for 24 hours waiting for your ID to be "verified". Police have long used temporary detention to intimidate and spite people, but at least there had to be reasonable suspicion to make an arrest in the first place, and theoretically victims have resort to a civil rights tort claim. But a recent SCOTUS emergency docket decision has effectively given ICE a pass to arrest people on a whim.[1] And it's much more difficult to press civil rights claims against Federal agents; in fact, it may even be impossible to sue ICE agents for false arrests, no matter how egregious.[2]
[1] See the Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo stay at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a169_5h25.pdf. Note that in his concurrence Kavanaugh wantonly mischaracterizes the district court order, then in passing dicta lazily tries to cover his ass by suggesting the rule he just rejected is actually the existing rule. One can only hope the other justices in the majority had different rationales for their decision, and weren't as confused or malicious as Kavanaugh. Sotomayor's dissent is at page 11 (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a169_5h25.pdf#...)
[2] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egbert_v._Boule.
ICE doesn't have legal authority to punish people. Despite that, they are actively doing it all over the country at this very moment. At least if a TSA agent got a bug up his ass and decided to fuck up your day, you'd probably still walk out of the airport unencumbered by handcuffs. ICE might just black bag you and ship you out of the country.
They have immense power to punish anyone they feel like, and they can and do detain and deport US citizens. They don't give a shit that it's illegal, they're doing it anyway and they won't stop until they are removed from power. They have and will continue to ignore any court orders telling them to stop.
Here's a good overview, please take a look at the sources if you don't trust Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_and_deportation_of_A...
They don't deport American citizens even if wiki editors are hoping a low IQ reader won't check references and just read the title. The cases they mention are illegal parents taking their technically American citizen children with them. If you want to blame someone for "deporting citizens" then blame the illegals.
Thanks for taking a look, please let me know your justification for the Miguel Silvestre case as well.
The one who was first deported in 1999? From what a quick search shows - most likely not a citizen.
They have the power to kidnap citizens off the street and ship them to a third-world prison without telling anyone. That is worse.
I don't know about the violent overthrow stuff, but you're absolutely right about the simple consolidation of Constitutional violations with respect to travel into FBI and ICE. But that's how politics work, if you wave around a shiny bauble above your head in your right hand, most people are wayyy too slow to remember to look at what you're doing under the table with your left hand. I think that's the dynamic that the original comment is evidence of.
Whole heartedly agree.
The violent overthrow stuff is reference to current attempts to send the US military into blue states against court orders, to drum up the insurrection act, to the violent arrests of children in their underwear as a publicity stunt, to ICE officers / bounty hunters ramming cars into pedestrians without recourse, to the slamming of non-violent bystanders into the ground, arresting elected officials violently for no reason, to the psychological violence of the rhetoric being broadcast ("Russ Vought is the reaper") along with Stephen Miller's rhetoric in general but specifically about how many 10s of millions of people don't belong in this country in his mind. Brown people is who he's talking about. They want ethnic cleansing and are openly blatant about it if you open your ears to exactly what they're saying. Sure they'll also deny it at other times, opportunistically, but if you listen to what they're saying in full, not just to denials, they're spelling it out.
Go listen to the leaked Russ Vought interview about his strategy and tell me that's not incredibly violent. Listen to Stephen Miller's rhetoric.
These guys are itching to arrest elected officials and political critics, and to go as far as they can to hurt and punish people who push back against the state that they're hell bent on forcing into existence.
If you haven't seen these things I urge you to pay attention.
This is a thing that happened:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
> I don't know about the violent overthrow stuff […]
Do you mean besides January 6? (You know, all those people that were convicted but were pardoned when Trump return to office. Also: have you noticed that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have stopped marching ever since the ICE raids started?)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...
Or perhaps the fake electors?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
That's because they're now hired as ICE agents and bounty hunters.
I mean that's the narrative but can you provide any evidence this is happening with the Quiet Skies program?
> She gets credit for being complicit in a violent overthrow of the Democratic government of the united States.
Care to elaborate what is this in reference to? Especially the "violent" part. Please do not simply link to some news article in your response.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517188
Maybe later I'll compile a list of videos but at the moment I ask you to do a little research yourself. I gotta work.
Spying on people using DHS and ICE resources or Palantier isn't better on using the TSA. It's all the same.
> Spying on people using DHS and ICE resources or Palantier isn't better on using the TSA. It's all the same.
You're right, but not for the reason you think. TSA is part of DHS, so it's a tautology.
Doing one wrong thing is better than doing two. You can oppose the Trump administration immigration policy and this sort of TSA abuse and celebrate one of them ending.
>Doing one wrong thing is better than doing two
Depends on their respective impact.
Not if it didn't end.
US travel blacklists are now maintained by the TSC at FBI.
What the Trump admin did was political sleight of hand. Calculated specifically to please people who, because we make it intentionally complex, are unable to understand the full spectrum of our military, law enforcement, and intelligence infrastructure. Politically speaking, these kinds of people could be made to believe we got rid of travel blacklists. When in actuality, the lists today are even longer.
Slightly off topic, but this is one of the primary reasons independents will never win an election by the way. The liberals and conservatives can always say, "you're lying", and it would take longer than the average voter is willing to pay attention for an independent explain why they're not lying.
I'm sorry. Just to be clear..
You do realize, do you not, that the US travel blacklist is now maintained by TSC instead of being a major feature of TSA right?
I mean you don't actually believe we would get rid of that function do you?
A real “at least hitler made the trains run on time” moment.
Technically, that was Mussolini. Who didn't even do that.
Hitler's only contribution was killing the great-great-great-grandfather of the time machine, assuring his own birth, but also preventing the worst tourist industry ever developed.
"News reports, presumably based on DHS statements, described Quiet Skies as a 'Biden-era' program even though its largest expansion came in 2018 during the first Trump administration."
More like we're lucky that in blind fury they lashed out and actually crumbled something that was terrible to begin with. A broken clock and all that.
Republican elected officials and members of the present admin, e.g. Tulsi Gabbard, were targeted by the program under Biden. So they had a personal grudge
Is there a source for this or did you just make it up?
https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2025/09/30/dhs-and-t...
Your source is a press release by the Trump administration?
With context (e.g. no due process) those logs are chilling
> redacted ate sandwich
> redacted and UNK1 purchased head phones
> redacted and UNK1 used their phones to scroll through news
> UNK1 opened settings app and top of phone showed 'redacted iPhone'
All that work being done manually is one thing -- it would be limited to high profile targets. But with AI, its concerning that this kind of detailed transcript could be scaled to mass surveillance.
I'm a little confused by this article. It is facially opposed to extrajudicial blacklists, which, sure, I'm 100% on board with. Those are civil rights violations.
But it seems to spend most of its time and evidence on what seem to me to be totally fine surveillance. It's not a 4th amendment violation for a police officer to be in a public place and pay attention to the public movements of suspects. You don't need a search warrant to write down "so and so went to the bathroom" You don't even need any police powers. I'm pretty sure any random person could make a log of what they can see someone on an airplane they were on did during the flight. What abuse of power is supposed to be involved here?
Osama bin Laden couldn't have dreamt of these far reaching effects of 9/11.
This isn't actually because of 9/11.
For the politicians who are putting this structure into place, 9/11 is a convenient excuse to pin all of this on.
But in reality if 9/11 didn't happen, then any myriad of other things would be used in it's place to justify this.
Just look at things like the chat control proposal in the EU. Which "9/11" is that based on? None, and they don't need one.
I’m flagging this post; the discussion went off the rails. I don’t understand how “government ends dubiously legal program that was abused and weaponized” can in any way be perceived as tyrannical.
It's HN, what do you expect. More than half the people here are (probably) the ones who put in black masks and swing bats at people.
Travel blacklists have always been a weapon. It’s like saying the weaponization of firearms.
Off topic but can anyone tell me why the [sic] in 'The Quiet Skies [sic] program assigned officers from the Federal Air Marshals Service ...'?
Also see numerous typos in the article, including a mention of 'Quite Skies'.
Saw that coming 20 years ago...
Sad that the things happening today we were warned could happen. The future of this country does not look good.
as if they weren't always a weapon.
first class, is the new second class, anybody worth anything flys private, ie: if you have a ticket, you are on the list that way, further restrictions may apply. at this point it would take an very special and exceptional circumstance to prompt me to fly internationaly