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Tulsi Gabbard, a former US congresswoman and presidential candidate, revealed that she and her husband were placed on a terror watch list and followed by government agents under the "Quiet Skies" program, almost completely uncovered in US media:
https://www.racket.news/p/american-stasi-tulsi-gabbard-confirms
I just read that story, too; since mods are asking for context, let me help out with that.
"Quiet skies" is a TSA program that's basically the kinder, gentler version of the Bush-era no-fly list. Instead of outright stopping suspected terrorists from getting on airplanes, now they send plainclothes air marshals to ride along and keep an eye on things, possibly with the aid of bomb-sniffing dogs, keeping all of this hidden from the suspect and other passengers. Here is a post from the official TSA blog from 2018 explaining it, and comparing it to the practice of having police officers hang around crime hotspots to cool things down: https://www.tsa.gov/blog/2018/08/22/facts-about-quiet-skies
Recently, some employees of this program have come forward with claims that Trump supporters, including but not limited to Tulsi Gabbard, were put on this list and monitored whenever they flew, for political reasons. This has not yet been reported in any mainstream publication as far as I can tell; all the Google results I got were from small-time independent sources and Twitter posts. It's also unclear exactly what criteria were used - it seems the list also included individuals who went to Washington on Jan 6 but were never charged with any crime.
This seems kind of... fine? It's not a "do not fly" which creates real and tangible problems, it's rather at worst a waste of government money, right? The program description also mentions that very much unlike the Bush-era program, they take at least some people off the list after a while. If Gabbard temporarily has a few ride-alongs, maybe she gets to be outraged personally for a little while but it doesn't seem like she suffers any actual, uh, harm?
The program is fine, using it to harass your political opponents is clearly not.
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Right on cue.
Always good to hear from DTulpa Gabbard herself! :)
It's just one more point towards simulation theory. I was having a conversation with somebody in my kitchen while making dinner, half-assedly and uncharitably trying to anticipate the kind of minimizing response one could expect to see to this story (pending corroboration tbf I guess) not even one hour before seeing this post.
And then - there it is. The world is a hologram.
I'm just over 30, which means 9/11 happened in elementary school, and I came of age right when society was starting to question the Iraq war and if all the post-9/11 stuff was worth it. I especially remember people (myself included!) being very upset about the Do Not Fly list, which used to be absolutely horrendous nightmare-fuel (people wouldn't get told they were on it, would get on it for stupid reasons, even if you were obviously on it by mistake they wouldn't even admit you were on it much less take you off, the list grew very large very quickly, etc etc), as far as I knew that was still the case, and so in that context finding out the new version is "they let you fly but someone has to secretly babysit you" is kind of underwhelming in terms of "I should be upset". It's possible even I have been gaslit into thinking this is all okay and fine, but I won't pretend that kind of upbringing didn't play a role.
One thing I am quite upset about is the biometric Clear thing, which seems like a nefarious corporate conspiracy to steal your biometric data (and for airports to bilk the public out of money). Like, my home airport dedicated a TSA officer just to the Clear line, and they used to pay literally half a dozen salesman to sign people up for their "free trial" (yearly price over 100 bucks) (if you can afford to pay that many salespeople, your product is dodgy). So not only are they worsening TSA wait times for poor regular people, they are dedicating public money to do so (my airport is at least ostensibly owned by a public benefit type thing).
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It's much more than just having an air marshal tag along on each of her flights. It also comes with enhanced security screening at each checkpoint. Even if you're comfortable with the wasted resources—and three marshals per flight plus a bomb dog team at each stop comes to a lot of resources—that's harassment unless they really have some evidence of wrong doing.
How is it harassment if she's unaware? About the details, I found this 2018 ACLU article about the same program interesting. A few points:
Allegedly the program is largely algorithmic in who it selects, and this algorithm is often pretty irrational. This means while it's still possible it was targeted at Gabbard, on balance I'm inclined to say it wasn't. Apparently a group is considering suing on her behalf, and this might (we would hope) surface some details, and I support that kind of accountability and attempt at transparency, so I approve.
Allegedly the marshals use some subjective judgements about "suspicious" behavior, which does raise false positive concerns, but presumably the escalation is simply banning flying altogether, which I would assume (could be wrong) would be a higher bar and one especially unlikely for a high-profile person like Gabbard, so I'm not quite convinced this is a real worry.
In terms of waste of money? Yes, it sounds like an absolute waste of money. I would appreciate this program were to receive more scrutiny. But sadly, this seems fairly par for the course in terms of the American paranoia about terrorism. And to be fair, taken in aggregate, the government does seem to have been fairly effective over the last decade in preventing mass terror attacks, including on planes, so I think it's quite possible that the general public doesn't mind this kind of cost too much.
What does the enhanced checks look like? Sounds like "Quad S" which means your luggage might be swapped for explosives, might be searched, and you go through a metal detector and a patdown. Most of those things are fairly normal in today's situation, though of course
We should also consider the alternate hypothesis: maybe she did actually deserve scrutiny? Certainly we don't want politicians to be above the law. This is admittedly a super-tricky balance to strike. IMO, this being exposed is good and so are any lawsuits that come of it.
In other words, at risk of sounding cliche, but the system is working fine. Politician suffers minor inconvenience and secretive government program receives more scrutiny. Not a bad trade.
Tulsi Gabbard is an American-born, female, military veteran, Congresswoman who is in her 40s and has publicly denounced Islam -- you think she was flagged algorithmically as a threat to aviation?
I find it quite unlikely that such an algorithm would be deployed, and if it were true the real story would be that the algorithm could use some serious fixin'.
I think her family is running some weird cult, so on a pragmatic level I can understand the spooks wanting to keep the tabs on her especially given her positions in public service, but yeah, it does make a mockery out of the very idea of liberal democracy .
Cults should not be spied on either, unless they are a criminal organization.
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It's an improvement.
Next step, expand it to all flights.
Then, roll back the airports to the status quo ante, getting rid of the 'security' that can't find their own tuchus with both hands, a map, a GPS receiver, and a pack of bloodhounds.
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If undercover cops started hanging around outside your house, following you to work, etc, but never arrested or otherwise interfered with you, would that be fine? Nobody else in your town should have a problem with that, when it comes to light?
And if you happen to be a well-known and outspoken critic of your town's mayor, and you find out that other critics of the mayor are being followed by undercover police too, everything's still fine and nobody else should be upset?
Of course that would be a problem. I'm slightly more sensitive to privacy violations than the average American, but... scale matters, as does the risk of privacy violations (and other considerations not exhaustively listed here, such as the risk of false positives). The act of flying in a domestic passenger airplane is fundamentally a public act, but not only that, it's somewhat infrequent even for a career politician and only captures a small subset of behavior and time. In other words, the risk of the government violating your privacy is low. In fact, the government already has your flight records to start with, so what exactly is at risk here is unclear. Let's make a contrast to your example. Following someone 24/7 is of a fundamentally different nature than monitoring you on an airplane flight. As a crude but effective example, they might accidentally discover that you are having an affair, which is none of their business.
Of course we also have to address the intimidation angle too, but if the process was indeed secret and unknown to the subject as is alleged to be the case, that angle doesn't really exist! So again, the main detriment to Gabbard is not a privacy concern but a mere inconvenience, plus an allegation about waste of public funds. I'm writing a separate comment in this thread about the degree of inconvenience, but at least according to the info I'm looking at, it's nothing too exceptionally different than what everyone else in America has accepted as par for the course for flying nowadays - the chance of pat-downs, waiting a little longer for the special scanners, a chance of having your luggage hand-searched. I don't like the placement of the current bar, and think a lot of it is mere security theater, but pretending it's abnormal is just incorrect.
That's probably true, but the status quo of flying nowadays is already a gross violation of our civil liberties. It is absolutely reprehensible that the TSA is allowed to exist on that basis alone, let alone the massive waste of taxpayer funds that they incur. And on top of that, it turns out that there's politically motivated harassment going on? Hell no! These organizations never should've been allowed to form in the first place, but they must not be allowed to stay.
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I’m not sure what the point of that would be.
Like, if the point is to spy on Gabbard, you know she’s probably not jumping out of the plane, and you know where it’s going to land. You don’t need someone physically present to keep tabs on her location. And she’s probably not personally hijacking a plane.
This is simply the way things appear to work in federal law enforcement. They are overfunded, overstaffed, and dont have a real domestic mission (aside from border patrol which is the opposite). They have no real job and just pick people they want to investigate and then dedicate ridiculous resources to finding that said person pooped in a bathroom that had a sign that said "customers only" and then left the store without buying anything.
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Because the way things are might not be the way things stay. Sure, all being on that list now means is that an air marshal tails her as she flies. In the future that might escalate. Maybe it will be supplied as evidence to a FISA court to spy on all her private correspondence, which they then use to dig for further process crimes, for her, or people around her.
Maybe they assign a politically motivated air marshal to her that claims to see some shit that may in fact have never happened.
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The point may be to simply give the person anxiety and stress. This tactic was used by East German and Soviet secret police to inflict psychological harm on targets. They would also secretly enter their apartments and move things around in noticeable ways.
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I read this and was pretty outraged, though unsurprised. I have felt from the very beginning that the DHS (and by extension the TSA) is one big violation of our civil liberties waiting to happen, so it's unfortunately not shocking to me when I see them doing police state shit like this. I would love for both departments to be utterly abolished, but unfortunately that's not going to happen in my lifetime.
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For top level posts I usually suggest having three elements:
You've got a bit of context. Though knowing how Tulsi knows this, what the quiet skies program is, and why the source you do have is covering it would all be helpful context.
Interpretation could be why you think she was placed on the list.
Opinion could be that this is further example of how far the deep state is willing to go.
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