#[1]alternate [2]Testing an Opaque Security Power, Michigan Man
  Challenges ‘No-Fly List’

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  [8]Politics|Testing an Opaque Security Power, Michigan Man Challenges
  ‘No-Fly List’
  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/us/politics/no-fly-list-lawsuit.html
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Testing an Opaque Security Power, Michigan Man Challenges ‘No-Fly List’

  The plaintiff, a Lebanese-American, says he was barred from flying
  after refusing to become an F.B.I. informant.
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  Travelers at Salt Lake City International airport last month. Including
  people in databases like the no-fly list can lead to increased scrutiny
  at airports and during encounters with the police.
  Travelers at Salt Lake City International airport last month. Including
  people in databases like the no-fly list can lead to increased scrutiny
  at airports and during encounters with the police.Credit...Rick
  Bowmer/Associated Press
  [11]Charlie Savage

  By [12]Charlie Savage
  April 6, 2021Updated 4:11 p.m. ET

  WASHINGTON — A Michigan man challenged the constitutionality of the
  government’s so-called no-fly list in a lawsuit on Tuesday, accusing
  the F.B.I. of violating his due process rights by barring him from air
  travel and giving him no meaningful opportunity to challenge their
  decision.

  The case, developed by the American Civil Liberties Union, opens a new
  front in a still-unresolved clash between the scope of individual
  rights and collective security measures after the attacks of Sept. 11,
  2001: the government’s practice of placing people on watch lists based
  on suspicions of links to terrorism.

  Including people in such databases can lead to increased scrutiny at
  airports and during encounters with the police, deny them government
  benefits or contracts, and — in the case of the no-fly list — bar them
  from boarding aircraft or traveling through American airspace on planes
  that took off abroad.

  The government maintains various terrorism-related watch lists that it
  uses for different purposes, a practice that has undergone
  extraordinary growth over the past two decades. Civil libertarians have
  criticized the lists, including the opaque standards and rationales for
  adding names and the adequacy of redress procedures for those who
  protest their addition.

  The plaintiff in the new case, Ahmad Chebli, 32, is a Chicago-born
  United States citizen of Lebanese descent who spent much of his youth
  in Lebanon and lives in Dearborn, Mich. According to his complaint,
  F.B.I. agents asked him in 2018 to work as an informant, but he
  refused. It also said they also accused him of being a Hezbollah agent,
  which he denied.

  Since then, Mr. Chebli has had significant trouble traveling by air. He
  was denied boarding for some flights to both foreign and domestic
  destinations; in late 2018, after being barred from a flight home from
  Lebanon, he enlisted the A.C.L.U. to help him obtain a one-time waiver
  so he could return to Michigan.

  Mr. Chebli’s status may have changed or toggled between different
  restrictions. On other occasions, he was eventually permitted to fly
  but was first subjected to extensive scrutiny and questioning, causing
  him to miss his flight and rebook another one.

  But his attempt to obtain information about his designation so he could
  challenge it via the Department of Homeland Security’s Traveler Redress
  Inquiry Program, the complaint said, has been fruitless. He has been
  seeking information since 2018, it said, without success.

  “For over two years, I’ve tried to get off the no-fly list, but the
  government won’t even give me its reason for putting me on the list or
  a fair process to clear my name and regain my rights,” Mr. Chebli said
  in a statement released by the A.C.L.U. “No one should suffer what my
  family and I have had to suffer.”

  The Justice Department declined to comment on the lawsuit. But it has
  defended the legality of the government’s terrorism watch lists and its
  related practices in litigation over the past decade, arguing that the
  procedures are lawful and reasonable given the national security
  interests at stake.

  Mr. Chebli’s case is a sequel to [13]a major lawsuit by the A.C.L.U.
  during the Obama administration that challenged government procedures
  for reviewing whether it was appropriate to put someone’s name on the
  no-fly list. In 2014, a federal judge in Oregon ruled that those
  regulations were inadequate and violated Americans’ Fifth Amendment
  right to due process.

  In response, the government promised to overhaul the Traveler Redress
  Inquiry Program to ensure that Americans would be told if they were on
  the list and given a meaningful opportunity to challenge the decision.
  (It also removed seven of the 13 original plaintiffs in that case from
  the no-fly list. Several remaining plaintiffs pressed on, but that
  judge, and later the appeals court in San Francisco, [14]upheld the
  revised procedures as applied to them.)

  Citing Mr. Chebli’s inability to obtain information about the
  government’s evidence about him or to challenge it in a hearing before
  a neutral decision maker, the new lawsuit said that the revised
  procedures are both unconstitutional and that they violate statutory
  law, including a federal law that protects religious liberty, the
  Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, because he is unable to
  travel to Mecca for the required Muslim pilgrimage.

  “More than two years ago, Mr. Chebli filed an administrative petition
  for redress, but the government has failed to provide any reason for
  placing him on the no-fly list or a fair process to challenge that
  placement,” it said. “As a result, Mr. Chebli has been subjected to
  unreasonable and lengthy delays and an opaque redress process that has
  prevented him from clearing his name.”

  Beyond the Oregon case, the new lawsuit takes its place among a
  constellation of related litigation that has tested the limits of the
  government’s terrorism watch-listing powers and individual rights.

  In December, for example, [15]the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in
  favor of three Muslim-American men who claim they were put on the
  no-fly list for refusing to become informants. That case turned on
  whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act allows people to sue for
  monetary damages against government officials who are accused of
  violating it. (Mr. Chebli’s case is different: He is seeking
  declaratory and injunctive relief, not money.)

  And [16]in a ruling last week, a three-judge panel on the federal
  appeals court in Richmond, Va., upheld the government’s use of a broad
  watch list known as the Terrorist Screening Database. The decision
  reversed [17]a 2019 ruling by a Federal District Court judge who had
  struck it down as violating Muslim-Americans’ constitutional rights.

  The Terrorist Screening Database is run by the F.B.I., although other
  agencies may also nominate people’s names for inclusion on it. As of
  2017, about 1.2 million people were on the watch list; while most were
  foreigners abroad, about 4,600 were American citizens.

  People who are in that database are likely to be pulled aside for more
  rigorous screening at airports, but are generally still permitted to
  board their flights afterward. But the no-fly list is a subset who are
  subject to a more restrictive ban on flying in American airspace, even
  if a search of their bodies, carry-on bags and luggage turns up nothing
  suspicious.

  The most recent publicly available data on the no-fly list, from 2016,
  showed about 81,000 people on it, [18]according to the government.
  About 1,000 of those were American citizens or lawful United States
  residents who are protected by the Constitution.

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