From: John Gilmore <[email protected]> The US no-fly list has existed for decades in a legal limbo, and no court has yet ruled on the legality or constitutionality of its ban on citizen travel or its lack of due process for victims. It is being challenged in court this week.
Rahinah Ibrahim, a middle-aged Muslim Stanford grad student from Malaysia, was put on the no-fly list in 2005 for no obvious reason, and arrested in the SFO airport. A day later, she was allowed to leave the US to go to a conference, whereupon her longstanding student visa was canceled and she could not return. She ultimately completed her Stanford PhD remotely, from her native Malaysia, and is now the dean of the architecture school at a Malaysian university. She has diligently pursued a court case against DHS and the San Francisco police who arrested her in the airport ever since. After years of Federal delaying tactics, including two trips to the Court of Appeals and the invocation of the "state secrets privilege", Judge William Alsup forced the matter to trial, which is happening this week in San Francisco. Earlier in the case, he refused to look at DHS-offered secret evidence, declaring that travel is a right that cannot be denied without "an effective means of redress". The news from Monday, the first day of the trial, is that Ms. Ibrahim's daughter, who was born in the US and is a US citizen and a witness in the trial, was prevented by DHS on Sunday from flying to San Francisco for the trial. The daughter, Raihan Mustafa Kamal, was 14 years old in 2005 when she accompanied Ms. Ibrahim through the San Francisco airport where she was arrested. Ms. Ibrahim's lawyers had notified the DHS that they planned to call her as an eyewitness to the events of that day. DHS appears to have put her on the no-fly list, and as a result she has not been able to attend the trial. (For the same reason, Ms. Ibrahim cannot attend her OWN trial against the Federal government. She went to London to testify, with attorneys from both sides present, and part of her videotaped testimony was shown in court on Monday. Apparently she can fly anywhere else in the world except the lawless USA.) DHS lawyers claimed that Ms. Kamal "just missed her flight", which is not what she told her mother's lawyers. Judge Alsup ordered them to provide more information today, saying, "I want to know whether the government did something to obstruct a witness, a U.S. citizen." More information is here: <http://papersplease.org/wp/2013/12/02/witness-in-no-fly-trial-finds-shes-on-no-fly-list-too/> <http://papersplease.org/wp/2013/12/01/first-no-fly-trial-to-begin-this-week-in-san-francisco/> Ms. Ibrahim already reached a settlement with the San Francisco police, which cost the taxpayers of the city a cool $225,000 for that false arrest. The city's lawyers realized that they had had no grounds to arrest Ms. Ibrahim, who had not broken any laws, and settled rather than risk a trial. (TSA agents have no power to arrest anyone. They call local cops when they want someone arrested. Most local cops are stupid enough to arrest someone when TSA tells them to, even though no law has been broken, on some vague and bogus theory about Federal orders trumping state laws. I am hopeful that cash-strapped San Francisco will decline to stooge for TSA next time.) The ID-card-holding public can attend the trial at 450 Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco, on the 18th floor. The case docket and some of the filings are publicly available at the Internet Archive via the RECAP system that voluntarily publishes public-domain extracts from the Federal Courts' restricted pay-per-page docketing system, PACER: <http://ia700500.us.archive.org/17/items/gov.uscourts.cand.175882/gov.uscourts.cand.175882.docket.html> John Gilmore -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected].
