U.S. ‘No Fly List’ Leaks After Being Left in an Unsecured Airline Server | Hacker News Reader

U.S. ‘No Fly List’ Leaks After Being Left in an Unsecured Airline Server

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69 pointshasseo45 comments

Huge discussion on this topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34446673

A million is just so many. I expected abuses, like "tell us about your uncle or we'll put you on the no fly list." So something like 50,000 people or so.

It was originally marketed as people directly involved with terrorism. "These are people who might blow up a plane." It's so much vastly bigger, it has to be some dumb trolling for data. Like lets add all the people who went to a mosque where a bad guy once went.

Did you really not expect this?

I can’t think of a time where a way to take away rights without judicial overview wasnt massively abused, often to target politically disfavored groups.

Look at asset forfeiture and police robbing cash on highways.

Why is 50,000 about right?

Why is 1M too many?

I’m not sure I follow your logic beyond it’s how you feel things should be. How did you arrive at those numbers and that conclusion?

50,000 is WAY too many. If we go off the rate of terror attacks in America, the number of terrorists in this country is incredibly low.

Consider this: you can buy gun powder at walmart with cash, no ID needed, but how many pipe bombs are going off every day? It's incredibly rare. Obviously there are very few people out there with terroristic inclinations.

Why are we going off the rate of terror attacks in America

Because we're talking about America's No Fly list......

Ok but American planes fly in and out of the US. Also domestic flights have no limitations on foreigners. Unless you are saying that it's ok to have terrorists onboard, as long as they're not trying to terrorize America.

The rate of terrorist attacks in America, regardless of perpetrators' country of origin, is the relevant metric when evaluating the value of American anti-terror watchlists. Extend this to international flights to or from America if you like, it makes no difference. Any sort of terrorism is exceptionally rare. If somebody were to say that terrorism doesn't exist at all, they'd be closer to the truth than fiction.

Leaving aside the question of effectiveness and abuse of the list, the rarity of terrorist attacks doesn't say anything about the number of people who might be inclined or convinced to commit them.

At the very least it indicates the rate at which people actually go through with it, which is the rate that actually counts. It's stupid small. Worrying about terrorism is extremely foolish.

It's not the rate that counts if your list is intended to stop people who have an elevated risk of carrying out an attack.

> Worrying about terrorism is extremely foolish.

I'm not debating the merit of the list or terrorism policy. But if you have a list in the first place then it's illogical to say its size should be relative to the number of successful terrorist attacks on planes. Not without more information about the distribution of terrorism inclination in the population.

The number is probably closer to 50k based on other estimates so let’s go with that.

Expanding that we’re talking worldwide (and I bet most of the list is non-American) I feel like we could get to 50k pretty easily. The list isn’t just terrorists, but anyone who has been a real safety risk to flights (we’ve seen them in YouTube videos).

And the list accumulates year after year. I wonder how many are dead?

I don't believe this list is the same list as the passenger blacklist airlines use for unruly drunks.

It by no means diminishes the magnitude of the list, but it's worth noting that the list is heavily bloated because any person with multiple aliases or whose name can be spelled in multiple ways (e.g. due to differing romanization systems) will have a separate entry for every known alias and spelling.

From the original Daily Dot article:

> The list, according to crimew, appeared to have more than 1.5 million entries in total. The data included names as well as birth dates. It also included multiple aliases, placing the number of unique individuals at far less than 1.5 million.

> On the list were several notable figures, including the recently freed Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, alongside over 16 potential aliases for him.

> The aliases comprised different, common misspellings of his last name and other versions of his first name, as well as different birthdays. Many of the birthdays aligned with the recorded date Bout was born.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/no-fly-list-us-tsa-unprotecte...

So there aren't 1.5 million people on the no fly list, but there's still a hell of a lot of people to ban secretly and arbitrarily from flying with no clear justification given and no clear way to get off the list.

> Viktor Bout

That guy doesn't belong on the list. He sold weapons to terrorists, including anti-aircraft missiles, but I don't think that's a reasonable cause to believe he might attack an airplane himself. I wouldn't feel uncomfortable flying on the same plane as him.

I'd never heard of him before. But it sounds pretty reasonable to me. I don't really see the bright line between supplying people attack an airplane and attacking an airplane.

If the list is to exist at all, it should only be for people we think might blow up or hijack an airplane.

If you're putting people on the list for other reasons, even selling weapons to terrorists, then the list is being used punitively and therefore it shouldn't be secret.

It doesn't really seem like a different reason to me. I mean, I have no background in this stuff, but someone who sells weapons to terrorists, seems like a reasonable risk to do the actual thing to me.

It's the difference between somebody selling weapons to other people to blow up airplanes, and being willing to blow themselves up in an airplane. The former does not evidence an inclination for the latter.

The standard of evidence for violating the principle of innocent until proven guilty is not satisfied by reasonable risk, it is satisfied by beyond a reasonable doubt. Since they are violating that principle without trial I would argue the standard is actually much higher. This idea of innocent until proven guilty via a trial of your peers is one of the basic building blocks of western society and a pivotal part of what makes the West great so if we aren't going to uphold this idea, wtf are we even doing? Might as well just name someone the king and start trials by ordeal again.

As far as I can tell, he's not a US citizen. And no guilt seems to be under discussion here. Just whether he's allowed to fly. I once saw a guy get kicked off a bus for being too drunk without so much as a call to his lawyer. This isn't about sending him to prison as far as I know. Just keeping flights safe.

Well, if the person isn't on the no fly list due to some form of guilt then the government is violating a myriad of other human rights including, but not limited to, the freedom of movement. There is also a massive difference between someone temporarily being denied the ability to ride the bus due to clearly being too drunk and someone being put on a list that bars them from flying permanently with no recourse and no way to even know they are on the list other than to buy a plane ticket and attempt to board the plane. Keeping flights safe is an appeal to emotion that has no place in this discussion because it presupposes doing a no fly list in a way that doesn't violate the basic principles that define the United States of America would be unsafe, which is clearly untrue.

He is the subject of the Lord of War movie by Andrew Niccol, who made Truman Show (gaslighting), Gattaca (eugenics), In Time (immortality), Good Kill (drone pilots) and Anon (privacy/hacking).

I don't want this guy anywhere near me. Why isn't he in prison?

The American government traded him to Russia in exchange for a basketball player.

He seems like a thoroughly unpleasant man to me and I think he belongs in prison, but I don't think anything in his past suggests that he'd be a direct threat to other passengers if allowed to fly. Banning him from the country makes a lot of sense, maybe even banning him from airplanes as part of his sentence after a trial. But secret punishments are no bueno, even when the guy is a scumbag.

FFS, you felt the need to defend a convicted arms dealer?

Even the worst scumbags deserve due process. Otherwise, denying somebody due process is simply a matter of casting them as a scumbag. I am fine with banning this guy from airplanes IFF it is done openly as part of his sentence. The no-fly list is not that, names are added to the list in secret.

How can you make such an assertion knowing only the size of the list?

There are ~330 million people in the USA. Do you think every ~1/200 people should be on such a list?

By my back of the envelope math, there are ~0 American planes being blown out of the sky on an annual basis. Nor am I even hearing reports of attempts to do such things (the FBI loves to pat themselves on the back after they catch a terrorist they recruited, trained, and supplied just before the act was supposed to occur).

The list only contains US citizens?

The article says it is most likely around 50,000 (47,000 and 81,000 people to be exact), most of the leaked list are known aliases and alternative names for the same person.

How can the no-fly list be secret in the first place? Or is this part of the outside-the-legal-system, men-in-black, constitution-does-not-apply type arrangement?

People so dangerous we can't let them on an airplane, but not so dangerous, or with so little proof of any wrongdoing, that arresting them cannot be justified.

So yeah, the whole thing is bullshit. And it will continue because no politician wants to be the guy who fixes this mess then loses his next election because something happened and his "weak on terrorism" stance gets blamed.

HN is going full circle. Instead of being a secondary news source, we’re becoming the primary news that gets reported on.

I remember when TV started reporting on what they found on the internet instead of the other way around.

Just because HN is where some journalists found a link doesn't make it a news source it just shows that everyone reading HN could replace them.

I think this is a compliment from the journalism community. Any journalist on a particular beat is going to lurk on various news aggregators and forums, looking for a scoop. This writer has probably seen dozens, hundreds of stories come across HN's headlines that were reporting on blogs already given exposure and news stories that had already broken. If the journalist determined that in this case, HN had the scoop, and dang's outlet was the first to publish the link to the hacktivist's blog, then HN rightly deserves credit as having the scoop. I have no idea whether it went down that way; I'm just describing a Platonic ideal.

Shouldn't the list be abandoned now that the War On Terror is over?

The defining feature of the War on Terror is that it is never over.

Who said it’s over?

Not really a war, not really any terror, not really over. )

I look forward to when the list is leaked to the public unredacted. Let’s have fun with this.

What's fun about it? I can't picture any outcome except those people on it facing a constant torrent of abuse.

If that happens be prepared for it to become the No Employ list.

Employers run background checks via services, and those services will quickly integrate such a list as a flagged item on people.

Letting employers have a default of freedom of association was a mistake.

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