Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton on Sunday morning spoke approvingly of a government program that stops some American citizens never accused of any wrongdoing from traveling freely within the country.
“I’m a lot happier having a list that keeps people off planes that there’s any question about their intent or their potential behavior,” Clinton said on ABC News, referring to the so-called no-fly list. The database includes tens of thousands of people, including roughly 800 Americans.
In the wake of the Dec. 2 San Bernardino attack, Clinton called for gun laws that would prevent individuals on the no-fly list from purchasing firearms, too.
The suspected terrorists, Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, were not listed in the dossier.
As several outlets have reported, the no-fly list does contain a number of errors and false-positives, raising the possibility that innocent individuals given the restrictive distinction could, under Clinton’s plan, be increasingly deprived of Constitutional rights. As Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) pointed out in an April hearing on passport revocation, the Supreme Court has recognized there is a right to travel “that comes directly from the right of freedom of assembly under the First Amendment.” The Second Amendment, of course, guarantees Americans’ right to “keep and bear arms.”
The former Secretary of State was unmoved by those concerns, however. “Some mistakes, of course,” she said on Sunday. Clinton claimed that “there’s a process for people to be able to raise their concerns about being on the list and then to have a process that could even lead to a legal action to remove yourself from the list.”
Only this year did the Department of Homeland Security reverse a policy of total secrecy regarding the no-fly list, announcing in April that individuals prevented from boarding a plane could, for the first time, inquire about their inclusion on the list and the reasons for it.
The change was precipitated by a lawsuit brought by a 19-year-old American citizen who was stopped from flying back to the United States from Kuwait. Gulet Mohamed claimed that because he was identified on the restrictive list, he was also subject to torture during his Kuwaiti detention.
A Congressional Research Service report published in April noted that “in some cases, it has been reported that persons have been prevented from boarding an aircraft because they were mistakenly believed to be on the No Fly list, sometimes on account of having a name similar to another person who was actually on the list.”
CRS added that the list expanded rapidly following the failed underwear bomber attack on Christmas Day in 2009, and “a number of individuals were placed on the No Fly list who may not have met the normal standards for inclusion.”
