Via commentor Steve Crickmore, I belatedly found out how Rahinah Ibrahim ended up on the dreaded No-Fly List. From David Kravetz, on February 6th, at Wired:
The government contested a former Stanford University student’s assertion that she was wrongly placed on a no-fly list for seven years in court despite knowing an FBI official put her on the list by mistake because he checked the “wrong boxes” on a form, a federal judge wrote today.
The agent, Kevin Kelley, based in San Jose, misunderstood the directions on the form and “erroneously nominated” Rahinah Ibrahim to the list in 2004, the judge wrote…
Much of the federal court trial, in which the woman sought only to clear her name, was conducted in secret after U.S. officials repeatedly invoked the state secrets privilege and sought to have the case dismissed.
Attorneys working pro bono spent as much as $300,000 litigating the case and $3.8 million in attorney’s fees…
Bolding is mine. My original guess was that Rahinah Ibrahim might’ve been flagged by “a buggy program or an overzealous technician” — should’ve gone with Mr. Pierce’s formulation about “our all-too-human yet curiously error-prone security guardians”…
Of course, to look on the bright side, it only took ten years and four million dollars to successfully clear this first case, so AMERICA FVCK YEAH!