I'm a remote worker and have travelled a lot for fun in the past two years. While checking into a flight from AMS headed to USA, I was told as a prerequisite to getting my boarding pass I needed to talk to an agent from the US Department of the State. He asked me many detailed questions about my travels and said I was considered a person of interest. He stressed that they may in the future not allow me to enter the USA (I'm a citizen of USA).

It seems likely he was just trying to scare me, but it was still was quite jarring. I'm a fairly normal US citizen (I don't associate with political people, no criminal record, never been to a country not known for tourism). I believe I was flagged just from traveling between Turkey and Russia.

Since then when I fly I cant use online check-in, my boarding pass is marked SSSS and I am taken into the backroom for questioning at border control.

Maybe these extra precautions keep the USA safe, but it certainly seemed excessively paranoid.

This sounds like the latest "mission creep" by the TSA in order to justify their budget and possibly ask for a budget increase. This would not be the first instance of "mission creep" by them.

See:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/tsa-expands-duties-bey...

and

https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/02/29/the-tsa-is-...

They are basically an entrenched part of the security-industrial complex at this point. It seems to be a vicious circle of "expand the mission to justify a bigger budget and ask for a bigger budget in order to meet the self-directed increase in scope." There seems to be very little practical oversight of this agency.

This is the natural evolution of the privatized prison. To treat an ever growing segment of the population in a carceral manner in ways large and small. Degrees of citizenship is now a thing in America. You can be graded on your credit, your connections, your history; the color of your skin or the shape of your face.

Some of these behaviors are so benign that any regular person might exhibit these. Slept during the flight, changed clothes, boarded last (I hate standing in those queues), observed the boarding area from afar. Hell I do many of these things. I am sure their "ML" model must have spit these indicators but it's a waste of resources.

>The teams document whether passengers fidget, use a computer, have a “jump” in their Adam’s apple or a “cold penetrating stare,” among other behaviors, according to the records.

I believe this isn't the first time the TSA has tried to do some sort of behavioral profiling and such. Previously it proved to be BS and did not show any ability to identify threats.

Considering TSA agents are leaking this to the press makes me think someone(s) at TSA think you can just spot a terrorist and the agents think it is ballony ....

Imagine the economic result if we got rid of the TSA (we did fine without it before 9/11 and they don't do shit now) and created jobs in rebuilding infrastructure using that budget.

This sounds like they’ve hired a bunch of air marshals but don’t have much for them to do. Having them make observations on random people might be a way to make sure they’re still doing their job?

>A bulletin in May notes that travelers entering the United States may be added to the Quiet Skies watch list if [they] ... “are possibly affiliated with Watch Listed suspects.”

What a beautiful qualification. Put one person on Quiet Skies, for any reason, legit or not. Now every known contact or associate of that one person becomes of interest to the Quiet Skies program. Every neighbor, even if they don't know the neighbor. Every work colleague, even if the colleague doesn't know that they work with the person. Every vendor. Every vendee. The air marshal assigned to watch them.

TSA seems to have taken a page from NSA. They aren't even "hop-limited;" they can continually go as far out on a person's network as they want, merely by including a hop in Quiet Skies. https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/28/ns...

US Federal Tax dollars at work, infringing on our rights with no tangible benefits for the American people.

Agency documents show there are about 40 to 50 Quiet Skies passengers on domestic flights each day. On average, air marshals follow and surveil about 35 of them.

Wow... reminds me of good old East Germany

This seems mostly harmless (insofar as tailing random innocent people could be) but also a collosal waste of time that could be spent doing nearly anything else.

Mind you, it's hard to see it as security theater (they won't admit it's happening!). It sounds like they have a power envy thing going on vis a vis the FBI, but even the actual marshals doing it seem to think it's dumb. If it were the FBI just tasking FBI Surveillance Vans onto random people without a predicate, there'd potentially be hell to pay as they generally have regulations on what is a valid reason for opening an investigation.

The most likely explanation I can think of, is that this is work to establish baselines against which to run mass automated surveillance.

So, it's not just this. Consider where it's going -- what would induce this level of effort and expenditure?

P.S. It will also be "interesting" when parallel construction enters the picture -- if it hasn't, already.

Next headline: NSA is tracking regular Americans like terrorists in secret surveillance program.

>> the program could pass legal muster if the selection criteria are sufficiently broad

and...

>> surveillance of travelers without any suspicion of actual wrongdoing

Those seem to play off each other in a weird way. The program is legal because the selection criteria are so broad that no one under surveillance is suspected of any evildoery? It would be really interesting to find out what kind of records on these surveillance activities are kept.

Having been the subject of covert surveillance at multiple points in my past (and future probably) there is a certain amount of shrugging it off that is necessary. The real concern for TSA, or Neighborhood Watch, is whether they are sharing records with any other agencies. Congress would potentially have a Pinata party if that came to light.

TSA employees are generally not well-paid and not well-educated. They come from the bottom third of the economic advantage spectrum. As a result, most of them have probably never visited a foreign country; many have likely never even been on an airplane.

So their opinion of "foreigners" is skewed by their anti-terrorist training to think that people from outside the USA are mostly bad and wish us harm.

TSA employees should be required to visit a foreign country at least once a year--paid for by their employer--so they have direct experience with the vast majority of non-US citizens who are simply normal people living their normal lives.

While we are on this topic, what I find to be a complete sham is TSA-PRE (a US preflight registration program). The pre-screening is valid for 5 years, in exchange you don't remove your shoes or have to remove electronics and liquids. Basically, what you did BEFORE the TSA program was put in place.

I presume they are OK with taking the chance that a TSA-PRE enrolled individual is not turning into a shoe-bomber in year 3 after preenrollment? Why not just abolish all the checks and selectively pull people to remove liquids, shoes and electronics. You'd lose the $99 revenue/passsenger that TSAPRE generates.

This program sounds like a huge, irresponsible waste of public resources. However I don’t exactly see how merely being observed in public amounts to the dystopian surveillance state this article seems to imply. Is going unnoticed in public reasonably considered to be a right? I would suggest the problem here is the extent of resources that are wasted by the government watching the innocuous behavior of arbitrary people in an airport.

"Subject was abnormally aware of surroundings"

Isn't that the whole point of being vigilant?

OT, but I just get

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Should that even be possible?

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Seeing my 12 year old daughter groped by a TSA agent because she "moved her hand too early" in the x ray machine really put things into perspective for me.

TSA is the department of domestic fear mongering. That's it.

"But some air marshals ... say the program has them tasked with shadowing travelers who appear to pose no real threat .. a fellow federal law enforcement officer, in a third."

Who watches the watchers? Why, the watchers!

"Subject slept during the flight" ??

You got me, guilty as charged.

Could a program like this just be practice?

I dunno about TSA, but I'm am Indian male and I keep a beard and visited Sydney and Melbourne recently. I was singled out for "random" checks at every single airport. Even though the metal detector thing didn't go off at all. They were very nice and polite but I was a bit annoyed. After 9-11, it seems most western countries have become cautious to the extent of paranoia and cause inconvenience to normal people.

https://my.mixtape.moe/ohbnhi.jpeg

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