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And More January 22, 2023 2 mins read

The FBI’s “no-fly” List Consists Mostly of “Arabic or Muslim-seeming names”

And More ı By Rochdi Rais

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flag of FBI and USA painted on cracked wall

The FBI Terrorism Screening Center's secret "no-fly" sparked more debates after a Swiss hacker who was exploring unsecured servers shared her findings.

Maia arson crimew, described by the Department of Justice as a "prolific" hacker, said she was scraping an online search engine full of vulnerable servers on January 12.

The Daily Dot first reported that the server, hosted by CommuteAir contained among its files a redacted 2019 version of the anti-terrorism "no-fly" list. The files "NoFly.csv," and "selectee.csv" found by crimew contain over 1.8 million entries including names and dates of birth of people the FBI identifies as "known or suspected terrorists" who are prevented from boarding aircraft "when flying within, to, from and over the United States."

"Based on our initial investigation, no customer data was exposed," Erik Kane, a spokesperson for CommuteAir, said in a statement to Insider. "CommuteAir immediately took the affected server offline and started an investigation to determine the extent of data access. CommuteAir has reported the data exposure to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and also notified its employees."

"We are investigating in coordination with our federal partners," Lorie Dankers, a spokesperson for the TSA, said in a statement to Insider.

While browsing files in the company's server, "it dawned on me just how heavily I had already owned them within just half an hour or so," crimew wrote in a blog post detailing the hack. 

The enormous files contain a plethora of aliases for Viktor Bout, the Russian "Merchant of Death", in addition a massive number of names of people suspected of organized crime in Ireland. However, crimew said there was a notable trend among the names.

"Looking at the files, it just confirmed a lot of the things me, and probably everyone else, kind of suspected in terms of what biases are in that list," crimew told Insider. "Just scrolling through it, you will see almost every name is Middle Eastern."

Edward Hasbrouck, an author and human rights advocate, wrote in his analysis of the documents that the lists "confirm the TSA's (1) Islamophobia, (2) overconfidence in the certainty of its pre-crime predictions, and (3) mission creep."

"The most obvious pattern in the data is the overwhelming preponderance of Arabic or Muslim-seeming names," Hasbrouck wrote in an essay published Friday by Papers, Please.

 

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Rochdi Rais

Rochdi Rais is the Head of Growth and financial and legal writer at USA Herald. He has been writing and editing financial, legal and U.S. news for years with over +4000 articles published during his career.

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