“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.”
