On January 24, 2023, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) published a statement calling on the Biden administration to stop the dissemination of two secret terrorism watchlists utilized by the US government, alleging they disproportionately target the Muslim community. According to the statement on the CAIR website:
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today called on the Biden administration to suspend the FBI’s dissemination of two of their secret lists, which leaked copies show to be “almost entirely lists of Arabic and Muslim names.” On Friday, January 20, a Swiss hacker that goes by the moniker “maia” reportedly gained access to copies of the No-Fly List and Selectee List.
Read the rest here.
On January 20, 2023, outdated versions of the lists were obtained by a Swiss hacker who exploited security flaws on the website of regional American airline CommuteAir, which had left them on a data server exposed to the public internet. They contained 1.5 million data points on individuals deemed to pose a risk to US national security. They notably included multiple aliases of individual persons, which significantly reduced the total number of entries. On the list were several prominent figures, including the recently freed Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, along with over 16 of his potential aliases. The lists are sent out to governments, law enforcement agencies, and commercial organizations worldwide facilitating travel to the US. CAIR said that its attorneys had obtained copies and claimed the names were almost entirely of Arabic and Muslim, comprising what CAIR calls “a vast Muslim registry deployed against Muslims all over the world.” Questioning the No-Fly List’s efficacy, CAIR Civil Rights Director Lena Masri said, “This racist list serves no useful purpose. It has done nothing over its two-decade existence to make us safer or stop terrorism.”
CAIR has a history of fighting the use of the No-Fly List, alleging it deprived people of their right to travel without presenting concrete evidence against them. In 2017, CAIR successfully filed a lawsuit against the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) on behalf of a Utah imam who had been barred from entering the country. A January 2023 report laying out CAIR’s legislative priorities demanded greater congressional oversight and committee hearings focused on the FBI’s Terrorism Screening Database (TSDB), which CAIR incorrectly described as “unconstitutional.”
CAIR describes itself as “a grassroots civil rights and advocacy group and as “America’s largest Islamic civil liberties group.” It was founded in 1994 by three officers of the Islamic Association of Palestine, part of the US Hamas infrastructure at that time. Documents discovered during the terrorism trial of the Holy Land Foundation confirmed that the founders and current leaders of CAIR were part of the Palestine Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood and that CAIR itself is part of the US Muslim Brotherhood. The organization is led by Nihad Awad, its longstanding Executive Director and one of the three founders. Recently, CAIR has been generally portrayed in the media as a Muslim civil rights group. CAIR has a history of defending individuals accused of terrorism by the US government, often labeling such prosecutions a “war on Islam.”
For more on CAIR, go here.
PREVIOUS POST