Limited distribution: No Fly list (90 MB)

A 2019 version of the United States' No Fly List. The TSA's terrorist screening list has more than 1.5 million names including 3000 minors

maia posted a photo of the NoFly list with this weed cat plushie, inspiring many memes

We have the No Fly list that was discovered by Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew on an unsecured server of regional U.S. airline CommuteAir.

CommuteAir confirmed the leak in a statement to the Daily Dot: “The server contained data from a 2019 version of the federal no-fly list that included first and last names and dates of birth.”

This dataset is in our Limited Distribution section, due to PII and potential for abuse. Researchers with a history of publishing their investigation can get in touch to request the data. We may not be able to respond to rejected requests, so make sure to first read our guidelines for how to request data.

Apart from the main NoFly.csv list with more than 1.5 million names on it, the leak also contains a secondary file named Selectees.csv, including more than 250,000 names of people who are not necessarily banned from flying but are subject to additional screening at airports.

Papers Please wrote about the lists:

The most obvious pattern in the data is the overwhelming preponderance of Arabic or Muslim-seeming  names. More than 10% of the entries on the No-Fly list (174,202 of 1,566,062)  contain “MUHAMMAD” in either the first or last name fields.

As Republik reports (auto-translated):

The list, which is compiled according to opaque and often arbitrary specifications, is kept by the FBI's Terrorism Screening Center. The no-fly list is part of the Terrorist Watchlist, which lists people who are either " known or suspected terrorists ".

In the past, the no-fly list had also been described by US courts as unconstitutional, racist, and arbitrary. It apparently produces countless "false positive" results.

A side effect of the release of the list, is it makes it possible to discern which intelligence services are providing names to the U.S. to inform their No Fly list database. The Belfast Telegraph wrote:

Given that it includes names of Irish citizens suspected of involvement in republican paramilitary activities, it suggests the Irish authorities may have provided the names to the US.

More research about the No Fly list will be posted to our index article as it becomes available.

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