Potemkin Citizenship: How Terrorist Watchlists Diminish Freedom of Movement and other Individual Rights in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom

Watchlists, such as the U.S. No Fly List, present important questions about the nature of an open society, the rights of citizens, the uses of technology, and the responsibility of the state for national security. Should citizens in a democracy need the permission of the state to move within or across borders? On the other hand, in a world in which airplanes have been used as guided missiles, what responsible government official would not want to know (and have the power to decide) who is flying above that country’s businesses, schools, and churches? On what basis should such decisions be made – using facts of what provenance, assessed according to what standard of review – by well-meaning but zealous officials, or entrusted to a computer’s cold calculations? These questions reveal broader implications for watchlisting technologies; there is no logical reason why watchlists should be limited only to restricting citizen access to air travel. This paper examines the recent development of travel restrictions in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom from both a theoretical and applied perspective.