Is the ‘Quiet Skies’ Program Being Used for Political Payback Against Tulsi Gabbard?

​“Quiet Skies” is a federal aviation security program that includes singling out flyers for close inspection by giving them an “SSSS” or “Secondary Security Screening Selection” designation on their boarding pass. In the case of Tulsi Gabbard, it is alleged she was also put on a “terror threat list” that requires that she receive intense surveillance as well.
 
You probably know Gabbard as an outspoken and iconoclastic former U.S. Representative from Hawaii who ran for president. During a slew of domestic flights after returning from a recent trip to Rome, Gabbard and husband Abraham Williams were allegedly designated as security threats requiring enhanced observation.
 
A war veteran of Iraq who signed up after 9/11, Gabbard told Matt Taibbi of The Racket that she and her husband are getting third-degree inspections every time they go to the airport. Every inch of her clothes is squeezed. The lining of the roller board of her suitcase is patted down. Gabbard has to take out every personal electronic and turn on each one, including her military-issue phone and computer. This process can take up to 45 minutes.
 
What may be happening in the air is far more worrisome. Sonya LaBosco, executive director of the advocacy group Air Marshals National Council, is the source that told Taibbi that Gabbard is on the TSA’s domestic terror watch list. Every time someone on that list travels, LaBosco said, that passenger gets assigned two Explosive Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist in explosives, and one plainclothes TSA Supervisor. Such passengers are assigned three Federal Air Marshals to travel with them on every flight. LaBosco says that Gabbard’s recent three-flight tour would have required no fewer than nine Air Marshals to tail her and her husband.
 
Taibbi writes that an Inspector General’s report in 2019 revealed one-half of the Air Marshal’s budget is wasted, and that much of $394 million in funds for air security are put to questionable use.
 
In our personal experience, the “SSSS” designation can be randomly assigned. Judging from publicly available sources, that designation can also be algorithmically triggered by a host of activities deemed suspicious, such as flying out of Turkey, paying cash for plane tickets, and buying one-way tickets. (We can only imagine what would happen to the brave or foolhardy person who bought a one-way ticket out of Istanbul with cash.)
 
To be fair, many complaints about the TSA that seem absurd have a basis in hard experience. That experience goes back to 1986, when an extra close inspection by El Al security officers of a pregnant Irish nurse flying to meet her boyfriend in Jordan revealed that he had betrayed her by secreting a bomb in her bag. TSA has to contend with the fact that anyone – a decorated war hero, a handicapped grandmother, a toddler – could be the unknowing carrier of a threat.
 
But the treatment of Gabbard raises the unavoidable question if this outspoken political figure was put on the SSSS list out of political pique.
 
Gabbard has certainly irritated a lot of powerful people and agencies. In Congress, she advocated for dropping charges against Edward Snowden. As vice chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, she publicly criticized the party’s reliance on superdelegates and endorsed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. She later left the Democratic Party and was recently on the list of Donald Trump’s possible vice-presidential candidates. She has been a consistent critic of “elites” who want “nation-building wars.” Gabbard found herself on the threat list just after she left Rome where she had called Vice President Kamala Harris “the new figurehead for the deep state.”
 
You might find Gabbard insightful or a flittering gadfly, but no one should be targeted for surveillance for merely expressing controversial views. And if Gabbard did somehow inadvertently trigger a threat algorithm, one has to wonder if anyone is in charge with the ability to apply common sense – if, in fact, such vast resources are being deployed to follow her. If that is true, even the most benign explanation reveals a diversion of manpower (and dogpower) that could be used to deter real threats.
 
A Congressional investigation – perhaps by the Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee – is warranted to discover if the facts reported by Taibbi are correct and, more importantly, if Gabbard has been targeted for enhanced surveillance and harassment for her speech.
 
After all, crazier things have happened, like Matt Taibbi finding himself targeted with a rare home visit from the IRS on the same day the journalist testified before Congress about federal meddling in social media curation.