Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, questioned Wednesday why the TSA is using watchlists to eavesdrop on social rebels as jihadists.
In a text to TSA Administrator David Pekoske, Paul cited recent leak reports that revealed the transport company’s monitoring of former U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, and the family of a provincial air marshal through the Quiet Skies program.
Collectively, these incidents” seemed to be a part of a broader design” in which TSA has repurposed Quiet Skies to track people based on their political activities, even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing,” Paul wrote.
Early this month, the leak security organization Empower Oversight addressed letters detailing the misconduct allegations to the Department of Homeland Security inspector general. According to a protected disclosure from a whistleblower whose own wife was “improperly labeled a ‘ domestic terrorist,'” the U. S. Federal Air Marshals Service ( FAMS ) “was improperly targeting individuals for enhanced surveillance” including Gabbard. The whistleblower’s woman was investigated under FAMS” Unique Mission Coverage” because” she attended President Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 statement at the circle in Washington D. C”.
” She was somewhere near the U. S. Capitol advanced that time, yet her FAMS document erroneously stated she’ unjustly entered the United States Capitol Building on]Jan. 6, 2021],'” the current letter read.
” Ultimately, the journalist was able to work with the FBI to have his sister’s name removed from the terror watchlist in the spring of 2023″, the text continued. ” But clearing his own sister’s name did not cure the obvious violations of FAMS surveillance or avert farther violations,” as the current Tulsi Gabbard revelations demonstrate.
The allegations, Paul wrote Wednesday, “echo concerns highlighted in a previous report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General ( OIG), which identified critical deficiencies in TSA’s management of the Quiet Skies program”. Inaccuracies include “insufficient monitoring and unsatisfactory safeguards to protect against the use of passenger data.”
National air marshals surveilled Gabbard on at least eight distinct flights after the original Hawaii senator and surveillance state critic Joe Biden criticized him on Fox News, according to Empower Oversight in a follow-up notice.
Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, charged the TSA with starting a probe against an anonymous whistleblower who came forward, saying that” a retaliatory investigation that hunts for whistleblowers in order to intimidate them into silence is exactly the wrong step the agency should take.”
” Instead, agency leadership should be investigating the abuses on which FAMs are blowing the whistle”, Leavitt wrote.
Read the full letter from Sen. Paul below:
The Federalist‘s Paul TSA Letter is available on Scribd.
