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Comment by chwahoo | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there is some kind of official annotation that can be added to a person's record indicating that they should be inconvenienced and harassed? If so, are officials "officially trained" to perform this function?

Or else, is this a case of local officials seeing that someone notorious is passing through and abusing their discretion to harass them and cause them to miss flights?

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Presumably, there's a memo box that says wikileaks, since I doubt these guys knew him by name.

I was ok with wikileaks when I first heard of them. After seeing the type and character of their opposition? I'm now a rabid supporter. What they do is legal, this has been upheld in the supreme court, and these people are being fundamentally unamerican in the 1st amendment sense by trying to extrajudicially harrass people.

EDIT: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_St...

That court case may not be a slam dunk defense. For a different perspective, I found this article interesting.

http://www.slate.com/id/2276592/

Eh, I think that's just a linkbait headline. It's materially different to wiretap private individuals for the purpose of defamation than it is to publish federal documents. There's no such thing as "defaming the govt" under law, for example.

The more important facts, imo, were the six different opinions written and that while the court refused to grant a pre-publication injunction, they didn't actually grant immunity from post-publication prosecution. The summary of the Pentagon Papers case is not "publishing secrets is ok".

Good call. This is where I put on my IANAL hat :) I guess I made an assumption based on the fact that Ellsburg never got prosecuted for anything.

More the latter, I suspect. Your file is flagged "up to no good". Nobody wants to be the official that let the terrorist get away, so they all do sufficient screening that if anything happens later they can say, "There was nothing I could do to prevent that. We questioned him for a few hours, but without a warrant we needed to respect his rights and let him go."

The officials are thinking less about how this process inconveniences the traveler and a lot more about the shit storm that will ensue should they let another underwear bomber on a plane.

Though the 'underwear bomber' didn't board a plane in the US.

You have two ways of doing this, the No Fly List and the Secondary Security Screening Selectee (SSSS) list. I imagine that there may be a cross-check with the FBI on either list (although I don't know) but there's enough heat on him to trigger whatever it is that they want with him.

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