Mrs. Shipley's Ghost: The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watchlists

Chapter Six: Change: Digitizing Mrs. Shipley

125 Chapter Six Change: Digitizing Mrs. Shipley The lessons of the past have been wasted; history not only repeats itself, it seems to be laboring under a neurotic compulsion to do so. —Arthur Koestler1 When Mrs. Shipley began her career, barnstorming was the most common use of an airplane in America. The pictures that hung in Mrs. Shipley’s regional passport offices displayed ocean liners, not aircraft. This reflected the most popular mode of travel, which remained ships, not planes, until 1954, the year before Mrs. Shipley retired.2 And by the time the wide-body Boeing 747 and McDonnell Douglas DC-10 jumbo jets revolutionized international air travel with their first flights in 1970, Mrs. Shipley had been dead for four years. Only when air travel was in its infancy was Mrs. Shipley there to control it, as she did the international travel of all U.S. citizens. Mrs. Shipley was resolute that her power was based on American interests in foreign affairs and national security. But although passport fraud was a top priority of her office, the national security reasons were espionage and pro-Communist activism, not terrorism. In a world pitched on the brink of nuclear Armageddon , such concerns resonated clearly enough: the travel and activities abroad of those suspected of Communist Party sympathies, even seemingly innocent ones, could set off an international crisis. Nonetheless, the anxieties of the Red Scare sometimes seem inchoate and shifting compared to the current fear of terrorism. Mrs. Shipley forbade travel for many reasons, but never for the concrete one that originally inspired the No Fly List: to protect aircraft from hijackers and bombers. Paul Robeson, Arthur Miller, and Linus Pauling might have been suspected of undermining American interests abroad, but they were never suspected of 126 ◆ Mrs. Shipley’s Ghost planning to blow anything up. And although she kept meticulous files to prevent the departure of Americans whose international travel was “not in the interest of the United States,” Mrs. Shipley never kept a No Fly List and she never used a computer. And yet it was Mrs. Shipley’s system that was reconstituted after the attacks of September 11, 2001. To be sure, her name was never mentioned. Indeed, it is doubtful that anyone closely involved in creating new agencies and policies after September 11 had ever heard of her. Nevertheless, the approach to controlling the travel of American citizens that these policymakers crafted was unmistakably hers. It is Mrs. Shipley’s ghost that inhabits the new American counterterrorism machine. This chapter describes that return to Mrs. Shipley’s system of controlling the travel of her fellow citizens. It also begins to explain how the No Fly List shifted from an original mission that focused on the physical safety of the traveling public to one that looks increasingly to stop the travel of individuals who do not present an immediate physical danger to anyone, but whose travel someone has concluded would “not be in the interests of the United States.” 1. After Mrs. Shipley, but before 9/11 The Invention of Hijacking On September 11, 2001, Americans were shocked by the evil demonstration that commercial aircraft could be converted into guided missiles.3 In retrospect , the lethality of a fuel-filled, wide-bodied passenger aircraft now seems as obvious a means of terrorism as the “old-fashioned” crime of hijacking. But there was a time when hijacking an aircraft was itself a new idea, and its origins are far removed from the political act (whether a crime of civilians or an attack by combatants) that today we recognize as terrorism. In fact, when Congress began studying the problem in the late 1960s, its first report referenced Webster’s Dictionary to explain what the word “hijack” meant in this new context.4 Fifty-five years ago, American law had no precise crime to fit the act. After all, hijackers did not typically intend to steal the plane or contraband in its hold in the way that the Prohibition-era origins of that term described the work of smugglers and bootleggers.5 Nor did “air piracy” really fit, although that was ultimately the term of art used to categorize the crime.6 Hijackers were not pirates as understood in international law because they typically did not intend to plunder passengers and vessel.7 Typically, they “only” Change: Digitizing Mrs. Shipley ◆ 127 wanted to alter the scheduled route for personal...