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154 Chapter Seven Growth: Mrs. Shipley’s Ghost By the very act of denying the existence of the ghost in the machine . . . we incur the risk of turning it into a very nasty, malevolent ghost. —Arthur Koestler1 In 1925, the State Department’s Division of Passport Control accomplished its work with an index card system.2 By 1953, Mrs. Shipley’s office maintained 1,250 filing cabinets of data on 12,000,000 people.3 In light of this mountain of information, the efficiency of her office was amazing. She made state control over who could travel abroad appear to be a public service— few complained because most people received passports quickly and without onerous restrictions.4 Of course, when Mrs. Shipley decided that a traveler’s itinerary was “not in the interests of the United States,” that was the end of the matter. The traveler stayed put. Nevertheless, many (successful travelers , at least) viewed Mrs. Shipley’s reign as beneficent, if autocratic, and she successfully fended off meaningful judicial review of her discretion until she retired from office. Mrs. Shipley’s unchecked power to decide which citizens could leave home came to be seen as the gross infringement on liberty that it really was. There is no doubt that the judgments of this capable and experienced civil servant were sincere assessments of national security. But her sincerity could not mask the un-American principle she defended: that the state should have the power to control the movement of its citizens whenever their travel was secretly found to be, not unlawful, but simply not consonant with a government official’s view of foreign policy or national security. Nor could her skill excuse a decision-making process kept behind a wall of unreviewable discretion buttressed by impregnable bureaucratic secrecy. Just as her passport controls reached the peak of their perfection, the courts and Growth: Mrs. Shipley’s Ghost ◆ 155 Congress began to restore the individual liberty that had been sacrificed in pursuit of national security. Passport decisions were subjected to judicial review, although the government left its heavy thumb on the judicial scales, to tip them when necessary with claims of grave threats to national security. Mrs. Shipley’s passports were ultimately abandoned as the primary tool to control a citizen’s travel. But her ghost still lingers in the machine. Just as her empire grew from index cards to rooms full of filing cabinets, today’s watchlisting system has grown from a dozen or so names typed in a security directive that fit on a single piece of thermal fax paper. Today a massive database operates on a budget of tens of millions of dollars, employing hundreds of officials. Travel control is now done remotely, using networked computer systems to sort the good from the bad. In the blink of an eye, it can stop travel into, out of, or through the airspace of the United States. Mrs. Shipley’s spirit has been digitized. It flows through these computers and watchlists with a power greater than the real Mrs. Shipley could possibly have imagined. That shift from corporeal form to digital avatar accomplished a neat trick, even if those who created the new system did not realize just who they had regenerated. There is no single Mrs. Shipley anymore. Her power was certainly not transferred to the singular discretion of the Director of the Terrorist Screening Center. But Mrs. Shipley’s spirit did not entirely disappear. It has been diffused into the databases and computers of scores of analysts working in a systematic, multilevel process. This makes decision making appear scientific, rigorous, and technologically sophisticated. Data points are parsed and assessed at different stages according to set criteria by dedicated professionals in the “watchlisting community.” The involvement of multiple agencies with a stake in the results would seem to prevent any single person from amassing the power that Mrs. Shipley did. What could be more objective and dispassionate? Isn’t the current system the well-designed antidote to the reign of Ruth Shipley, which Dean Acheson called in his memoirs her “Queendom of Passports”? Though it may seem counterintuitive, diffusing Mrs. Shipley’s power in fact magnified it. The new system makes it much harder to identify just who is responsible for the final decision to ground a citizen. An attempt to reach the decision makers with meaningful controls through our traditional system of checks and balances on government power is a journey down the rabbit hole. No single agency...

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