Starting Points: Homeland Security Department

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Apr 19, 2010

CQ - Behind the Lines for Monday, April 19, 2010

By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly

Special orders do upset us: One of three Detroit men arrested for a series of fast food restaurant robberies turns out to be TSA screener . . . Order in the court: Citing the high volume of threats it receives, Supreme Court seeks more federal security funds . . . Don't tread on me: California woman standing trial today for allegedly hitting the TSA agent who tried to seize her mother's applesauce. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.

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“The Obama administration is for the first time drafting classified guidelines to help the government determine whether newly captured terrorism suspects will be prosecuted or held indefinitely without trial,” the Los Angeles Times’ David S. Cloud and Julian E. Barnes lead. Even as “vexing detainee decisions” loom, this fall’s midterm elections “will lead to further politicization of detention issues and make the administration’s efforts more difficult,” John B. Bellinger III safely predicts in a CFR Expert Brief — while The Boston Globe’s Bella English spotlights a group of 9/11 families fighting for a civil trial rather than a military tribunal for the attacks’ plotters.

Feds: Facing a Senate subpoena threat, Defense will not share info that could compromise prosecution of the suspected gunman in last year’s Fort Hood shooting, Reuters’ Phil Stewart hears Secretary Robert M. Gates vowing. Taking a leaf from the Fort Hood shootings in November, the Pentagon last week announced steps to expand the dissemination of info on terrorist threats to the military, Killeen (Texas)’s KWTX 10 News notes — as NBC News’s Jim Miklaszewski cites an internal Pentagon report’s judgment that existing safeguards were “unclear” or “inadequate.” The Supreme Court is asking for more federal security funds, citing as one reason the “volume” of threats it receives, The Hill’s Russell Berman reports.

Homies: “There’s almost nothing I’ve done [in my career] that doesn’t touch upon DHS. This department crosses so many things,” Janet Napolitano says in a Washington Post Magazine “First Person Singular” squib — while The Boston Globe’s Brian R. Ballou covers the homeland chief’s frantic Friday rounds in Beantown. His new blog “is all national security and terrorism stuff related to some of the threats we face,” soon-to-be imprisoned would-be DHS chief and ex-NYPD commish Bernard Kerik touts to TPM’s Justin Elliott. Senate homeland overseers plan to introduce a bill later this month to overhaul and modernize DHS’s edifice-encircling Federal Protective Service, Government Executive’s Robert Brodsky updates.

State and local: Wyoming authorities have refused to turn over detailed records showing how DHS grants have been used there since 2001, The Cowboy State Free Press relays. The court security division of the Seneca County (N.Y.) sheriff’s department has received its official accreditation, The Finger Lakes Times tells — as The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sees the supervisor for the private firm hired last month to secure the Milwaukee County Courthouse being removed in view of newly revealed convictions. “Researchers continue waiting to move into the new Homeland Security lab at Fort Detrick . . . after an endurance test uncovered flaws in the building,” The Frederick (Md.) News-Post reports.

Know nukes: “Almost from the invention of the atomic bomb, government officials were alarmed by the threat that compact nukes would be smuggled into the United States by Soviet agents and detonated,” The New York Times surveys. “Obama’s proclamation of unilateral nuclear disarmament [has] nullified America’s willingness and ability to defend itself . . . when worldwide nuclear proliferation abounds,” an American Thinker contributor condemns — as Al Jazeera sees Iran’s supreme leader telling a nuclear disarmament conference in Tehran on Saturday that the United States’ atomic weapons “are a tool of terror and intimidation.” The Christian Science Monitor spotlights a Pentagon memo fretting that the United States lacks a long-term plan to deal with Iran — while Defense’s Gates tells the Post: “The memo was not intended as a ‘wake-up call.’”

Bugs ‘n bombs: “While the United States cannot defend its citizens against a nuclear weapons blast, we do have the capability against bioterrorism,” the WMD Commission chairmen stress in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch op-ed. The author of “Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security” (Lyons Press) decries to Pro Publica the United States’ “weak, outmoded defenses and poorly trained personnel more apt at discouraging burglars than stopping suicide terror teams.” The soon-to-depart Northern Command/NORAD chief warns that wind farms pose problems for the radar that scans for air and space threats, The Colorado Springs Independent informs — while The Boston Herald hears that officer’s pending successor warning that small, hard-to-detect terror plots are a mounting concern.

Exercised: Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection joined state and local agencies last week for a chemical threat response training exercise at the Banner Center for Homeland Security & Defense, Tallahassee’s WCTV News relays. California local response officials, meanwhile, are gearing up for a June exercise simulating the detonation of a 10-kiloton nuke in Los Angeles, the L.A. Daily News notes. Access and fishing areas near the dam at Old Hickory Lake was closed Friday and Saturday while the Army Corps of Engineers ran homeland security exercises, The Tennessean tells — as The Arizona Republic reports responders and health officials staging a mock bioterror attack at the Peoria Sports Complex last week.

Close air support: One of three Motor City men arrested for a series of fast food restaurant robberies turns out to be a TSA screener at Detroit Metro Airport, the Free Press reports — while ABC 15 News uncovers hundreds of internal e-mails, audits and other documents revealing a pattern of failures involving security contractors at Phoenix’s air hub. A California woman is slated to stand trial today for allegedly hitting a TSA agent who tried to seize her mother’s applesauce at a Bob Hope Airport checkpoint, The Burbank Leader relates. “The lesson of the Jihad Janes is that our safety requires vigilance that exempts few groups, if any,” a Post reader writes. Logan airport, meantime, is in line for 60 more explosive trace detectors, The Boston Globe, again, has DHS’s Napolitano announcing during Friday’s junket.

Border wars: Arizona’s two senators have asked CBP reduce the long vehicular and pedestrian lines at Nogales’ border crossings, stressing the backups’ harm to the local economy, The Nogales International informs. Ultra-tough legislation passed in Arizona last week is heightening debate on how far is too far to go to curb illegal immigration, and prompting renewed calls for a federal immigration overhaul, The Christian Science Monitor surveys — while The High Plains Journal hears the Independent Cattlemen’s Association of Texas urging DHS to increase security along the Mexico border, and The San Diego Union-Tribune has CBP officers shooting a man Saturday morning after he came through the San Ysidro border crossing.

Courts and rights: FBI agents are in Guyana seeking evidence in the case against four men accused of plotting to blow up New York’s JFK airport, CaribWorldNews.com recounts. With less than six months until the terror trial of seven North Carolina men begins, defense attorneys say they are trying to work through the massive amount of evidence, Raleigh’s WRAL TV-5 News notes — while ABC 11 News has the seven back in court Friday for a hearing on the same. The feds are probing whether an Oregon peace activist knowingly helped fund Muslim terrorists in Russia when he allegedly laundered donations through his charity in 2000, The Medford Mail Tribune tells.Decrying “judicial interference,” lawyers for New York City want a judge to stop talking about his objections to a $657 million settlement of some 10,000 9/11 respiratory cases, The New York Law Journal notes.

Qaeda Qorner: The destruction of nearly 100 videotapes showing the harsh interrogation of two al Qaeda detainees in 2005 triggered concerns within the CIA over whether it was adequately cleared, CNN notes. Osama Bin Laden requested a satellite TV dish be installed in his Afghanistan hideaway so he could watch the 9/11 attacks unfurl, but the signal was blocked by the mountainous terrain, The Daily Mail mentions — while FOX News notes Facebook moving to shut down a social-networking page purportedly put up by the chatty terrorist mastermind. A new video by the al Qaeda-linked Al Shabaab shows the Somali militant group indoctrinating children, some of whom appear to be toddlers, The National Post notes — while the Times has the group outlawing school bells in a southern town after deciding that they conflicted with Islam.

Over there: Pakistani authorities beat confessions out of some of the five northern Virginia men accused of planning terrorist acts there, the mother of one defendant tells The Associated Press — and check the Times, again, for a broader profile of that family. Former Pakistani P.M. Benazir Bhutto’s 2007 assassination might have been prevented had security forces taken adequate steps after death threats were made against her, Bloomberg has a U.N. probe finding. India is further tightening security before the October Commonwealth Games after State issued a warning to American citizens about possible militant attacks on hotels and markets in India, Reuters reports — as France 24 has at least 10 people hurt Saturday when two bombs exploded at a cricket stadium in Bangalore.

Ashes to asses: “A gigantic ash cloud from an Icelandic volcano that blanketed Northern Europe and paralyzed air travel across the continent has turned out to be part of the finale of the television series ‘ Lost,’” The Borowitz Report has network officials confirming. “Bracing themselves for the public uproar over a special-effects spectacle gone awry, ABC officials attempted to explain how the producers’ desire for a fitting ending to the increasingly convoluted series led to an aviation nightmare,” Andy Borowitz writes. “’The producers of ‘Lost’ set off a small explosive charge underneath the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in Iceland, hoping to create a cloud of black smoke,’ said ABC spokesperson Carol Foyler.‘That was pretty much the only way they could think of to end the series.’ But longtime ‘Lost’ fanatics doubt the network’s story. Tracy Klugian, 27, a web designer from Evanston, Illinois who has seen every episode of the confusing series at least eight times doesn’t believe that the gigantic ash cloud could possibly be the end of the series: ‘For one thing, it makes too much sense.’,”

Source: CQ Homeland Security

Apr 14, 2010

CQ - Behind the Lines for Wednesday, April 15, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly

Doing the dirty: Indian radiation injuries from discarded cobalt-60 source sparks renewed dirty bomb angst . . . Rag trade rumors: "There's a huge security issue here that just seems to be going right over everybody's head," wholesaler warns of TSA uniform outsourcing . . . What we maybe should be worried about: "Since 9/11, far more Americans have been killed, injured or hurt because of our lack of a coordinated food safety system than by terrorist acts." These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.

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A “mysterious shiny object” that turned up at a West Delhi scrap dealership — leaving five people injured from radiation exposure, one severely — contained cobalt-60, often used in radiation therapy, The Press Trust of India updates. “Could what happened in India four days ago happen here? The answer: It is amazing that it has not happened yet,” Homeland Security Newswire follows up. “Add in scary data about Pakistan’s nuclear security, and the specter of a terrorist dirty bomb exploding in New York, D.C., or elsewhere is no longer a remote possibility,” Thomas Lifson alleges in The American Thinker.

Know nukes: On the eve of the Nuclear Security Summit concluded yesterday, Pakistan’s P.M. assured President Obama “appropriate safeguards” are in place to safeguard atomic materials, Reuters’ Matt Spetalnick, relatedly, reports. “Overall, how much loose nuke material is out there? A lot. The nations of the world together have about 1.6 million kilograms of highly enriched uranium and about 500,000 kilograms of plutonium,” The Christian Science Monitor’s Peter Grier assesses. Some 130 lightly guarded civilian research reactors, moreover, hold sufficient HEU for hundreds of warheads, The New York Times’ William J. Broad spotlights — while The Associated Press’ Sharon Theimer highlights the United States’ own stockpile security shortcomings. A White House counterterrorist says al Qaeda has been “scammed” in its bid to obtain the material for building a nuclear device, Danger Room’s Nathan Hodge also notes.

Feds: World leaders arriving for the nuke summit “must have felt for a moment that they had instead been transported to Soviet-era Moscow,” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank muses of the highly militarized security on display the past two days. Senators have called for creation of a permanent cyberczar in response to two GAO assessments finding federal agencies out of compliance with info security initiatives, Nextgov’s Aliya Sternstein relates. “There’s a huge security issue here that just seems to be going right over everybody’s head,” a Knoxville wholesaler tells Nashville’s NewsChannel 5’s Phil Williams about the outsourcing of TSA uniform orders to Mexico — and recall the Kissell Amendment.

Follow the money: West Africa offers South American drug traffickers “what the impenetrable terrain of the Hindu Kush offers to al Qaeda and the Taliban — a place beyond the reach of law,” The N.Y. Times Magazine spotlights — as a Fletcher Forum of World Affairs piece urges Washington to “leverage its strategy of . . . diplomatic engagement to gain broader support against the growing terrorism-crime nexus.” Since Afghanistan banned logging and lumber sales, the industry is largely supervised by the Taliban, which skims the profits and uses timber smuggling networks to transport weapons and men, The Wall Street Journal relates. Washington stands ready to cooperate with a new E.U. system for tracking terrorism financing, a Treasury big tells the Times, but without saying whether it would go so far as to share U.S. bank account data. Swiss authorities sifted through record numbers of suspicious financial deals last year for possible money-laundering, most being forwarded to prosecutors, Reuters reports.

State and local: New Orleans is using a controversial recovery management contract to dole out no-bid deals to other firms using FEMA dollars, the Times-Picayune learns from a city I.G.’s draft report. Champaign, Ill., is in the midst of its spring 2010 round of Community Emergency Response Team training, comprising five classes instructing locals in assessing and tackling disastrous situations, The Daily Illini informs. Gun and ammo sales are up following the murder two weeks ago of a southern Arizona cattle rancher, The Arizona Daily Sun says. New Mexico Homeland Security chief John Wheeler, meanwhile, has been named to DHS’s Preparedness Task Force, Albuquerque’s KOAT 7 News notes. A free discussion on bioterrorism is scheduled tomorrow evening at the Louisville Science Center, the Courier-Journal alerts.

Bugs ‘n bombs: A white powder was found near an X-ray machine at the U.S. Attorneys office in Phoenix on Monday morning, but no evacuation was ordered, The Arizona Republic reports. “Since 9/11, far more Americans have been killed, injured or hurt because of our lack of a coordinated food safety system than by terrorist acts,” a Huffington Post contributor leads. Using current technology, it could take DHS as long as 36 hours to detect a biological attack on U.S. soil, but the department’s goal is to cut that time to four hours, Defense News spotlights. In each of dozens of instances in which BioWatch filters have captured dangerous germs since 2003, the reading has been traced to the background environment, not evil-doers, The Columbus Dispatch recounts.

Close air support: Three Continental Airlines flights out of Newark were delayed after a disgruntled passenger falsely complained that an airport employee had triggered a security checkpoint alarm, the Star-Ledger relates. “The new London [Ontario] International Airport security measures currently in place for travel to the United States are very disconcerting,” a London Free Press reader rumbles. Security at a major regional airport in New South Wales is under scrutiny after a secure entrance was found to have a secret PIN code posted clearly on a gate, The Australian says — while NDTV has a Jet Airways flight in India delayed for five-plus hours after a passenger threatened to blow up the plane.

Coming and going: Passengers subdued a man who threatened to blow up an eastbound Greyhound bus on Interstate 10, The Arizona Republic relates. YouTube has removed a video of a Chechen rebel claiming responsibility for last month’s Moscow metro bombings after it was flagged by the site’s users, the U.K.’s Metro Reporter relates. Federal authorities are certain nearly 300 Somalis allegedly smuggled into the United States by a Virginia man who admitted contacts with an Islamic terrorist group are still in the country, but they can’t find them, The Washington Examiner explains.

Terror tech: “While it’s clear from the cyberwar news that we are living in a war zone when we turn on our computers, we at Wired.com refuse to surrender — even at the risk of taking an e-bullet in the name of Freedom,” Threat Level proclaims, challenging news readers to play CyberWar Bingo. Ultra-pure samples of a radioactive gas could soon make it harder for nations to carry out nuclear tests in secret, New Scientist notes — while Budget Travel describes “a few technologies that could help spot potential terrorists before it’s too late, similar to the systems for detecting ‘pre-crimes’ used in the Tom Cruise movie ‘Minority Report.’” The Indian military’s Computer Emergency Response Team has issued a cyber-alert to government and corporate officials warning of possible large-scale cyber-attacks, Defense Tech tells.

Terror cells: The Mexican government is allowing cell phone firms a bit more time to process unregistered users before disconnecting 27.5 million such phones as a counter-cartel measure, Bloomberg relates — while Tucson’s KOLD 13 News sees that rancher murder prompting an Arizona lawmaker to urge cell companies to boost their border coverage. DHS’s Science and Technology division wants to help create 40 prototypes by year’s end of cell phones “that can detect toxic chemicals in the air just as easily as they can receive a call or send a text message,” PC Magazine mentions — while Sci Pry notes work proceeding apace on Optical Dynamic Detection devices capable of sensing potentially dangerous chemicals and explosives in suitcases and such left in public venues. Britain’s anti-terrorist hotline, meantime, has received a total of 62,871 tips between April 2002 and March 2009, an average of approximately 40 a day, The Guardian spotlights.

Courts and rights: Wisconsin’s Justice Department won’t release its copy of a threat assessment wrongly compiled by DHS regarding groups participating in a 2009 abortion protest, Wisconsin Public Radio briefs. The attorney for the Muslim convert charged with killing one soldier and wounding another outside a Little Rock military recruiting center says his goal is to avoid the death penalty, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports. A Canadian passenger from the underpants-bomber-threatened flight tells the Detroit Free Press she wants a trial for the Nigerian man accused in the case — as Detroit’s WDIV News hears fed prosecutors at a brief hearing yesterday saying they’ve shared reams of evidence with the defendant’s lawyers. The trial of the last three people accused in the Toronto 18 terror plot is under way in an Ontario courtroom, The Canadian Press reports.

Over there: Iran, meanwhile, is refusing to allow Canada to deport a member of an Iranian terrorist group who was arrested at Toronto’s airport while carrying a recruitment letter from the “Martyrdom Lovers’ Headquarters” in Tehran, The Canwest News Service notes. The Afghan war “is likely to end in negotiations that will involve wrenching choices for the country as well as for U.S. and European allies,” a Los Angeles Times columnists forecasts — and see Brit Foreign Minister David Miliband in The New York Review on “How to end the war in Afghanistan.” Army chiefs from seven African nations gathered Tuesday in Algiers to coordinate efforts against a regional al Qaeda offshoot, AP reports.

This just in, from The Onion: “WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric Holder turned in his letter of resignation to President Obama on Tuesday after discovering that people willfully participate in the killing of other human beings on a routine basis. ‘I am stunned,’ a pale and shaking Holder said. ‘That’s just horrible. People really do that? My God, why?’ Sources close to Holder said that he is seeking a position in which he will be less likely to encounter man’s inhumanity toward man, perhaps in child protective services.” See, also, on Onion Network News: “Man Attempts To Assassinate Obama, ‘But Not Because He’s Black Or Anything’: Suspect Alex Croft, who has a ton of black friends, planned to kill Obama because of his socialist agenda — not because of his skin color . . . ”

Source: CQ Homeland Security

Apr 7, 2010

Ensnared by Error on Growing U.S. Watch List - NYTimes.com

Image by mathowie via Flickr

By MIKE McINTIRE

Rahinah Ibrahim, a Stanford University doctoral student, arrived at San Francisco International Airport with her 14-year-old daughter for a 9 a.m. flight home to Malaysia. She asked for a wheelchair, having recently had a hysterectomy.

Instead, when a ticket agent found her name on the no-fly list, Ms. Ibrahim was handcuffed, searched and jailed amid a flurry of phone calls involving the local police, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. Two hours after her flight left, Ms. Ibrahim was released without explanation. She flew to Malaysia the next day.

But when she tried to return to the United States, she discovered that her visa had been revoked. And when she complained that she did not belong on a terrorist watch list, the government’s response came a year later in a form letter saying only that her case had been reviewed and that any changes warranted had been made.

Every year, thousands of people find themselves caught up in the government’s terrorist screening process. Some are legitimate targets of concern, others are victims of errors in judgment or simple mistaken identity.

Either way, their numbers are likely to rise as the Obama administration recalibrates the standards for identifying potential terrorists, in response to intelligence failures that let a would-be bomber fly to Detroit from Amsterdam last Christmas. On Friday, the administration altered rules for identifying which passengers flying to the United States should face extra scrutiny at the gate. And it is reviewing ways to make it easier to place suspects on the watch list.

“The entire federal government is leaning very far forward on putting people on lists,” Russell E. Travers, a deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at a recent Senate hearing. Before the attempted attack on Christmas, Mr. Travers said, “I never had anybody tell me that the list was too small.”

Now, he added, “It’s getting bigger, and it will get even bigger.”

Even as the universe of those identified as a risk expands, the decision-making involved remains so secretive that people cannot be told whether they are on the watch list, why they may be on it or even whether they have been removed. The secrecy, government officials say, keeps terrorists off balance. But civil liberties advocates say it can hide mistakes and keep people wrongly singled out from seeking redress.

Now, five years after Ms. Ibrahim’s arrest at the United Airlines ticket counter, a lawsuit she filed is chipping away at that wall of secrecy. While judges have dismissed many similar cases, a federal appeals court let hers proceed, endorsing a new legal strategy for challenging placement on the watch list. In December, a federal judge scoffed at the government’s claim for secrecy and ordered it to release files on Ms. Ibrahim’s detention.

Ms. Ibrahim’s case has also raised legal questions about detaining people whose names appear on the no-fly list, and it casts light on the role of private contractors in deciding whether someone should be held. The police in San Francisco said they had acted on the instructions of a contractor working for the Homeland Security Department.

The government is fighting back, and there is no guarantee that Ms. Ibrahim, a 44-year-old mother of four, will ever learn more about what happened. However, an examination of her case, along with documents from other lawsuits, government audits and official testimony, offers some broad hints about the murky system.

The watch list is actually a succession of lists, beginning with the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, a centralized database of potential suspects. Mr. Travers said that about 10,000 names come in daily through intelligence reports, but that a large percentage are dismissed because they are based on “some combination of circular reporting, poison pens, mistaken identities, lies and so forth.”

Analysts at the counterterrorism center then work with the Terrorist Screening Center of the F.B.I. to add names to what is called the consolidated watch list, which may have any number of consequences for those on it, like questioning by the police during a traffic stop or additional screening crossing the border. That list, in turn, has various subsets, including the no-fly list and the selectee list, which requires passengers to undergo extra screening.

The consolidated list has the names of more than 400,000 people, about 97 percent of them foreigners, while the no-fly and selectee lists have about 6,000 and 20,000, respectively.

The standards for adding names to the lists have gone through a cycle of tightening, then relaxing. After the Sept. 11 attacks, hundreds of names were added with few guidelines, eventually leading to complaints that too many innocent travelers were being stopped. Two years ago, the government developed a reasonable suspicion standard and secret protocols for applying it; their last major revision was outlined in a 72-page memorandum in February 2009 that clarified the “minimum substantive derogatory criteria.”

A federal official involved in the process said that under those rules, associating with a known or suspected terrorist was not enough to warrant being listed; there had to be evidence that the person supported terrorism. The criteria also generally require more than a single source of “derogatory information,” said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss security matters.

A task force formed after the Christmas Day episode is considering changes to the process, including making it easier to label suspects extremists and giving greater weight to credible “single-source walk-ins,” the official said. The suspect in the attempted bombing, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was known to American intelligence analysts because his father, a banker in Nigeria, had reported him to the authorities, but he had not been placed on the watch list.

Putting United States citizens on the watch list requires more than just a single tip, although one tip could prompt an investigation that eventually leads to placement on the list. Local police officers are encouraged to file “suspicious activity reports” with the F.B.I. or the Homeland Security Department, which finances about 70 intergovernmental intelligence cooperatives nationwide.

While federal policies prohibit profiling, a wide range of innocent activities can be deemed suspicious. Guidelines distributed by several cooperatives advise landlords to be alert for tenants who prefer ground-floor apartments and have little furniture. Among the warning signs listed by one in Ohio are “immersion in a purely Muslim environment” and the “study of technical subjects” like engineering.

By such standards, Erich Scherfen could look suspicious. A veteran of the Persian Gulf war and a commercial pilot from Pennsylvania, Mr. Scherfen converted to Islam and married a Pakistani-born woman, Rubina Tureen, who runs a small business selling religious books. They have taken part in Islamic conferences and interfaith seminars.

In May 2006, a co-worker told the state police that Mr. Scherfen had retrofitted the family car to carry bombs, court records show. (He said he had simply removed a broken seat from his old Mazda.) Not long after, Mr. Scherfen and Ms. Tureen began being detained at airports, jeopardizing his job.

The couple filed a lawsuit, and his job was saved after a judge was given secret evidence that apparently indicated that Mr. Scherfen had been taken off the selectee list.

“I think some ill-informed people were putting the dots together and came to faulty conclusions,” Ms. Tureen said.

Their lawsuit cited rulings in Ms. Ibrahim’s case as precedents.

A Muslim who came to the United States to study civil engineering, Ms. Ibrahim impressed colleagues at Stanford. “Of all the people you could think of who might be on a list of terrorism suspects, she would be pretty close to the bottom,” said Raymond Levitt, one of her faculty advisers.

The judge presiding over her lawsuit appeared skeptical, too.

“It looks like to me it was a monumental mistake, and they identified the wrong person,” the judge, William H. Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco, said at a hearing in December. “I’m just guessing.”

The authorities will not say why they singled out Ms. Ibrahim. A week before her scheduled flight to Malaysia in January 2005, she was visited by two F.B.I. agents, said her lawyer, Marwa Elzankaly.

“They actually claimed they did not know why they were there to interview her,” Ms. Elzankaly said, “and basically just asked her a few background questions about herself, her family, her line of work, her travel plans and her education.”

When the airport ticket agent discovered her name on the no-fly list, he called the San Francisco police, who contacted the Transportation Security Administration in Washington. There, they reached a watch officer working for U.S. Investigations Services, one of several private contractors the agency has hired for its 24-hour operations center.

The contractors’ duties “include receiving telephone inquiries and providing direction as to how to handle passengers,” said Kristin Lee, an agency spokeswoman.

The police incident report says the watch officer told the police to “deny the flight to Ibrahim, contact the F.B.I. and detain her for further questioning.” She was driven to a police substation, where she was searched and placed in a holding cell. Eventually, an F.B.I. agent told the police to let her go, adding that she was being moved to the selectee list and could fly home.

Outraged, she decided to sue for wrongful arrest and to find out why she was on the list. But the law creating the T.S.A. made it virtually impossible to mount a legal challenge against it.

Instead, Ms. Ibrahim’s lawsuit focused on the F.B.I.’s Terrorist Screening Center, which does not have the same legal protections. After much of her case was thrown out, a divided United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reinstated it.

“If your name or my name or anybody’s name in this courtroom were put on that list, we would suffer grievously,” the chief judge, Alex Kozinski, said at a hearing in April 2008. “And we want to have some way of going to our government and possibly to our courts and saying, ‘Look, I shouldn’t be on that list.’ ”

Another issue raised by Ms. Ibrahim’s case is whether inclusion on the no-fly list is sufficient grounds for arrest. At a hearing last December, government lawyers agreed that it was not, although the courts generally allow brief detentions for investigative purposes.

The police, as part of their defense, offered to explain why they detained Ms. Ibrahim, but the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security refuse to allow it.

Meanwhile, Ms. Ibrahim earned her doctorate from Stanford but has been unable to return to the United States to participate in the lawsuit. Her lawyers said in a court filing that when she applied for a new visa last September, American Embassy officials in Kuala Lumpur questioned her about the suit, asking what it would take to settle it.

Last month, Ms. Ibrahim accepted a $225,000 settlement from the San Francisco police and U.S. Investigations Services. But she is pursuing her claims against the federal government. None of the defendants’ lawyers would comment for this article.

At the December hearing, Judge Alsup showed his displeasure at the government, telling Justice Department lawyers that they were abusing the secrecy privilege.

“You’re holding onto this five-year-old information like, you know, like another 9/11 is going to happen if you somehow release it,” the judge said, according to a transcript. “That’s just baloney.”