For some reason I can only find news articles about children placed on the Canadian No-Fly List. The No Fly List Kids is a Canadian advocacy group. The Wikipedia article mentions the children stuck in the US one, but my cursory Google-fu isn't turning up any but a 2010 NYT article.
However, here's what happens when you fight the US govt for years and are finally taken off of it – you get harrassed by other governments.
Maniar said that he didn’t have anything to tell them (Pakistani authorities). Frantically scanning his mind for something that could explain his situation to the ISI agents and get him out of this, he went back to the no-fly list letter. That one-page document, issued under the letterhead of the Department of Homeland Security, permitting him to fly and clearing his name of suspicions of terrorism back home, had been his ticket out of the nightmare of law enforcement harassment he’d been experiencing for years. But somehow the message that he wasn’t a threat hadn’t been communicated abroad.
Maniar tried with increasing desperation to explain the letter and how he had resolved his issues in the United States. As he was speaking, a black bag came down over his head.
In 2014, a major investigation based on leaked documents was published by The Intercept shedding light on how the terrorist watchlist was constructed. A 166-page document titled “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” exposed a covert program that blacklisted large numbers of people based on unchallengeable secret criteria. The watchlisting guidance revealed the levels of “derogatory information” that could lead to someone winding up on the list, exposing an opaque system with few checks and balances that was ripe for abuse. It was easy to get yourself on the list and suffer its consequences, but very difficult to know how to clear your name if you were actually innocent.
Handeyside added, the simple fact of sharing information with foreign governments suggesting that someone might be a terrorist can create enormous dangers for them: “To the extent that the U.S. government is using and sharing watchlist information at all, it creates serious risks. You can have a hell of a time clearing your name with the U.S. government but still be detained, targeted, interrogated, or searched very intensively abroad, based on information about you that is outdated or inaccurate.”
When it comes to the no-fly list specifically, U.S. citizens and permanent residents can now go through a legal process to remove themselves from the list. But even if they are cleared to fly, it remains possible that they could remain on other secret lists or that negative information about them could wind up persisting on databases maintained by foreign governments. The dangers of this could be very serious, particularly when individuals who have been watchlisted are traveling to foreign countries where legal protections are weak.
“The entire watchlisting enterprise is predicated on the idea of guilt by association,” said Gadeir Abbas a staff attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations who represented individuals on the watchlist. “People are connected to others based on their associations, and based on those associations, potentially determined to be higher risk and subject to more scrutiny.”
It was that formula of guilt-by-association that got Maniar listed in the first place, trapping him in a web of problems from which there seemed to be no escape.
How did this guy land on the No Fly List? He became friends with a British Muslim woman and talked to her about the Syrian war over WhatsApp. Her Facebook posts about Syria got flagged by British intelligence, who confiscated her electronic devices and flagged anyone she had been talking to. The Feds then started harrassing this guy.
I don't know whether he and his friend were posting pro-terrorist or edgelord shit about Syria or simply criticizing the West's responses to the war. These agencies are staffed by extremely paranoid personnel with military and police conditioning. In either case, it's the exact precedent established here that might well lead to your house getting raided for posting "ACAB" on Instagram. Reasons don't matter, because once you give a government the power and precedent to circumvent due process and suspend democratic human rights, all that's left is finding an excuse.
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