Air marshals add innocent people to watch lists to meet quotas

The simple act of taking a picture on an airplane could land you on a federal “watch list.” The reason? Air marshals are required to meet monthly quotas and are sometimes desperate to find anything suspicious.

According to The Denver Channel, federal marshals must submit a report every month that documents suspicious persons and activities during air travel. The incentive to do so is bonuses, raises, awards, and special assignments.

The marshals that spoke did so anonymously, and what they said is quite disturbing:

“Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft … and they did nothing wrong.”

The database is known as a Surveillance Detection Report and anyone listed on an SDR could be misidentified by the Department of Homeland Security as a potential terrorist. That means the very lives air marshals are sworn to protect can actually become targets of investigation for little to no reason at all.

“They could be placed on a watch list. They could wind up on databases that identify them as potential terrorists or a threat to an aircraft. It could be very serious,” said a former agent who lost his job trying to get these terrible policies changed.

The report states that management from the Federal Air Marshal headquarters in Las Vegas sent out a memo as early as 2004 telling agents to be on the lookout:

There may come an occasion when you just don’t see anything out of the ordinary for a month at a time, but I’m sure that if you are looking for it, you’ll see something.

Marshals are motivated by performance evaluations and some haven’t been shy in making up entries in hopes of extra kudos from management. From the report:

One example, according to air marshals, occurred on one flight leaving Las Vegas, when an unknowing passenger, most likely a tourist, was identified in an SDR for doing nothing more than taking a photo of the Las Vegas skyline as his plane rolled down the runway.

Not all air marshals are complicit in this scam and many are speaking out. One said, “Well, it’s intelligence information, and like any system, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out.”

“I would like to see an investigation,” he added, “a real investigation conducted into the ways things are done here [in Las Vegas.]”

DHS denies there is a quota system but air marshals based in Vegas have documents that prove performance reviews are “directly linked to producing SDRs.”