Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Thursday that the “Quiet Skies” surveillance program was dismantled. It’s a good first step — but it’s just that: a first step. It’s time to dismantle the entire surveillance regime that grew out of post 9/11 panic.
The “Quiet Skies Program” was launched in 2010 with the goal of identifying potential threats among domestic air travelers who might not be on the terror watchlist but who supposedly exhibited suspicious behavior. In reality, it became another tool to monitor American citizens.
But as Noem said in a press release Thursday, the program “has failed to stop a single terrorist attack while costing US taxpayers $200 million a year.”
Worse still, the program has been used to target political opponents, like Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard, a vocal critic of America’s intelligence agencies, was allegedly targeted by the U.S. Federal Air Marshals Service (FAMS), according to a whistleblower complaint shared by the non-profit watchdog group Empower Oversight. The complaint alleged that Gabbard was placed under federal surveillance by the FAMS Quiet Skies program “one day after she criticized the Biden administration in an interview with Laura Ingraham,” as reported by Tristan Justice.
“Air Marshals were assigned to their first flight with Ms. Gabbard on July 25, 2024,” Empower Oversight reported. “Absent any significant evidence that Ms. Gabbard actually poses a significant threat, this is a gross waste of taxpayer resources and an abuse of TSA’s authority.”
Noem is also calling for an investigation into the program.
“It is clear that the Quiet Skies program was used as a political rolodex of the Biden Administration — weaponized against its political foes and exploited to benefit their well-heeled friends,” Noem said. “I am calling for a Congressional investigation to unearth further corruption at the expense of the American people and undermining of US national security.”
But while they’re at it, Congress and the Trump administration must reckon with the broader surveillance state.
As The Federalist’s co-founder and CEO Sean Davis wrote in these pages, “The government response to 9/11 birthed the constitutional abomination that is the modern warrantless surveillance state. The Patriot Act enabled the government to weaponize its vast resources against its own people.”
Then there is the PRISM program, which was revealed by Edward Snowden. The PRISM program is a “constitutionally dubious surveillance program under which the National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Central Intelligence Agency gather and search through emails, internet calls, photos, and chats of Americans without obtaining a warrant, usually through the backdoor of America’s major tech companies,” as explained in these pages by Rachel Bovard.
While Congress passed the USA Freedom Act in 2015 to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance act (FISA) to ban some collection of American data, the CIA nonetheless was caught spying on Americans again. Notably, the feds later used FISA to spy on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
There was also the revelation that the NSA was conducting massive surveillance under Executive Order 12333. As described by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), this order allows the government “to vacuum up billions of emails, texts, and calls from people across the globe, grabbing Americans’ sensitive communications in the process.”
“The fundamental problem with EO 12333 is that it is a virtually lawless surveillance authority,” POGO explains, adding that it operates “absent any limits or oversight from Congress and the courts.”
The Quiet Skies program is not an aberration — it’s the rule. The national security state has grown unaccountably large and increasingly willing to turn its tools inward on the American people. It’s not enough to shut down one failed program — Republicans must go further and dismantle the entire surveillance state.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
