Your rights are an "odd divergence from federal law"
In an incident which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called "embarrassing" last year, bumbling bureaucrats (if that isn't too much of a redundancy) placed the elderly and venerated South African leader Nelson Mandela on the infamous "terrorist watch list":
WASHINGTON -- Nobel Peace Prize winner and international symbol of freedom Nelson Mandela is flagged on U.S. terrorist watch lists and needs special permission to visit the USA. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls the situation "embarrassing," and some members of Congress vow to fix it.
At the time, Homeland Security Director Michael Certoff observed that the incident raised a "troubling and difficult debate" about who gets placed on the list, and why:
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says "common sense" suggests Mandela should be removed. He says the issue "raises a troubling and difficult debate about what groups are considered terrorists and which are not."
When ANC members apply for visas to the USA, they are flagged for questioning and need a waiver to be allowed in the country. In 2002, former ANC chairman Tokyo Sexwale was denied a visa. In 2007, Barbara Masekela, South Africa's ambassador to the United States from 2002 to 2006, was denied a visa to visit her ailing cousin and didn't get a waiver until after the cousin had died, Berman's legislation says.
Moving forward a year, the debate became more troubling when the DHS (under Chertoff's replacement Janet Napolitano) suggested that right wing groups (such as anti-abortion protesters, certain veterans, and people overly concerned with the loss of their Second Amendment rights) should be watched.
...Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.
Whether these people were (like Nelson Mandela) added to the no-fly" list, who knows? The list is kept "confidential" --which means government employees, airline security people, police, and no doubt "private investigators" for a fee, can access it. The ACLU estimates that there are a million Americans on the list, and there have been complaints that even credit scores are factored in:
Among the complaints about the No Fly List is the use of credit reports in calculating the risk score. In response to the controversy, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials said in 2005 that they would not use credit scores to determine passengers' risk score and that they would comply with all rights guaranteed by the First and Fourth Amendments.
Somehow I don't find any of this reassuring. (The Wiki piece has a long list of false positives, including many children and people with common names.) However, it has to be recognized that this list was generated for use during the war on terror, and that there is no constitutional right to fly on a plane. It's an extraordinary measure passed for an extraordinary time. As I keep saying about the extraordinary measures adopted during the war on terror, it would have been one thing if their use had been limited strictly. The abuses are out of control and in light of recent news, things are getting worse.