One of the most frustrating aspects of this pandemic has got to be being told by a shopkeeper, or restaurant employee, or flight attendant, that you are in violation not of their rules, but of someone else’s. “I’m so sorry, but federal law requires that…(fill in the blank).” Sympathy in this moment is a bit of a joke; we both know you’re not sorry to be passing the buck for rules the state passed the buck back onto you to enforce.

We’ve seen it with masks; we’ve seen it with vaccine passports. Now, Delta Airlines wants to see it with any “unruly” behavior on flights.

Edward Bastian, Delta’s CEO, sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland last week requesting that passengers convicted of on-board disruption for “unruly” behavior be placed on a national “no fly” list. Like most airlines, Delta already keeps its own no fly list, but passengers banned from one airline can still continue to fly with competitors. Bastian seeks to nationalize the list so that a passenger banned on one flight would be banned on all flights within U.S. airspace, through an expansion of the FBI watchlist which prevents known terrorists from boarding an aircraft in the United States.

Delta has also asked other airlines to share the names of unruly passengers on their flights, to tighten its own enforcement; however, the trade group Airlines for America has pointed out that this can pose legal challenges to customer privacy protections.

There’s a lot at stake here, as even an ACLU spokesman pointed out to the Washington Post. The question of due process is probably the biggest. Currently, the Terrorist Screening Center alerts a citizen that he has been designated on the no fly list via a mailed letter after the decision to ban him from all air travel has already been made.

A passenger who learns he has been placed on the FBI’s no fly list has the option to “submit and receive additional information.” The Department of Homeland Security Traveler Redress Inquiry Program will then send a second letter identifying the general criterion under which the passenger has been placed on the list.

The ACLU notes that:

The government’s summary likely will not include all of its reasons for your placement on the list, and in some cases the government will choose not to provide any summary at all. The government also will not provide you any of the evidence it relied upon in deciding to place you on the list, and it may also withhold information in its possession that undercuts its basis for putting you on the list. Finally, the government does not provide a live hearing at which you could testify or give you an opportunity to cross-examine witnesses against you.

In other words, once the FBI decides you’re out, you’re out. The only way for a passenger to learn if he has been removed from a no fly list is to purchase a ticket and attempt to board a plane.

How would the FBI decide who gets on this expanded list? Is it enough for Delta to consider a passenger “unruly”? Since the pandemic, Delta has placed nearly 1,900 passengers on its own no fly list for refusing to comply with mask rules, as Bastian noted in his letter. If their rules were to hold for a nationalized list, numerous Americans would be put at the permanent mercy of the federal bureaucracy for one mask violation. In short, we would be treating an American who refused to wear a face covering with the same severity as those threatening to blow up an airplane.

Nevertheless, the worst part of all of this may still be the too-big-to-fail corporation angling to use the federal government as its bludgeon yet again, to enforce what should be company policies with the arm of the law. We’ve heard about how tough the past two years have been on flight attendants, who always have to badger those idiot folk from red states to pull their masks up over their noses, but never forget that their bosses’ lobbying power is keeping that mask mandate in place.

You’d think Delta’s government relations team would just seek an end to the mandate, rather than cordon off those who resent it from ever again participating in modern travel. But then again, maybe you wouldn’t.