Friday, October 06, 2006
Newsflash: TSA No-Fly List Rotten with Errors
The Associated Press has just discovered that
Thousands of people have been mistakenly linked to names on terror watch lists when they crossed the border, boarded commercial airliners or were stopped for traffic violations. More than 30,000 airline passengers have asked just one agency — the Transportation Security Administration — to have their names cleared from the lists, according to the Government Accountability Office report.We in the blogosphere have known about the egregious number of "false positives" from the No Fly List for, let's see, how long has the No Fly List been in use? Which is not to say that it's useless. It's been very useful for harassing Democratic politicians, peace activists, and other enemies of the Bush Administration. It's also useful for further undermining our right to privacy, by providing a pretext for demanding outrageous amounts of personal information from travelers in order to refine the method of checking travelers' names against the entries on the list. I predict there will be a certainly amount of hand-waving about improving the accuracy of the list, but nothing will really be done to prevent the false identifications.
More blogs about politics.
