no-fly list insanity

[trochee]

Somehow "Sam Adams" is a name on the TSA-no-fly-list. There are nearly 300 million people in the United States. Any guesses how many of them have this name? There have been quite a few, and those are the famous ones. [On examination, one of them invented the joy buzzer; perhaps this is why they're on a terrorism watch list.]

Needless to say, the TSA probably wasn't looking for the four-year-old: doesn't common sense have something to do with this?

what am i saying? of course not.

second link via yendi

Comments

You never know.

[lx.livejournal.com]

That baby next to you might be a bomb. You never know. You never know.

I think your second-link is supposed to go somewhere else though?

Re: You never know.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

oops. was supposed to point here. corrected now. thanks!

[tulip-tree.livejournal.com]

This is beyond ridiculous. The "no fly" list barely makes sense for adults, especially since many of these common names are probably aliases which are presumably chosen by the bad guys specifically because they are common. Duh. You would think that they could AT LEAST make a rule like "children under the age of XX are exempt" or something.

This country is so scared of doing anything that could be considered "profiling." Too bad, since in some cases it's pretty effective. Take El Al's security vs. the TSA, for one example. I know that we can't just adopt Israel's model at the scale of our entire country, but maybe we could learn something from them. Profiling happens all the time anyway, often in very bad ways, but no one is willing to make official policies about it in ways that might actually be useful. Clearly, "all terrorists are dark-skinned young men" would be a very bad profile to use, and I think that's what the powers that be are shying away from; no one wants to be accused of racism. Profiling based on suspicious behavior could be useful, though. And in this case, you'd think that something like "children do not fit the profile of suspected terrorists" would be a no-brainer.