TheAgitator.com
One Million Strong
Monday, July 14th, 2008The ACLU says the Transportation Security Administration’s terrorist watch list hit one million names sometime over the weekend. It’s hard to see how a list that large could possibly be useful.
According to a recent public chat on the TSA website, nearly seven years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the government is "in the process" of finally developing a way for innocent people to appeal their inclusion on the list.
CORRECTION: The watch list is maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, not by TSA.
Hmmm. I already registered with the Pennsylvania Terrorism Awareness and Prevention group, is there someplace one can check to make sure they’re on the necessary lists?
!,000,000 unverified names stuck on there by thousands of government “clerks” with access to the system. No notice, no opportunity to be heard, no possibility of removal (unless you are Senator Ted Kennedy), and obviously, no basis for most of the ONE MILLION names!
And some Congressmen want to use this piece of crap list to deny citizens their Constitutional right to possess firearms.
Is every aspect of government a disfunctional, looney bin?
One million is nothing, there are 300 million citizens of the United States. Three million of those are incarcerated in some form of jail or prison, so that means not even all of the convicted are on the list. True some are innocent, but I still do believe most are not. I would think that they should be on the list before a person with no record, but that is just how I think, not the government way thinking.
After that 3 million, I would have to think that at least another 6 million have prior convictions, so they would need to be on the list, and again before the record less people.
At least 250 million have small offenses against society, such as speeding tickets, jaywalking, cohabitation without a government document of approval, hundreds of thousands of other traffic violations, failure to report all pets for tax purposes, not keeping the grass mowed, conducting business without a license (such as washing hair, and not having attended 2 years of beauty school), and some for having a yard sale without the proper license. These people should be next on the list.
Hell now that this list is so full, might as well toss in the remaining 41 million on it, so as not to look as though everything is not on the up and up.
wow. 1 million. That’s 1 million nukuler bombs going off. Don’t want 1 million smoking guns no do we? The only peace you’re going to get is in a jail cell.
This is evidence of the pure hysteria and stupidity surrounding terrorism. If there were a million people willing to blow themselves up or crash a plane for the sake of a political or religious idea, we’d already be well and truly screwed. Fortunately, there are not, so we just have to suffer the indignities attendant to living in a bureaucratic state run by the dumbest assholes we can find because we don’t want them screwing anything else up.
I wonder how many reasonoids and Radley regulars are on the list out of spitel
“The ACLU says the Transportation Security Administration’s terrorist watch list hit one million names sometime over the weekend. ”
This is flat wrong. The TSA doesn’t maintain the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB), the Terrorist Screening Center does. The TSA only maintains the No Fly and Selectee lists, which are much smaller than the overall database. http://www.fbi.gov/terrorinfo/counterrorism/tsc.htm Perhaps to many this is a small issue (hey, it’s all “the government”, right), but it is better to be accurate in.
“It’s hard to see how a list that large could possibly be useful.”
You forget that multiple names can be attached to a single identity. Since English spelling variations are common in Arabic names, and Arabic naming conventions differ from Western ones (Osama Bin Ladin, AKA Usāmah bin Muammad bin`Awa bin Lādin for example) the actual number of individuals on the list is likely an order of magnitude lower than the number of names. If you are running a name check against information from intelligence reporting, it would be tedious and cost prohibitive to check each name seperately without that variant data, and could potentially cause you to inflate the true number of individuals involved.
“According to a recent public chat on the TSA website, nearly seven years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the government is “in the process” of finally developing a way for innocent people to appeal their inclusion on the list. ”
TSA and DHS have had a redress system since at least 2004. I should know, I worked on it. The vast majority of the time a person wrote in demanding to be taken off the list? They weren’t on it in the first place.
eh….spite….
The last time I had to fly someplace, I was told by a turbaned, floridly-bearded and mustachioed TSA ‘agent’ (whose roller-coaster cum jumping-jack Hindi accent marked him as not having been born in this country) telling native-born me that I had been ’selected by the airlines’ for extra screening. On arriving at my Canadian destination, I was grilled for the first time in 20+ years of border crossing by a Canadian Customs official. This after using my brand-spanking new RIFD-laden US Passport.
I can only surmise that it was the result of having written to my local Reps and Senator regarding issues of national security (I’m an Army vet who ‘did his time’ in the 1980’s) and voicing my displeasure at the increasingly intrusive - and ineffectual - security measures being foisted upon the American people in the name of making them more ’secure’.
I have not flown in over 2 years, and don’t know if this was a fluke or not, but the ‘coincidences’ are just a little too unsettling. But I had to have gotten on somebody’s shit list, and I want very much to know whose before I fly again.
Turns out one/millionth of that list was former Ass’t Attorney Gen’l Jim Robinson. An obvious suspect!!! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20080714/terror-watchlist
The ACLU site as a few notables on the watch-list. Hmm. Seems like Senator Ted Kennedy is on the list. Perhaps they are afraid he’d crash a plane into a river and swim away?
Given that they stop anyone who has a name that’s even close to a name on the list, they’re probably affecting about 50 million people.
And now the TSA blog is stating that there is “only” 50K total entries on the no-fly/selectee list.
Right. And if Kip Hawley told me the sun rises in the east I’d check.