It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.
 | The Terrorist Watch List: Still a Mess After All These Years |
Bush’s no-fly Terrorist Watch List, which bans people from boarding airplanes within the United States and has included such people as Senator Edward Kennedy and Cat Stevens, was blasted in internal government memos during the year 2004 as confused and inconsistent. One security official with the Bush Administration described the list as “subjective”, with “no hard and fast rules”. A federal judge described then Attorney General John Ashcroft’s defense of the list as based on “frivolous” claims.
By the fall of 2007, the Terrorist Watch List had grown to include 860,000 names, and in congressional testimony experts testified that long-identified problems had not been fixed. Innocent people whose names resembled suspects were still being kicked off flights, and actual suspected terrorists were still being let through. Even with years during which the authoritarians in charge of Homeland Security swore they’d get their nosy behavior straightened out, the whole watch list system is not only a big government intrusion, but a messy, slap-dash, inefficient intrusion at that.
(Sources: New York Times, October 9 2004; All Things Considered, November 8 2007)
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