I’m on it. Sometimes it holds me up when I’m flying somewhere. I have also heard from one other “Robert Spencer” who has the same problem. I am, however, willing to put up with a bit of inconvenience in support of anti-terror efforts, as inefficient as they may be in this case. If I were, say, a CAIR official, I would already have sued after some of the airport delays I’ve experienced.
“U.S. terrorism watch list tops 1 million,” by Randall Mikkelsen for Reuters, July 14 (thanks to Stlreader):
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. watch list of terrorism suspects has passed 1 million records, corresponding to about 400,000 people, and a leading civil rights group said on Monday the number was far too high to be effective.
The Bush administration disagreed and called the list one of the most effective tools implemented after the September 11 hijacked plane attacks — when a federal “no-fly” list contained just 16 people considered threats to aviation.
The American Civil Liberties Union publicized the 1 million milestone with a news conference and release.
It said the watch list was an impediment to millions of travelers and called for changes, including tightening criteria for adding names, giving travelers a right to challenge their inclusion and improving procedures for taking wrongly included names off the list.
“America’s new million-record watch list is a perfect symbol for what’s wrong with this administration’s approach to security: it’s unfair, out-of-control, a waste of resources (and) treats the rights of the innocent as an afterthought,” ACLU technology director Barry Steinhardt said in a release….
Steinhardt doesn’t note, of course, that part of this waste of resources can be attributed directly to the inability of law enforcement officials to give special scrutiny to members of groups that are more likely than others to pose an actual terror threat.