Terrorist Watch List Hits One Million Names
July 16th, 2008Via: ACLU:
The nation’s terrorist watch list has hit one million names, according to a tally maintained by the American Civil Liberties Union based upon the government’s own reported numbers for the size of the list.
“Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ‘suspicious characters,’ with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon.”
Fredrickson and Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program, spoke today along with two victims of the watch list: Jim Robinson, former assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division who flies frequently and is often delayed for hours despite possessing a governmental security clearance and Akif Rahman, an American citizen who has been detained and interrogated extensively at the U.S.-Canada border when traveling for business.
“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, treats the rights of the innocent as an afterthought, and is a very real impediment in the lives of millions of travelers in this country,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program. “It must be fixed without delay.”
“Putting a million names on a watch list is a guarantee that the list will do more harm than good by interfering with the travel of innocent people and wasting huge amounts of our limited security resources on bureaucratic wheel-spinning,” said Steinhardt. “I doubt this thing would even be effective at catching a real terrorist.”
Research Credit: Pookie
Yesterday on CNN, the reporter Drew Griffin was talking with the anchor Anderson Cooper about how the TSA put him on the watch list three weeks after he started researching this story. They say it is some other terrorist sharing his name but won’t remove it from the list.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/14/air.marshal.investigation/
Don’t want to get cryptogon into any [more] trouble — or myself for that matter — but I have to say, I’d love it if someone hacked into their computer and got the list, and published it on the net. For so many reasons.
Hopefully, Larry Glick will appear at the Top of the List!
Semi-amusing sketch comedy on the subject: http://www.betterbadnews.com/2008/06/14/berkeley-kid-puts-big-brother-on-terror-watch-list/
These folks don’t care about fixing the list. To get your name off of the list – what do you do – contact a lawyer?
Well good luck. Feeling so lawer-ly this evening. Does anyone out there know whether there is a law or federal regulation that defines why or how one gets on this list? There is NO LAW that I know of that defines who gets on this list. So it appears a persons name appears on this list against a capricious criterion instuted by whom, Herr Bush? or Herr what’s his skinny self who starves himself so he looks like he’s been at Aushwitz instead of the reality of him running marathons across the globe and practicing eat and purge aneroxic disorder techniques? Hmm? Oh yeah, I just re-remembered his name, Chertoff.
Hey, Chertoff, oh you of the former concentration camp era where we branded numbers on human bodies, if there is no law, no code of federal regulation (CFR) this is just another bogus bullshit hitleresque stalinesque tap dance party that will in the end, only benefit lawyers who, after studying case history and legal precedent will find there is none.
Thus this list is illegal.
Unconstitutional.
Not that the last two prior lines mean anything anymore when the whole agenda is SECURITY. TERRORISM. FUNDING SECURITY. FUNDING ANTITERRORISM.
Anyone find Chertoff’s financial disclosure statement on the web?
Any conflicts of financial interest? Ethics violations? Who does he claim on his statements as his master?
Duh.
No, the real way to fix them is to get SO MANY NAMES added to the list that they listocrats become paralyzed by the enormity of their own list. Imagine not hundreds of thousands of names but MILLIONS!