...and your little dog, too!

tojo2000 wrote:

...and your little dog, too!

First they went after 85-year old women in wheelchairs, but I said nothing
because I wasn't an 85-year old woman in a wheelchair.

U.S. officials for their first time disclosed that the no-fly list includes fewer than 2,500  individuals and the selectee list fewer than 16,000. Ten percent of those named on the no-fly list and fewer than half on the selectee list are U.S. citizens, Chertoff said.

WTf? Last the spring we were told that the watch list was at >1 million identities.

So does that mean that out of those 1 million there are actually only < 2500 (<.25%) people  that were actually so suspicious as to be no flys along with 16000 (<1.6%) semi-suspicious selecties?

Or does that mean that they were lying all along about the 1 million on the watch list and there are really only so few no-flys and selectees. But that they just flag and yank thousands of innocents as mistakes every month.

The one thing that is clear is to keep 2500 identities  off our planes, as long as they play by Marquess of Queensberry rules and always use their own names, it will only cost us 3 billion dollars.

DHS estimates Secure Flight will cost passengers, the government and the airline industry more than $3 billion over 10 years.

Last edited by Johnny_Rotten (2008-10-25 23:31:40)

Think about it. Now one of the nation's most important transportation systems is set up so that you can't travel unless the government approves your travel application. You submit some personal information and they make a decision whether or not you can fly. It's rules don't require them to be fair or rational. The government can use most whatever data they would like to make the decision. And if you don't like their decision, you can only appeal to the same agency for redress.

Or as Edward Hasbrouck of the Identity Project writes:

Secure Flight is not the watchlist matching program that the government claims: it is a program for enforcing a secret, standardless, nonreviewable administrative “black box” of total control of all air travel within the USA [...]

Instead of their current obligation as common carriers to transport all passengers willing to pay the fare and comply with the general conditions in their published tariff, airlines would be prohibited from transporting anyone except with the express prior per-flight, per-person permisison of the government, in the form of a 'cleared' message.