No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Fly the fiendish skies

The Soviet Union controlled its population (and especially its dissidents) very effectively by requiring every citizen over 16 to carry a propiska or internal passport which specified the person's ethnic group and where they were allowed to live.

Is the US no-fly list a form of back-door propiska? Read this before saying it couldn't happen here.

'I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That'll do it," the man said.'

The speaker is not only an ex-marine but one of the foremost legal authorities in the US and an emeritus professor at Princeton. If this can happen to him, it can certainly happen to a lowly software engineer - I've been on many peace marches and have frequently noticed a rather oppressive presence of Phoenix PD cameramen.

(And what do you mean, "we", paleface? "We ban a lot of people from flying" - the TSA or American Airlines? Since when is exercising one's First Amendment right peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, punishable by internal exile?)

Note also that the no-fly list apparently uses an algorithm called Soundex, which is useful in certain contexts but totally inappropriate here - it confuses Osama bin Laden with Johnny Rotten, and for every genuine terrorist on the list, hundreds of innocent people will be wrongly flagged. Not only is this a huge hassle for the victims of false positives, it drives down the signal to noise ratio and overwhelms intelligence analysts to the point where the system is basically useless.

See also this article which gives an inside look at airport screeners. It's clear that the system is dysfunctional, poorly designed, drastically under-resourced, and does nothing to make anyone safer. It's just window-dressing. Why won't Congress fund the system properly? Because all the money is going into the black hole of George Bush Junior's pet war against Iraq, which apart from anything else is creating a whole generation of terrorists and putting us all in infinitely more danger.

This country is so screwed.