Some people still don’t get that maintaining a list of names is an idiotic way to determine terrorist threats and using that list to deny airplane entry is beyond moronic. Especially in the case where an 8-year-old boy isn’t allowed to fly home because he’s on the list of known terrorists.
An 8-year-old boy expecting to catch a plane home is denied entry for appearing on a terrorist no-fly list, reported MyFoxKansasCity.com.
Bryan Moore was set to catch his first plane trip when he arrived at an airport in Cortez, Colorado to fly home after visiting his sister, said the report.
According to the story, the TSA rules specify that children aren’t to be barred when their names appear on the list. Of course, given how poorly known the rules are by TSA employees, that’s small comfort in general and it was clearly worthless in this case. That shouldn’t matter, though, because the number of false positives from this are absurdly beyond any acceptable level of lost time due to error. Senator Kennedy has been denied entry to an airplane because of this list. Catherine Stevens, wife of Senator Ted Stevens, has been denied access to planes because her name is close to that of barred singer Cat Stevens. The accuracy of this list has been covered all over the web-o-tubes (hint: it’s horridly low). The problem with non-unique identifiers as blocking a mechanism has been well-covered by many security experts. Yet instead of implementing smarter security, our government just trims 20% off the list and calls it done.
Poor kid just wanted home.
[tags]8-year-old blocked from travel as a terrorist, Further proof of non-security of names of terrorists, Security , Terrorism, TSA[/tags]