Pondering Minstrel

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

NO-FLY FLIERS

In the past few months, there have been at least a dozen incidents of passengers on the "no-fly" list permitted to fly, according to Time magazine's October 18, 2004 issue. Last week, a Royal Jordanian Airlines flight was allowed to take off from Amman even though they had a passenger on the terror watch list.

The list has become unmanageable. It now contains 20,000 names, including dead people, people in prison and at least 1000 duplicates. 300 more names are added daily, and the list is so large, it has caused airline computer systems to crash.

The seemingly indiscriminate list, which included the names of Senator Kennedy and Cat Stevens, has also stretched law enforcement personnel. Law enforcement personnel have to scramble to respond to each incident.

Secure Flight, a new TSA passenger-prescreening program, begins next month, and the agency hopes it will reduce some of the current "no-fly" list problems.

We'll see what happens to Senator Kennedy first.