AAFrequentFlyer

CafeBatavia,

Tell that to the 2 middle aged ladies. The problem I have with your believes is that as a good citizens and a believers in free society, we can't afford to wait till thousand, millions discover the abuses. My belief and apparently many from the past and present (see quotes above) is that we need to stop abuses early, beacuse later may just be too late.

ira

Dick writes,

>IT is the expansion that concerns many of us.<

Do you mean that a secret list of "bad guys" is OK as long as people you agree with aren't on it?

How do we know that those "peace activists" aren't current or former members of the Weather Underground?

We aren't told if they are still on the list?

If they are on a secret list, how did they get the tickets to begin with?

111 writes
>Didn't the purported "terrorists" turn out to be a baby and an old Chinese woman?<

Surely you wouldn't be happier if there had been terrorists and we didn't know it.

Is traveling by air without being delayed an "essential liberty"?

AAFrequentFlyer

Come on Fodors, how about editing feature <b>after</b> we post

Anyway, here is a second try:

Tell that to the 2 middle aged ladies. The problem I have with your beliefs is that as good citizens and believers in free society, we can't afford to wait till thousands, millions discover the abuses. My belief and apparently the belief of many from the past and present (see quotes above) is that we need to stop abuses early, because later may just be too late.

111op

Well, ira, you're missing my point. My point is that these people are really not doing their job well. That's my charitable interpretation.

The fear, of course, is that someone will use the expanded rules as an excuse to monitor people. That's my cynincal interpretation.

The fact is -- can anyone prove that we're now safer because of all these increased measures? If people can't do something as basic as match a name in a a passport with a name on a boarding card, I've some serious doubts as to whether we can truly safe.

P_M

This concerns me very much because the last time I came through US customs in January, the customs agent kept looking at me very suspiciously. He finally asked for my SS#. I gave it to him, and he then told me there's an international drug smuggler with my same name and she is exactly one day older than me!! I suppose this is better than being a terrorist, but I am now concerned about having trouble the next time I board a plane to travel overseas.

I am not a liberal as Wayne described, but I am very shocked that anyone can wish death on someone with an opposing view. That's the worst thing I have ever read on these boards, and I am completely disgusted by that statement.

Clifton

You know, you do have to figure there has to be a reason the two women are on the list. Different names, unrelated(?), but travel together and are somehow both on this list.

Barring dual bizarre data entry errors, there really are only two possibilities. One, they really are part of a dangerous organization (would you go to public if you matched that description?) Or two, that they are jointly entered onto this list for another activity. The questions are, really, if it's the first option, why were they able to walk away from the airport? For heavens sake, might they go and do some major damage in SF??

If it's the second possibility and they aren't actually dangerous, then are you willing to accept that safety issues aren't the only reason that this list exists?

Dick

IRa...

&lt;Do you mean that a secret list of &quot;bad guys&quot; is OK as long as people you agree with aren't on it?&gt;

Of course not....but there should be some discussion on what gets you on the list...and how to get off. The way it is now..someone can be on the list in error.

Let's face it...our intelligence said there were WMD in Iraq. THat certainly required a higher level of proof than to keep someone off a plane. Mistakes will happen.

&lt;How do we know that those &quot;peace activists&quot; aren't current or former members of the Weather Underground?&gt;

We don't...but since you brought it up.. What if they were a member of the Weather Underground ( or some other group) in the 60's while they were in college? Most &quot;radicals&quot; that I knew from the 60's outgrew their rebellious nature.

J. Edgar Hoover had plenty of peopll on his lists..including Martin Luther King.

jody

I wonder if any af the above truly READ the article.

The scary part is they are being denied a REASON for being on the list.

&lt;&lt;In Gordon and Adams? case, the ACLU believes the couple may have been targeted for their work on War Times, a free bilingual newspaper that has been critical of the war and the Bush administration's policies on terrorism.

It?s very scary that two people who pose no danger, who are publishing something, which last time I looked we were allowed to do, are being detained at the airport and having the police called and they won't tell us why,&quot; Adams said. &gt;&gt;

The last time I looked we supposedly had the freedom to protest!

chardonnay

First the no fly list, then this:

http://users.chartertn.net/tonytemplin/FBI_eyes/

Gardyloo

Watch lists and secret government snooping are certainly nothing new; many of us well remember the US Attorney General's list of hundreds of organizations, some of them dating from the Spanish Civil War (okay to volunteer for Franco, not for the other side) that you had to sign before you could apply for jobs or security clearances or unemployment or lots of other things.

My take on the current situation, however, is that we now have an unprecedented situation, namely the convergence of intent to snoop and monitor, coupled with virtually unlimited capacity to do so. Yes, Jedgar and Nixon had their &quot;enemies&quot; lists; what they didn't have was Carnivore software (or its children, more and more bug-free) and terabytes of storage, processing power, and thousands of well-educated, well-paid, and mission-driven analysts trying to outsmart terrorists or others whose points of view may be deemed dangerous to society. How many other secret lists are out there? Well, how great is the capacity to gather information without our knowledge and consent? And not just by the government: do you erase your cookies every night? Every 20 minutes? How about the hidden browser logs concealed deep within your C drive?

Unfortunately, along with this power comes near-infinite capacity to screw things up. Terabytes of data have room for gigabytes of goofs, including people getting matched to wrong names, badly updated files, you name it. Infinite monkeys on infinite mainframes. Government-hired monkeys, or, worse, low-bidder monkeys.

Paranoia? Ya think? Get over it. The whole world is watching.

ira

The ACLU must have been following this thread:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...no_fly_lawsuit

BTilke

This is the CNN story:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/04/06/no...uit/index.html

Interesting that one of the people mistakenly put on the no fly list was an Air Force master sergeant. The matter was supposed to have been cleared up, but she still has problems.