We'll all be on the list, sooner or later

It's estimated that the FBI now has upwards of half a million names on its terrorism watch list, which is .16 percent of the entire population of the U.S. This is making the list so large and unwieldy that it's fast becoming effectively useless for screening purposes, due to its high incidence of false positives. Of course, since it's the FBI, they refuse to confirm roughly how many names are on the list, for "security reasons". (How could totaling up the number of names possibly compromise national security? The news organizations only wanted to confirm how many people were on the list, not who they were. I think it's just another case of "We don't have to tell you, or even give you a reason why we won't tell you, because we're the government, nyah nyah".

This story makes it apparent that this supposedly vital piece of national security is just a data dump that is never updated or culled, as some of the names on the list apparently include Saddam Hussein and Zacarias Moussaoui, along with 14 of the 19 September 11 hijackers. I really don't think we have to worry ourselves about those guys anymore. I do think we have to worry about Senator Ted Kennedy, who was somehow placed on the list, but that's a story for another article. Kennedy's example does illustrate, however, how many problems exist with the list, and how innocent people keep getting detained and hassled because of it.

This magic list is all for naught anyway, as we found out last month when an idiot border agent let Andrew Speaker, the selfish lawyer with drug-resistant TB, through a border crossing even after the agent saw that Speaker was on a detention and hold list. "Duh, he didn't look sick to me, so I let him enter". With professionalism like that, why even maintain a terror list, since the border agents don't even bother to enforce the watch lists they already have? The inspector wasn't fired, of course, merely "removed from border duty". This means that we taxpayers are paying for him to screw up somewhere else.

I hope that Congress hauls the FBI director up to Capitol Hill to demonstrate his agency's success rate with the list, in order to justify the continued funding of this muddled mess. Don't hold your breath.