No woman, no-fly
In the history of American bureaucracy (imagine how many binders that would fill up!), it's hard to come up with a more confused agency than the Transportation Security Agency. Sure there's been more corrupt organizations (Hoover's FBI) and more inane ones (Bureau of Indian Affairs), but TSA has a tough job; it can't be much fun herding all those annoyed people through metal detectors, patting down sweaty people and inspecting more shoes than a bowling alley employee.
Created right after 9/11 (November 2001), the TSA currently has a 5 billion dollar budget and has bloated faster than Momma Cass after eating that ham sandwich.
The sort of random behavior at the various airports seems odd, but I put that down to working out the bugs in the system linked with Heart-of-Darkness style local backwater leadership. Shoes on, shoes off, belts yes/no? Watches, fondue forks, whatever.
If that's the price that I have to pay to avoid being smeared across a skyscraper, fine. Inconvenience me as long as you're respectful about it. Always say "sir" when you announce an impending cavity search, for instance.
But the biggest problem, as always, comes from secret listmaking. It always comes back to that. The newspapers would have daily travesty stories about stymied fliers, if in fact, the media was covering that kind of story.
The no-fly list is a mess. Surprisingly enough, it's a technology problem. Search just isn't good enough to do what they want. Names are lousy identifiers of individuals unless it's something really distinctive like Deadly McTerrorist.
A story came out a few months ago about a nun, Sister McPhee, who was put on the no-fly list. But not just any nun--Sister McPhee is in charge of all Catholic education in America. She's a boss nun.
After a series of humiliating events at airports and FOIO requests, she found out that an Afghan man had used the name "McPhee", no first name, and was a suspected terrorist. Solely on the strength of that, the good Sister found out that it went down on her Permanent Record.
She had to pull strings to get off the no-fly list. She called Karl Rove.
Good for Sister McPhee. It happened to Senator Kennedy and he also pulled strings. I hope that everyone else that's been messed up by this setup has the ability to do the same thing.
It's a poor system where the ombudsman is the guy running the country.
Posted on November 29, 2005
