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Terror Watch List Swells to More Than 755,000
rdavison writes "According to a USA Today story, the terror watch list has swollen to 755,000 with 200,000 people per year being added since 2004. Adding about 548 people daily every day of the year does not seem to lend itself to a manual process with careful deliberation given or double checking being done for each person added. It seems to suggests that data is being mined from somewhere to automatically add names to the list."
Its McCarthyism all over again, report your friends, family, and neighbors to the Un-American Activities Committee if you see anything suspicious! And I'm sure this is just as effective as McCarthyism was. We don't have the man power or money to monitor roughly .25% of the population. At $750 per month for a wiretap thats $566 million per month if we were to wiretap all these people.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
If there are 755,000 terrorists in the USA, we're already dead.
What do you want to bet the false positive rate on that is? 99%? That's still 7,000. 99.9%? That still seems a bit high.
If your false positive rate is that high, then why even have a list at all?
"Wow, Ed got 20 this week, I gotta get more to stay in the game and get the promotion."
Yep.
One of the primary criteria of terrorist success is to "succeed in spreading fear into the population". By that criteria the terrorists have clearly won against our governments on every single count.
There is still some hope that they have not won against the general population in at least some parts of the country. There are still some John Smeatons around to "kick em in the bawls".
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Terrorist watch lists punish people without trial. They are deeply unAmerican and are a direct violation of your right to due process. It is time to end this madness and call those who support it what they are, traitors.
These proscriptions deprive people of their liberty and property. Those on the lists are unable to use air transport, may be discriminated against when they seek employment and are harassed generally when they conduct business. In short, they are treated as a kind of felon. Needless to say, there's no jury involved before the conviction of "terrorist" is applied.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Two extreme ways:
Be like the Dalai Lama or Ghandi and offer no violence and still hold up our heads high and work on why we're causing those people so much suffering and as a result of our peaceful and loving actions, gain the moral high ground and allies Worldwide and of ALL faiths because of it.
Extermination - like the NAZIs.
One of those extremes is the only way to beat the terrorists.
I prefer the first option myself.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Do we get the significance of that? The list is of names, not individuals. Remember Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy's little problem with the list?. Or how about this vicious 4 year old terrorist?
God help you if your name is John Smith, but it's probably even worse if your name is Mohammed or a variant of it. Oh, wait a second; most Islamic men's legal birth name is Mohammed.
If you want to fly without hinderance, you should probably just go ahead and change your legal name to your social security number, as it's the only way you're likely to get a unique one.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You appear to have missed the gist of the GP's argument, which was that the effort and resources being spent on fighting terrorism (often in ways which, as you point out, are likely to be ineffective) significantly outweigh those being spent on societal problems such as heart disease that actually have a greater impact in terms of number of people directly affected.
Personally, I can't help but view terrorist incidents as being like tantrums thrown by an attention-hungry toddler. It rarely achieves anything in terms of actually affecting how the majority of people live their lives*, but it certainly concentrates the public's attention.
* Of course, this doesn't take into account the way anti-terrorist schemes cause problems for large numbers of people who simply want to fly somewhere (for example). But if you're going to argue that that is part of the terrorists' objectives, then the government is complicit, surely?
Your impression of what demographic suicide bombers come from is mistaken. They tend to be family people, and an increasing amount are from financially stable families (just look at the squarely middle-class bombers in London). Many of those carrying out attacks in Iraq are foreigners who haven't lost anything and have plenty of life, they just decided to take advantage of the chaotic political situation there to effect political goals.
This TWL and the various hues of Terror Alert (today it is brilliant opalescent blue alert level!) are activities done by the Government to show that it is doing something. The logic behind it is not much deeper than, "We need to do something, this is something, so we are doing it."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The question isn't whether terrorists are bad, or whether we should try to protect ourselves from terrorists, because obviously they are and we should. But are all of the current preventative measures really effective? Or necessary? One could argue that the fact that there has not been another attack using aircraft is an indication that they are. Or one could say that no stone should remain unturned in the quest to keep people safe.
But the situation is not black and white. Every security measure has a price which can be measured in money, time, effort, convenience, and freedom. The hard part is to find the right balance. Many of us feel that the current measures are more symbolic than effective. If everyone has to sacrifice, to feel some of the daily pain, then won't we all feel safer?
I don't think that putting my toothpaste in a clear plastic bag before I get on an airplane makes my trip any safer. I don't understand why requiring the government to go before a judge before they can listen to my telephone conversations makes me less safe. How does flying suspects to other countries where more effective means of interrogation are permitted (and also signaling to our enemies that those methods acceptable in our society) really helping on the long run?
Yes, terrorists are bad people. But that doesn't mean that we should take unreasonable stepes to combat them.
After all, the goal of terrorism is to make people so afraid that they change their behavior. That's why it is called terror ism. And when you look at all of the things that the government is doing to try to stop them, it certainly looks like the terrorists are meeting their objectives.
One of the primary criteria of terrorist success is to "succeed in spreading fear into the population". By that criteria the terrorists have clearly won against our governments on every single count.
By that criteria, it is the governments that are the terrorists.
Really? You think the red scare is what mediated this effect?
Same really with the no-fly lists. Before the no-fly lists four aircraft where hijacked, and afterwards?</blockquote>
I thought this was Slashdot, not the convention for the retarded. You got an "Insightful" rating for this garbage?
COINCIDENCE != CAUSALITY
Given the data you presented, there is no way to logically come to your conclusion! Furthermore, even if I assume just as a matter of a thought experiment, that you're correct, and the no-fly lists did prevent at least one terrorist attack, it still doesn't make them any better at all, because while the relative risk reduction may have been 100%, the absolute risk reduction would be like 0.0001%... and I am simply not willing to sacrifice much of my freedom, and a colossal amount of my money, for a tiny benefit like that.
Simply put, the cost-to-benefit ratio of these measures is totally unacceptable.
"......these people aren't going to be won over no matter how hard you try......" You can do nothing about this people above what you have to handle criminals. There will always be crime and there will always be groups of people who decide that terrorism/violence is a tactic that is useful.
How you hinder/cripple the terrorist is by removing the sympathy he needs to operate in. SO in the North of Irerland, kicking down the doors of ordinary innocent people houses led to MORE support of the terrorist - " Hey Mick, could you mind this _bag of tools_ for a week for me - wink wink" - OK Paddy, no problem.
However, if Mick had not had his door kicked in he would probably tell Paddy to fuck off, he might not call the police, but he would no co-operate so easily.
and this is how terrorists grow successful, they need rich soil of disaffected people who have been touched in bad ways by the supposed good guys. DO we believe that there is any Iraqi who has ANY ties to Fallujah will say no when Ahmed asks to store a "bag of tools" for a week?
So is we remove this "soil" of support, then the terrorist has no nore teeth than the ordinary criminal, the core of the terror movement remains small, the core has difficulty moving and acting wothout being reported by good happy citizens.
When you fuck off the entire population of Arab Muslins by kicking in doors, bulldozing houses, supporting your own forms of terror and lawlessness, then you will never lose perhaps, but you will never eradicate the terrorist, because too many people have empathy for the terrorist.
First let's sing that old familiar song-- "Causation != Correlation. La la la la na na."
There were 4 planes hijacked before the no-fly list. Now there's none. If you cancel the no-fly list, and a plane gets hijacked, what'll you tell people?
There were 4 planes hijacked before the Obama ran for president. Now there's none. If you don't elect Obama, and a plane gets hijacked, what'll you tell people?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
You know how there is a crisis in the copyright system because our successful and longstanding system of copyright laws is based on the assumption that copying is too hard for casual infringement?
Well there is another crisis going on that hasn't got nearly the same attention: The laws that protect our fundamental liberties are based on the assumption that suspicion is too hard to sustain for it to be used casually.
Generally speaking, placing somebody under suspicion and investigating that person is not considered a deprivation of liberty. In fact you can't have a functioning criminal legal system without suspicion and investigation, and generally the question of reasonableness isn't applied to the manner under which somebody falls under suspicion, but the manner in which the investigation is undertaken.
Suspicion and surveillance are not considered tantamount to punishment, because they are assumed to be temporary conditions. It's expensive (so the argument goes) to focus suspicion on somebody; if the suspicion is not productive, then the government surely must move its attention elsewhere, for it must have bigger fish to fry.
But what if there is a machine to the suspecting for the government? Furthermore, suppose the main expense is acquiring and maintaining the machine, and the marginal cost of adding more human grist to the mill is zero? Misplaced suspicion is no longer an inconvenience that one must bear occasionally as part of achieving a lower crime rate. It is quite feasible to make suspicion and detailed scrutiny a permament feature of someone's life. Furthermore, this can be done at no additional cost to the government, and it will surely catch at least a few additional miscreants. The entire system can operate without human effort, except to do things like additional pat downs at the airport. Many of those things are simply utilizing slack resources.
In the case of copyright, the government has given tools to private parties like the RIAA that, funded by deep pockets, can enforce and extend their economic interests. Where are the corresponding legal tools for the individual permamently and unjustly accused?
Society is divided into two groups: those who think technology is like magic, and those who understand how technology works. Of those who understand technology, some have a financial interest in technology being used more; some are simply so manifestly paranoid they have no credibility; and many, many more treat thinking about these issues as a boring waste of time. Unfortunately, big changes are coming, and in this case the paranoid people are right: they're the only one who have even considered that the changes that are coming might not be what we want.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
They may well leave themselves behind. Think about how long the holy land has been fought over. It has to be holy by now, what with all the blood thats soaked into it over the millenia. They aren't going to walk away that easy.
In fact I doubt that fundamentalists will want to go anywhere. It might well be that the first interstellar colonists aren't leaving the nutbars with imaginary friends behind (sorry, I meant 'culturally diverse people with deeply held beliefs'..), instead they might be running from them.
> Same really with the no-fly lists. Before the no-fly lists four aircraft where hijacked, and afterwards?
Actually, if you really want to argue this:
Before 2001, there were 0, repeat, 0 domestic hijackings within the United States for the previous 10 years. That is with none of these no-fly lists, nor the loss of liberties.
So, your arguement is useless as it goes on a false assumption. I would note that out of the 19 hijackers that day, most of them were already on a suspect list, and that's without "no fly" lists, warrantless wiretaps, and the like. It could be said that our overzealotness in making lists has actually increased a potential hijackers ability to "slip through" as now there's so much "noise" in the system.
The previous administration had recieved 36 terror convictions. The current? 1. Yes, read that number, 1. Our "new laws" have managed to actually decrease the number of convictions of terrorists. So, you really want to continue this arguement, or re-evaluate?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
9-11 wasn't a wake-up call for the administration. It was an excuse.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There is oversight and regulations of even a completely private thing like an individual's credit history. Banks can not simply claim: "we don't like this guy" — there are laws regulating, what records can be kept, and procedures allowing people to dispute inaccuracies.
The "terror list", which, allegedly, is used to not simply cause extra scrutiny, but to also deny boarding sometimes, is maintained by the (Executive) government and is in sore need of similar regulations. As a minimum, one must be able to inquire, whether he or she are on the list and to challenge the placing both in administrative proceedings or in courts.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And how would you describe a person with his mind set on spreading fear to achive political power? A terrorist.
Thats it. Any logical person should be aware that a "fear monger" is a terrorist who uses fear and threat of violence to shape public opinion.
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
The airlines are going to be pissed.
Why? They'll still charge you for a ticket, even if they don't let you on the plane. Refund? Sorry we don't refund to "terrorists"...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
or something to that effect...
Next time when I see yet another story on how China limits the freedoms of its citizens I shall be sure to point out this story.
fuck karma, I like saying the truth better
Islamist terrorists don't nobly meet the opposing force on the field of battle and seek liberty like Washington's generation did.
That's only because technology has changed, and they don't have the firepower to do it. Of course they won't take a modern army head on, they'd be killed immediately. Guerrilla warfare is the only way a force with inferior firepower can hope to do damage. And guess what - it's pretty effective. Ask the Soviets. Ask the Colombians. Ask the Nicaraguans.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This is what passes as insightful nowadays? Feh!
I don't know if any reputable historians would agree with your implied premise that there was an actual, credible "communist" threat to the United States at any point in the past. If the threat never existed in the first place, it is kind of hard to disprove that drinking milk every day wasn't have an equivalent (or superior) deterrence against communism.
Assuming of course that there is an actual, credible terrorist threat...
I think a sense of proportionality is required here: there are thousands of aircraft flights in the United States every day. Over the past 10 years, exactly four flights were hijacked. On any given day in recent history, more people are killed by impaired drivers in the United States than are killed by terrorists.
And yet, some people applaud insulting and ineffectual security measures because it give the appearance that the government is doing something to protect them.
Sorry to break it to you dude, but terrorists are criminals, and the way to catch criminals is with boring, methodical police work. It's not glamorous, but it is effective. I (for one) find it hard to believe that making everyone remove their shoes at the airport has saved so much as a single life. At best, it might have given a woody to someone with a foot fetish, but that's about all that has been accomplished...
I really feel sorry that there are people out there who are so afraid that bogus security theater makes them feel safer. I hope that some day, they will realize that effective national security policies are not based on lame Hollywood movie plots.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
And when you compound the situation by supporting an aggressive rogue state in the heart of the Middle East, allowing that state carte blanche to oppress and murder civilians in territories that are illegally occupied some 40 years after a war of aggression started by that rogue state, is it any wonder that the Arab (and non-Arab) Muslim world sees you as evil?
Get out of Iraq, then sort out Israel and force them to behave like a civilised nation, and let's see if support for anti-Western ideologies collapses in the region.
I think it might...
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
That's true enough. If you consider terrorism and disease both as causes of suffering and premature death in the population, then our response in the US to 9/11 is disproportionate. With just heart disease and cancer, the US suffers a 9/11 every day of the year.
I think "symbiotic" better describes that relationship.
I am not a crackpot.
Not to be mean, but one flaw with a whitelist...
Joe terrorist knows about the whitelist, applies to get on it, verifies that he is on it (i.e. visit previous parking garage, and sees if he is inspected) and when he gets on it, smuggles in a bomb to a secure target, using his security "pass."
Yeah, I can stand being screened to avoid this, but I also agree with your point that it is getting out of hand someplaces.
like "Edward Kennedy?"
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
From the point of view of Homeland Security, they're much more likely to be successful at stopping terrorist attacks than they would be at curing heart disease. You're right that their measure of success is bizarre, but under that measure, what they're doing is working.
Um, what?
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TRAVEL/10/18/airport.screeners
People weren't supposed to live there. Anything that convinces people to avoid DC is a good thing IMO. Especially if the people in question are members of a legislative body...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
By that criteria, the government is the terrorists.
It most definitely isn't working against them. Rather the opposite.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
So it got us thinking...Why can't we have some sort of "pre-authorization" that shows that we are law-abiding citizens who pose no threat?"
Wow...as a people we are REALLY starting to think wrongly. As a US citizen, you could be assumed to be a "good citizen" and pose no threat unless your actions indicate otherwise. This falls in line with innocent until proven guilty. You should have to prove NOTHING unless you are arrested for a crime. My bad..if you are arrested...it is upt to the govt. to prove you did something, the burden is upon them, not you.
Man, this is scary thinking you're showing here my friend.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You mean Bushie's fictional war on terror that is a figment of his sociopathic metal state? Or how his cronies keep perpetuating his mental illness?
The fallacy of the War on Terror - http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1212-13.htm
Time will solve it. Time and consistently doing the right thing.
The rage they feel is their own feeling and you can not change another person. They have to come to the realization that you are not so bad after all. Besides , most of these strong feelings will die down when they get a bit older.
As said in another post; I believe it would be best to follow the Gandhi way. Turn the other cheek. Try to make the cause of their anger go away instead of retaliating without measure - especially if you start retaliating to the wrong people.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
When I was on a flight at the end of August, I had a short layover. I had one lighter in my carry-on and one in my checked baggage. The one in my baggage was empty, the one in my pocket was full. I was allowed on the first flight, no problems. While I was on layover, I aws pulled aside and made to rip apart my two bags to take the lighters out and, because I wanted to keep them, find an envelope and stamps to mail them to myself. Both lighters were Zippos. It was explained to me that I would have been permitted to carry a disposable plastic lighter on with me but not these. I was completely boggled that I could carry a small container of compressed, flamable gas onto the plane but not a non-compressed, though still flamable liquid. And perhaps even more so that I was able to just drop them into an envelope with several stamps attached and get them back several days later. It's apparently too dangerous to allow a service member, showing ID only a small plane with a metal lighter than it is to drop that same lighter anonymously into a mail box and have postal workers carry it around?
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
Position is that I fail to see a significant moral difference between crashing a plane of passengers and handing out sanctions that only serve to starve the poor, young, old, and sick except that one takes a few thousand lives and the other may be counted in the millions.
Perhaps instead of focusing on the belief that "they are evil, plain and simple and must be extinguished" and forming our (very expensive) policies around this extremely simplistic view we should be asking ourselves "why do so many people want us dead so badly?". This is not to suggest that the blame lies on the victims of terrorism, but perhaps a change in our destructive, aggressive, and state sanctioned terrorism of 3rd world nations might wittle down the shear numbers of people who view us as evil.
For example, infant mortality has increased six-fold since 1990 in Iraq and 32% of children under 5 are malnourished. facts & myths (with citations). Impacts on Iraq population since 1990 have been devastating.
There's no doubt Saddam was a classic "mad dictator", but only in his wildest dreams could he have effected the level of destruction seen over the past 17 years. Further, despite our beliefs that Iraq was a backwards nation full of dolts the population used be quite educated by global standards with literacy rates reaching the upper 80 percent. A good portion of the pop is quite aware of the US's (Rumsfield and the first Bush administration's) contribution to Saddams domination by supplying the tools needed to carry out his attacks against certain sections of the population and Iran.
I am not defending the actions of terrorists in any way, but we're making it pretty damned easy for various groups to attract new recruits.
Sure. I don't disagree at all. The road block though, is the folks who can't stand that we're (The USA) is being attacked. And, I personally know a few folks like this, we have to deal with the folks who firmly believe that the terrorists are this group of folks who are guided by an ideology that's beyond reason. The person I'm thinking of equates the Islamic Terrorists with the Japanese who refused to surrender. I found it quite enlightening that, even after dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, the "war council" (of WWII Japan) was STILL divided about surrendering to the US. They would have rather died than surrender - even if that included every last man and child on the Japanese Island. There are folks in the US who think that ALL Muslims have this ideology.
A book that I found to have a fresh interpretation of all of this is ThePower of a Positive NO
The Arab people are REALLY pissed off and some of them are soooo pissed off, they want die and take everyone else out with them. Add in religion (Islam) and you get a VERY powerful force. What I mean by "add in Islam", I'm sure you've seen the interview with some tribesman somewhere who's went fight in Iraq (or wherever) to help his "Muslim Brother".
That's how to beat the terrorists: refuse to be terrorized.,p/>Amen to that! But tell that to the folks who are saying "I need to protect my children!" Even thought the odds are that their children will die in an auto accident while their parents are driving. Or that their children will die because of all the fast food their parents feed them. You know what I'm talking about: folks do not understand risk and where it's coming from.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
http://www.papersplease.org/gilmore/
There's not "no right to transport." There's a dent in the constitutional protection of the right to travel predicated on the availability of alternative means of travel.
the gist of the opinion of the court is that because there are alternate means of travel, you can choose one of those rather than submit to searches and id checks.
Gilmore mentioned in his complaint having heard that similar measures were put in place for train travel, but these were rejected as hearsay. i guess he ought to have tried to travel by train and sued the TSA and both Amtrak and the airline. He didn't. Anyways, even if he had, it seems fairly clear that the court would have ignored reason yet again.
basically it's a cop-out and yet another instance of the courts turning a blind eye to the government's depredations.
feh!
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
While I also don't entire agree with Ron Paul's positions, I think he could do a lot to counterbalance a system that has swung WAY too far in the other direction.
After all, even were he President, no way in hell is he going to get all of his own agenda -- there will be many compromises and many battles he can't win. But if he wins a few important ones, I think we'll all be better off. And given what Congress is like, there is absolutely NO danger of going TOO far in Ron Paul's political direction, if for no other reason than that there are too many entrenched special interests.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Symbiotic is clearly proven by the publicly available evidence.
There is suggestive evidence that indicates that complicit and accessory before the fact are also reasonable things to believe, but it's only suggestive, not convincing.
OTOH, if I were to compare the probability of a politician chosen at random vs. a citizen (or and arab, for that matter) chosen at random, I'd bet that the politician was the more guilty, and the more directly involved. The evidence doesn't come close to "beyond a reasonable doubt", but it's definitely suggestive. It also doesn't follow party lines, exactly, though more of the evidence indicates Republican involvement, that may just be because of who was in control of the executive branch at the time (which might, or might not, be chance).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Borodin: Do you think they will let me live in Montana?
Capt. Ramius: I would think they'll let you live wherever you want.
Borodin: Good. Then I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman, and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pick-up truck, or umm... possibly even...a recreational vehicle, and drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?
Capt. Ramius: Oh yes.
Borodin: No papers?
Capt. Ramius: No papers. State-to-state.
The state knows that "everybody is guilty of something" - so they just put everybody on a "Watch List".
It doesn't matter that the "Watch List" is useless as an actual "Watch List". It's useful because at any time, for any reason, that some state official wants to mess with you, they can say, "You're on the Watch List."
It's a control mechanism. It has absolutely nothing to do with "terrorism", just like the TSA and the rest of the pointless measures they take will never, ever have any impact whatsoever on real, live terrorists whose job it is and whose training it is to get around such measures in the first place.
Nothing the US has done since 9/11 would necessarily prevent another 9/11 - even assuming terrorists are interested in doing another 9/11. There are probably a lot of reasons an identical 9/11 hasn't occurred - reasons having nothing to do with the security measures put in place since the first one, but more to do with issues of organization, target selection, finances, redirected emphasis on other priorities, or simple disinterest. Even simple competence at pulling one off in the first place - maybe they got lucky with the first one - or more sinisterly, maybe they had help they weren't aware of to allow them to pull off the first one.
By definition, as Rutger Hauer's character said in the movie "Nighthawks", "Remember, there is no security."
Dick Marcinko used to say the same thing with regard to his Red Cell SEAL Team exercises. He pointed out that security organizations operate by checklists. They run down a checklist making sure everything is secure. He said that terrorists don't operate by checklists. They hit targets of opportunity. So his Team would just wait until the security organization went through the motions - then bypassed whatever security they thought they had and made their hit anyway using methods that either hadn't been considered in the first place or which stressed and actually made use of the security measures in place to bypass the security.
Example: an alarm system. Throw rocks at it until the numerous false alarms make the security people turn it off for repair. The very security system you're using is used to bypass it.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't have security systems. It just means you have to remember that they're only there to "keep out the riffraff." As long as your only enemies are "riffraff", they might work.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!