The No Fly List

60 Minutes is doing an exposé on the "no fly list" of supposed "terrorists":

(CBS) 60 Minutes has obtained the secret list used to screen airline passengers for terrorists and discovered it includes names of people not likely to cause terror, including the president of Bolivia, people who are dead and names so common, they are shared by thousands of innocent fliers.

…Even if the list is made more accurate, it won't help thousands of innocent travelers who share a common name on the list and who get detained, sometimes for hours, when they attempt to fly.

Gary Smith, John Williams and Robert Johnson are some of those names. Kroft talked to 12 people with the name Robert Johnson, all of whom are detained almost every time they fly. The detentions can include strip searches and long delays in their travels.

"Well, Robert Johnson will never get off the list," says Donna Bucella, who oversaw the creation of the list and has headed up the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center since 2003. She regrets the trouble they experience, but chalks it up to the price of security in the post-9/11 world. "They're going to be inconvenienced every time … because they do have the name of a person who's a known or suspected terrorist," says Bucella.

Just for the fun of it, I did a search for all the Robert Johnsons in New Jersey in the on-line telephone book maintained at Switchboard.com. There were 169 in New Jersey alone, and that doesn't count those who are listed only as R. Johnson or who have unlisted numbers. I'm guessing there are dozens of these as well. Projecting that to the nation as a whole on the basis of relative population, I guesstimate that there are over 5,000 Robert Johnsons across the country, all of whom are detained every time they fly.

Now, there is something terribly sick about punishing 5,000 people repeatedly when they are completely innocent of any crime (or even suspicion of crime) just to stop one guy who almost certainly isn't going to fly under that name if he truly is a terrorist. Based on that kind of logic, why not just lock us all up -- 100% of the population? Then, there would be no more terrorists outside of jail.

Heaven only knows how many thousands of others are improperly detained because of this awful list. If they can't narrow the list down by more than just name, they should throw it out altogether.

All I can say is that I certainly am glad I have a highly unusual name. If they put me on the list, it's going to be because they actually really want ME on the list, because there just aren't any other people who share my name.