| | >but if you're going to be a rogue negotiator, plan on getting to the airport a few mintues earlier than usual.
So that's his "crime"? Being a "rogue negotiator"? Nobody would tell him.
Protesters have also found themselves on this list. So have aged black grandmas who happen to have similar names to captured young white murderers. Who gets on the watch list and how, and how do you get delisted? As I write in my paper on national ID (send me a note if you want a pdf copy):
Johnnie Thomas, a 70-year-old black woman, suffered catch-22-like travails because "John Thomas Christopher" is an alias of a man who murdered his wife and children (but who was also, not irrelevantly, captured two days after being placed on the FBI’s Ten-Most-Wanted list). After the first incident, "Thomas [was informed] that she was cleared to fly, but that, from now on, each time she checked in US Airways would be required to call the state police, who would call the F.B.I., who would run a check on the date and place of her birth."[i] (Mrs. Thomas, a woman, is some four decades older than the nabbed white male murderer.) In April 2002, almost half of a group of protesters on their way to Washington DC to protest something or other were forced to miss their flight because their names were similar to names on a watch list. One of the passengers was named "Jacob Laden."[ii] There could be lots of trouble for certain people if a radical Islamic terrorist ever decides to go by the name of "John Smith."
[i] Deirdre McNamer, "Here’s Johnnie," The New Yorker, May 13, 2002. Archived at <http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?020513ta_talk_mcnamer>.
[ii] Gena Kittner, "3 USWP students detained at airport," Wausau Daily Herald, April 24, 2002. Archived at <http://www.wausaudailyherald.com/wdhlocal/275083752718269.shtml>.
|
|
