Great news for fear mongers like usenet Republicans.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/ACLU_calls_out_US_over_absurd_0227.html
More that 900,000 people are currently listed as suspected terrorists
on the US government's "do not fly" list, and that number will grow to
beyond 1 million by summer, says the American Civil Liberties Union.
"If there were a million terrorists in this country, our cities would
be in ruins," Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and
Liberty Program, stated in a press release from the group. "The absurd
bloating of the terrorist watch lists is yet another example of how
incompetence by our security apparatus threatens our rights without
offering any real security."
The ACLU has launched a new Web site to track the growth of the watch
list, which it says includes thousands of innocent Americans,
including prominent politicians and authors as well as people with
common names.
The group says its count is "extrapolated from a September 2007 re****t
by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, which re****ted
that the Terrorist Screening Center had over 700,000 names in its
database as of April 2007, and that the list was growing by an average
of over 20,000 records per month." As of Wednesday afternoon, the ACLU
said there were about 917,500 names on the list.
Having such an unwieldy list does little to protect against terrorism,
the ACLU argues, and it violates the constitutional rights of innocent
people on the list who are hassled by air****t security.
"Homeland Security's handling of the watch lists is typical of this
administration's blundering approach to the war on terror," said ACLU
Senior Legislative Counsel Tim Sparapani. "Create sprawling new
systems for sifting through the population, throw an indiscriminately
broad range of names into the mix, fairly or not, and treat the rights
of innocent people as an afterthought."
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