Tens of Thousands Mistakenly on Watchlists
[Important update below]
Nearly 30,000 airline passengers discovered in the past year that they were mistakenly placed on federal “terrorist” watch lists, a transportation security official said Tuesday.
Jim Kennedy, director of the Transportation Security Administration’s redress office, revealed the errors at a quarterly meeting convened here by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee.
From the New York Times, “Tens of thousands mistakenly put on terrorist watch lists.”
[Update: It seems that the headline is substantially misleading. First, the article is about people being added to the “cleared list,” which is a third list (after “no-fly” and “selectee”) thats designed to make it easier to get through the process of being allowed to board after you’re flagged. No one has been removed from any lists. No one has said there are any incorrect names on the list, only incorrect matches. One name can lead to a great many incorrect matches. (Paging David Nelson.) Finally, the opening half of the first sentence is entirely wrong. No one discovered that they were on a watchlist last year. These people have all known that they were mistakenly on a list for four years. What’s new is that, after three years, the TSA has started to do something about their complaints.
Update 2: The Times picked up the story from CNET, whose link is probably archival quality.]
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