Patrick M Brennan

Thank goodness I don’t need to travel for business any more. A few weeks ago, I had to attend a family function, and there wasn’t any other way to get there except to fly. I don’t often fly, because I don’t do a lot of traveling, and when I do travel, I usually investigate all the other options before I’ll settle for flying. Flying is just too much of a hassle for me. But, sometimes, as in this case, there was no choice.

So just imagine the scene: I had my e-ticket, and I walked up to the electronic kiosk to retrieve my boarding pass. They’re not optional anymore, by the way; the airlines will not let you talk to a human unless there’s a reason you can’t use the kiosk. And, as it turns out, I couldn’t. The kiosk told me it wouldn’t issue a boarding pass, and I had to speak with a person. So I queued up to talk to a service rep. (Typical airline stupidity, I thought. After making me wait in line to use the kiosk so I wouldn’t waste their valuable time talking to a service rep, here I was waiting to talk a service rep, and the whole transaction ends up taking twice as long.) When it was my turn, I walked up to the desk and gave the rep my credit card and my e-ticket. She punched something up on her terminal, and I saw a look cross her face, and I wondered, is this what I think it is? And then I thought, Nah! You’re being paranoid! And then she picked up a phone and spoke into it in hushed tones, and I said, “is something wrong?” And she looked back at me and she said, “No, sir. Nothing wrong.” (Sure there isn’t! I whisper over the phone all the time here! It’s part of the job!) Then she said, “I’m just calling for a supervisor.”

By now I was starting to get a little nervous. The supervisor came over, and he peered at her screen, and he looked at me, and he furrowed his brow, and he asked me for some photo ID, which I gave him. I asked, “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

“Well sir,” he said, quickly looking around to see if anyone else was listening, “it looks like you’re on one of the no-fly lists.”

Ummm…. WHAT?

I started to get a little frightened, because I have no idea what this is going to mean. Am I going to be searched? Am I going to be arrested? Am I going to be forbidden to fly? And after all, I mean, look at me. Even to the untrained eye, it should be immediately clear that I pose no conceivable security threat to the United States, or indeed to anyone. “OK … How did I get on a No-Fly list?”

“We don’t know, sir ; they don’t tell us.”

He then asked me what my middle name was, and I told him, and he thought about it for a few moments as he looked at the screen. Then he punched a few keys, handed back my credit card and my ID, printed up a boarding pass, and handed that to me. “You’re all set,” he told me. “We can’t print you a boarding pass for your return flight, though. You’re going to have to get that at the airport on the way back.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What happens now? I mean, I’m on a no-fly list, right? So how do I get off that list?”

“We don’t have anything to do with it,” he told me. “You’re gonna have to talk to one of the TSA people at the security station.”

I thought about asking why, if I’m on a no-fly list, I’d just been handed a boarding pass, but you know, I really did need to fly that day, and I didn’t want to give them any opportunity to take that pass away.

Anyway, I got to my gate in plenty of time. (The airport is one place where I’m always early.) I was not scrutinized more closely than usual. I wasn’t searched or questioned. I didn’t even have to take my shoes off. I did seek out a TSA person to ask how I should remove myself from a no-fly list.

She had no idea, but she did ask a bunch of other people, including her supervisor, and ultimately, she told me to phone Homeland Security when I got home. They didn’t have the phone number. She just shrugged.

When I finally got to my hotel, I had a little time to do some research. The first thing that becomes crystal clear is that the no-fly list is not highly regarded among security experts. Bruce Schneier, who knows as much about security as anybody alive, thinks that the no-fly list is a bad idea. He writes:

There’s something distinctly un-American about a secret government blacklist, with no right of appeal or judicial review. Even worse, there’s evidence that it’s being used as a political harassment tool: environmental activists, peace protesters, and anti-free-trade activists have all found themselves on the list.

But beyond being un-American, the list doesn’t actually help catch terrorists. Why? Because

Any watch list where it’s easy to put names on and difficult to take names off will quickly fill with false positives. These false positives eventually overwhelm any real information on the list, and soon the list does no more than flag innocents - which is what we see happening today, and why the list hasn’t resulted in any arrests.

I got off easy. A lot of people have experienced much more hassle with the no-fly list than I have. A man who wrote a book critical of the Bush administration, for example, is routinely searched when he flies. Why? Nobody tells him. It’s not unreasonable to believe that the no-fly list is used to harass political opponents of the administration. (Without transparency and oversight, these things are always used to harass political opponents of the administration. Any administration, but particularly this one.)

In one particularly high-profile case, Ted Kennedy found himself on the no-fly list and it took him three weeks to straighten it out. He’s a US Senator, and he’s rich and famous. What chance have I got?

Well, the TSA web site says there is a procedure, but the process is lengthy and the form is, shall we say, intrusive. In order to comply with their procedure, I need to provide my name, current address, gender, place of birth, date of birth, Social Security number, height, weight, hair color, eye color, and home and work telephone numbers. Then I need to supply certified or notarized copies of at least three of the following: my passport, my visa, my birth certificate, my naturalization certificate, my voter registration card, my driver’s license, or my government or military ID card. This really sucks because I don’t even have three of these, let alone notarized! So in order to comply with this procedure, I’d have to track down this paperwork, get it notarized or certified, and then file it with Homeland Security. And then, I’d have to wait at least 45 days, after which TSA will do whatever it is that it does with this information. And after all that? What do I get? TSA is helpful enough in spelling out the futility of my efforts:

“Please understand that the TSA clearance process will not remove a name from the Watch Lists.”

So even after going through all that rigamarole, I’ll still be on the list.

I’m not paranoid. I don’t think I’m on a no-fly list because of anything I’ve personally done or said or written, or because of anything anyone thinks of me personally. The most likely plausible explanation is that some person of interest, at one time or another, either has the name Patrick Brennan or has traveled under the name Patrick Brennan. It’s a common enough name, after all. (Just take a look: http://www.google.com/search?q=patrick+brennan) That person may be a terrorist or just a political foe of the administration; I don’t know. But from what I can gather, the No-Fly list isn’t a list of people; it’s just a list of names. So my name is on it, for whatever reason, and apparently, it’s going to stay there.

And here’s the thing about my experience with the No-Fly list: Whether you’re left, right, or center, there’s something in it to scare the shit out of you. You tell me which scares you the most:

• I found myself (and so can you!) on a secret government blacklist for no appreciable reason, with no explanation given, and which might at any time have grave consequences for me. I have no recourse, no redress, no appeal. There is no due process. I can be denied travel, detained, arrested, searched, or God knows what else, for secret reasons, and I can’t do anything about it.
• I can’t get off the list. The process of attempting this is a Kafkaesque labyrinth of pure pointlessness, seemingly calculated to bring joy to the heart of Soviet-era East European bureaucrats everywhere.
• But, even though I’m on the list, and even though I’m told I’m on the list, a boarding pass is given to me and I walk right through security without the slightest additional scrutiny. Everyone who works in the airport knows it’s bullshit, and pays it very little attention. I surmise from that fact that there must be a large number of false positives. So how many actual terrorists haven’t been caught even though they were on the list?
• What’s the real point of the list, after all? It is manifestly ineffective. Is it merely to provide the appearance that our government is doing something to help stop the terrorists? Is it to harass political opponents? Is it there because our government can’t really think of any better security measures? Maybe a little bit of all of these?

Like I said, you tell me. All I know is, I thought I heard Osama laughing his ass off that day.