Stupid surveillance

By Libby

I talked about the terrorist watch list a while back and sorry I'm too lazy to find the link, but there's 750,000 names on it and it's growing by about 200,000 names a year. A list that big can be nothing but useless in terms of stopping terrorists. As I said before, while TSA is busy harassing some innocent American, chances are three real terrorists will be waved through in the resulting confusion.

That the list is populated with an unwieldly amount of false positives is clear. Some 15,000 people have requested redress and DHS can't process the complaints in any kind of timely manner. They claim the average turnaround is 44 days, but two years later, a 6 year old is still on the list. It makes me think they're not clearing them faster than they're adding them.

The real irony is, I doubt that airplanes are going to be the target of choice anyway. While our government is busily making flying as unpleasant an experience as possible, chances are the actual terrorists are planning attacks on less secure targets. In fact the latest rumor flying around is that they're planning to target shopping malls at Christmas. Personally, I would rather get a root canal than go to the mall but what are they going to do about that? Make us show ID and take off our shoes before we go shopping?

This is what really bugs me about how people are willing to trade our freedoms for a false sense of security. There is simply no way to protect us against terrorists. A determined nutcase can and will find a way to cause deaths. It would be far better if our government put its resources into securing the facilities like nuke plants and oil refineries where a random attack could do maximum damage and spend the rest on intelligence that tracks known terrorists rather than trying to sift them out of crowds.