No Fly List is Worthless


Who is on it and how valuable is it to national security? 60 Minutes managed to obtain a copy of the No Fly List and without giving away any national secrets, found it to be incomplete, inaccurate, outdated and a source of aggravation for thousand of innocent Americans.

The first surprise was the sheer size of it. In paper form it is more than 540 pages long. Before 9/11, the government’s list of suspected terrorists banned from air travel totaled just 16 names; today there are 44,000. And that doesn’t include people the government thinks should be pulled aside for additional security screening. There are another 75,000 people on that list.

With Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, 60 Minutes spent months going over the names on the No Fly List. While it is classified as sensitive, even members of Congress have been denied access to it. But that may have less to do with national security than avoiding embarrassment.

Asked what the quality is of the information that the TSA gets from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI, Trento says "Well, you know about our intelligence before we went to war in Iraq. You know what that was like. Not too good."

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Posted: Sun - October 8, 2006 at 10:59 PM          

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