Good start but.. Long ago I got involved in an insurance case - same name, same birthday and living in apartments cross each other! Guess which one our collectors hit - the wrong one! And a manager in one of our largest customer on top of that. Took a while to cool it down. So, maybe they are not out of the loop yet?

Alas , did not a certain British Foreign Secretary at one time threaten to stuff a certain item up the then male US Secretary of State's posterior all because of an over the top stuff up in regard to a former top of the pop charts singer who sang Peace Train when he was granted his Nobel Prize or use similar words to that effect at that fateful meeting !

As for the other problem the no fly list is a total and absolute joke and ACLU has this web site showing why http://www.aclu.org/privacy/spying/watchlistcounter.html

Oh how we are always stuck in the same rut and travel in the same circle , as for the other problem , guess which party controls the spending power of this self wanking bunch of short sighted idiotic wowsers now and not when they had the chance to correct the obvious mistakes at the time !

Ah how much it must hurt now , when you are forced to swallow your own bile to grovel before cap in hand and face the man you said up yours to back in the halcyon days of yore when you had unlimited power of a demi god bestowed upon you by the moronic power crazed chimp of DC and now the same person has a steely death grip hand on your purse budget strings !

why didn't the TSA simply model their system after something like the OFAC's SDN list* to begin with? Did they really think this type of thing had never been done before?

*The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control's Specially Designated Nationals list is a list of entities which US banks must check before opening a banking relationship or transferring funds. It's got names, addresses, aliases, birth dates, etc. specifically for the purpose of checking if you're e.g, Osama Bin Laden the terrorist or Osama Bin Laden the greengrocer.

...They'd use the alias John Smith.

Even with the birthdate, it will still piss off a lot of people...

"TSA readies its Secure Flight program, a new passenger screening system for all airlines."

LOL

I fly regularly in the 1st world. I have flown without ID on most occasions. Screening be damned. There is no screening.

oh say can you see

"oh say can you see"

Not after they shoved this bag over my head and handcuffed me.

"PS: You may want to find out the maximum number of chars in the government's data base for first names before going about naming your child though."

And then make sure to name your child with buffer overflow code. Or maybe just 'sploit the DB - XKCD has explored this theme in http://xkcd.com/327/ - a devilish hack. :-)

Didn't he give moral support and raise money for the IRA in the 70/80's ? Isn't that a terrorist offence ? Justice at last ?

"According to the TSA, 97 per cent of those who complained weren't actually on the list"

The article doesn't actuall say what happened to the other 3% but I presume the FBI went around and got a little clumsy?

"why didn't the TSA simply model their system after something like the OFAC's SDN list* to begin with? Did they really think this type of thing had never been done before?"

Doesn't matter. US federal government organizations REALLY HATE sharing with or borrowing from each other, unless they're forced to. Your basic "not invented here" mentality.

"Or possibly those 480 are completely innocent of any actual crime and the government just likes annoying people to make themselves feel powerful, like schoolgirls making lists of people they aren't going to talk to anymore."

I think that schoolgirls are much more selective when making their lists, and have *reasons* for putting the names on the lists.