The problem with over-inclusiveness is that innocent people will suffer major inconvenience and that counter-terrorism resources are wasted. But if the lists are under-inclusive, innocent people can die, and in large numbers. If asked to choose between over- and under-inclusiveness on the watch lists, the passengers of Northwest Flight 253 no doubt would have their preference.

Another article pointing the finger at "civil libertarian extremeists" for the nearly successful terrorist attack a couple days ago.... The question ought to be whether Abdulmutallab was placed on the appropriate list and given the appropriate amount of scrutiny given the information that we actually had about him ahead of the incident and not based on the 20/20 hindsight that he turned about to be a terrorist in the end. If it turns out that he should have or could have received more scrutiny than he did based on what we knew, I'm all for making changes and holding people accountable. But, sometimes there are going to be situations where you just don't have enough information about someone to justify keeping them off of airplanes, and that remains a possibility here. There seem to be calls for the scope of these lists to be massively expanded as a result of this incident based on the "better be safe than sorry" rationale. I remain troubled that this is a knee-jerk reaction that will leave our security forces jumping at shadows.

We need more information about what, exactly, we knew about this person, as well as how our different watchlists are actually used, inorder to make a thoughtful assessment of whether or not there is something reasonable that can be done here. I think some of the relevant information may be classified and this won't be a public debate.

To put a finer point on it - presuming we did not, in fact, have enough information about this individual to subject him to greater scrutiny, this situation bares absolutely no relationship to future questions that might arise about the inclusiveness of and procedures behind these lists. To uphold this incident as a reason to ignore the concerns of privacy advocates and civil libertarians before a direct relationship can be draw between this case and those concerns is, frankly, dishonest political gamesmanship. It is this sort of partisan football spiking and total dismissal of the legitimacy one's opponents that has made it so difficult to build reasonable policies in this space by polluting the discussion with distrust and strife.