In short, the farce of federal efforts to create an efficient terrorist profiling system to keep terrorists off airplanes--and the farce of privacy-advocacy organizations' reactions to those efforts--will continue. Before September 11, 2001, the U.S. government's list of suspected terrorists banned from air travel held 16 names. Afterward, every government agency indiscriminately dumped information about every potential suspect from its databases onto the watch lists. By March 2003, when the TSA did early tests of CAPPS II (Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System II), the watch lists had expanded to 75,000 names--many of them being, notoriously, common ones like Ted Kennedy and Robert Johnson.
In February 2006, sources at the National Counterterrorism Center told the Washington Post that the watch lists had grown to 325,000 names--more than quadruple the 75,000 on the lists in 2003.
... In a December 8, 2006, National Journal article, Chertoff indulged in some minor drollery at the privacy activists' expense:
"I've got a new rule. If I want to keep a secret, I give a speech about it. Because if I make a speech, no one picks it up. But if I put it in a document and I slip it under the table, then it gets the front page."
... Soundex assigns to the name Laden the code L350, as it does Lydon, Lawton, and Leedham. This is, in other words, an algorithm so deficient for identification purposes that it confuses al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and the Sex Pistols' Johnny (Lydon) Rotten. To see for yourself how poorly Soundex performs, go to nofly.s3.com, where S3 Matching Technologies has combined the algorithm with a list of potential-terrorist names recorded in U.S. government databases. "The U.S. government obviously updates its lists every day, so we don't suggest this is up-to-date," says James Moore, a company spokesperson. "But we got the best available data on who'd be on terrorist watch lists from various private intelligence agencies." Using Soundex and S3 Matching Technologies' version of the watch list reveals that the names Jesus Christ and George Bush resemble terrorists' names enough that they're assigned to the no-fly or selectee list.
