If I were wont to believe conspiracy theories, I'd swear that the National Rifle Association. in an attempt to boost its membership rolls,
paid President Obama to respond to today's dreadful mass murder in San Bernardino by
insinuating to CBS News that the
grossly unconstitutional
No Fly List should become even more gross:
"For those who are concerned about terrorism, some may be aware of the
fact that we have a no-fly list where people can't get on planes," Mr.
Obama said, "but those same people who we don't allow to fly could go
into a store right now in the United States and buy a firearm, and
there's nothing we can do to stop them. That's a law that needs to be
changed."
Indeed, though Obama and I disagree on exactly which law that is; I'd say scrap the No Fly List, which security expert Bruce Schneier famously
described as “a list of suspected terrorists so dangerous that we can't ever let them
fly, yet so innocent that we can't arrest them - even under the
draconian provisions of the Patriot Act.”
You don't even have to be dangerous to make it on the No Fly List, which includes the names of journalists who merely
criticized the TSA or "put TSA in an unfavorable light." I wouldn't be surprised to find my own name on the list in retaliation for all the
various anti-TSA articles I published in the
Guardian, though I can't say for certain since I haven't attempted to
fly since the TSA started fondling people's genitals in airports.
In
2011, an honorably discharged Marine Corps veteran (and then-current dog trainer) named
Abe Mashal got on the list after exchanging emails with an imam on "how to raise children in an interfaith household" -- Mashal was Muslim, and his wife a Christian.
And of course the No Fly List also covers people who merely share names or initials with other people on it. The late Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy got on the No Fly List in
summer 2004 -- more specifically, a "T. Kennedy" did, which was all it took to ground the senator and any of the other tens of thousands of T. Kennedys in America.
I personally have a non-terrorist (and thoroughly whitebread) friend who almost got stranded in Canada a few years ago, unable to fly because, as he described to me later, "
sixty
thousand people in the US have or use my name, and hey, some David
Smith somewhere was a bad guy, so better ground all of them until we can
sort it out."
That's all it takes to get on a U.S. government bad-guy list nowadays. And after 14 people were murdered in San Bernardino today, President Obama responded by saying how freaking
terrible it is that the government can't use the No Fly List to violate even more of the rights of the people on it.
