Terrorist watchlist screws up lives of innocents
The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima wrote an article about the US government's incredibly sloppy job with maintaining a list of terror suspects. If they can't even keep innocent people off the list, how can we expect them to protect anybody from real terrorists?One man went into a Glen Burnie, Md., Toyota dealership to buy a car, only to be told that a name check revealed he was on a U.S. Treasury Department watchlist of suspected terrorists and drug dealers. He had to be "checked for tattoos," he said, to make sure he wasn't the suspect.Link (Via Farber)An 18-year-old found he could not open an account to accept credit card payments for his fledgling technology consulting business because his name was similar to that of a Libyan official on the watchlist.
A former U.S. Navy officer who served in the Persian Gulf and whose father was killed in the Korean War when he was a child, found himself locked out of his PayPal account because his name was similar to one on the watchlist.
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