New Reforms and Cutbacks to ‘No Fly’ List

Anyone who has taken a plane in the last decade will know – airlines are not what they used to be. Gone are the days where firearms could be taken on planes, and gone are the lax security requirements, where boarding an aircraft was akin to getting on a public bus on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

Since the September 11^th attacks on the World Trade Center, any traveler will be familiar with the steep increase in security that has followed the deadly hijacking. Along with the rise of security checkpoints, most people in transit know that the new safety measures being adopted by airlines are not limited to simple metal detectors.

In 2004, a program named TIDE (Terrorist Identities Datasmart Enterprise) had roughly 20,000 names registered on a list that prohibits people from boarding an airplane, colloquially known as the ‘no-fly list’. The number of names on this list ballooned after the September 11^th attacks, and has remained relatively stable since, save for a few fluctuations.

Unfortunately for those in charge of managing this list, namely government analysts trained to put together different pieces of information that hint towards terrorist activities, the process of adding a name to the TIDE list is far from a perfect science, and many innocent people are often placed on this list unintentionally.

Restricting someone’s ability to quickly travel across the globe is not something to be taken lightly. In this day and age, air transit is the quickest, cheapest, and most efficient way to get around, and should someone be falsely incriminated, huge inconveniences for the innocent traveler and possible lawsuits could very well follow.

Since 2004, the list went from over twenty thousand names to a reasonable 3,400. However, on Christmas Day of 2009, when Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab attempted to take down a commercial jet headed to Detroit, this no-fly list almost doubled to accommodate up to 6,000 names.

According to analysts in charge of managing the no-fly list, the fact that Abdulmuttalab even managed to board a plane was only due to a technical error, one that would never have happened if an unnamed agent had not forgotten to transfer Abdulmuttalab’s name to a second agency.

This sudden increase in restrictions could make the difference between life and death for many innocent travelers. However, many guiltless people could also be suffering the consequences of one person’s actions. The number of names on the list is said to be experiencing a drastic decrease in an effort to avoid all chances of mistakenly restricting innocent people from traveling by air, but only time will tell if the list is as effective as government agencies seem to think it is.

[Image: Shamanic Shift/Flickr]