Loose lips

I'm not sure how creeped out I should be by this story. Put another way, I'm sure I should be creeped out, but I'm not sure I'm creeped out enough.

Last night I was watching "Preacher," and hoping that the parts I liked will stay and the parts I didn't are just pilot-episode shakedown issues. At one point in the story, a Texas small-town sheriff says to someone else, "Yessiree bob."

I turned to the friend sitting next to me and said, "Do people still say 'yessiree bob?'" At which point a curious thing happened.

My Samsung tablet, about arm's reach away from me, and in sleep mode, suddenly woke up and beeped. After a moment, I recognized it as the sound Android makes to acknowledge when I say "OK Google" and it's waiting for instructions (set a timer, open an app, etc.). But it was, as I say, supposed to be asleep. So I tapped the start button, entered my lock code, and discovered that when it heard me say "Do people still say 'yessiree bob?'" it mistook that as instructions to launch a Google search for the phrase "People like the same rhubarb." This it promptly did.

(The inadvertent search, it must be said, didn't turn up anything terribly useful. It turns out that some people loathe rhubarb, some think it's great in fruit pies, and one blogger devoted 500 words, plus pictures, to differentiating rhubarb and Swiss chard – bottom line there: they look similar from about 50 feet away but that's where any similarity ends.)

It was a jolt to realize that unless the tablet is completely shut off (and perhaps the battery removed?) it's always listening to me. I guess I was dimly aware that this was possible, but in two years of having a tablet and generally keeping it close at hand I don't remember it ever happening. And second, it's not always listening very carefully. I didn't say the magic words "OK Google" (perhaps it thought it heard something like that in the ambient noise), and it didn't get my words clearly anyway. And third, that bit of nonsense is now enshrined in my Google search history, which can be deleted in its entirety but not edited to remove only specific items.

So it's lucky for me that it did come up with nonsense, I suppose. Imagine if it had inferred from a nearby conversation about "Arsenic and Old Lace" that I wanted suggestions on how to poison someone and dispose of the body. How would I have explained that to the local law enforcement people?

Or suppose, based on a remark it overheard, me mentioning my relief that I'd brought a book along to read while waiting for my delayed flight to finally board, a flight I wasn't looking forward to anyway, it had concluded I was planning to write a story about a man who must travel to the past to prevent something that will change the future for the worse – how would I have explained that to Harlan Ellison's lawyers?

A common moment in spy fiction (or dystopian fiction more generally) comes when someone has to be reminded that, in enemy territory (however defined – Cold War Moscow, Winston Smith's London, Terry Benedict's three casinos, or post-Patriot Act America), someone is always listening. Last night was a reminder of how complicit we all are in surveilling and tracking ourselves. 

I never found the answer to my question, by the way. The closest I got was this.

Thanks, Google.

‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that.'

Well, this is interesting.

I was trying to find out what local cinemas would be showing Citizenfour, the documentary about NSA whistleblower-on-the-run Edward Snowden, so I plugged the film name and a ZIP Code into Google.

The first four hits were showtime pages for area theaters.

Take a look at the fifth one.

Title quote source, as if you didn't know.

How far p3 has traveled in 5 years

From the p3 archives, December 18, 2005.

Context is everything.

Now you know how the California Condor feels

Is Sprint your network provider? If so, then here's some news you might be interested in:

[L]aw enforcement has used Sprint’s geotracking function 8 million times in the thirteen months prior to [October 2009].

Cheer up, Sprint customers: If the condors got used to it, you will too.

Dispatches: Protecting the Metiolus, health care reform, civil liberties and national security, controlled substances, and more

Items from the p3 inbox:

• Contact your State Representative by phone or email today, to politely let them know to vote YES to protect the Metolius river basin from destination resort development. (Carla @ Blue Oregon)



• Contact Sen. Ron Wyden and politely let him know your priorities for health care reform: a strong public option, no corporate freeloading, and no taxes on the benefits. (AFL-CIO Working Families)



• Tell Attorney General Holder that an investigation into Bush administration torture policies and practices is fully warranted. (ACLU Accountability on Torture action center)



• Attend the public forum "Civil Liberties Under the Obama Administration: Are We Still at Risk?" moderated by Steve Novick, Wednesday 6/17, 7pm, on the PSU campus. (ACLU of Oregon)



• Urge your state representative to oppose SB 355, the pharmacy database bill for controlled substances as an unwarranted intrusion into Oregonians' privacy. (ACLU of Oregon)

Who gives a WHTI where you are right at this moment?

Here's your choice, America:

Is it worse that the government and corporations want ever-increasing panoptic monitoring and data-gathering programs directed at all of us?

Or that, once they get this information in hand, they have absolutely no idea how to keep it secure?

Chris Paget just did you a service by hacking your passport and stealing your identity. Using a $250 Motorola RFID reader and antenna connected to his laptop, Chris recently drove around San Francisco reading RFID tags from passports, driver licenses, and other identity documents. In just 20 minutes, he found and cloned the passports of two very unaware US citizens. Fortunately, Chris wears a white hat; his video demonstration is meant to raise awareness to what he calls the unsuitability of RFID for tagging people. Specifically, he's hoping to help get the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative -- a homeland security project -- scrapped.

At least the members of the Party, servants of Orwell's fictitious Big Brother, had the simple professional self-respect to keep their files secure from every pony-tailed hacker with a compact car and a laptop. (Although their technology was comparatively primative--the Ministry of Peace could only dream about tagging us like migratory waterfowl.)

Never heard of WHTI, the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative? You might want to read here (especially the part about the Passport Card) before they have a chance to hear about you.

(Hat tip to AmericaBlog, although to quibble about titles, I think the problem is less about someone stealing your passport, per se, than it's about someone electronically tracking you to every business, meeting, or residence you go to.)

Fixing the Constitution: Obama will only go as far left as the left pushes him

Late last week, Digby had a good post on a topic everyone's hot on right now: How far to the left or the right will Obama govern?

The answer, which I consider especially smart even by Digby standards, since I've been saying much the same thing since last spring: Obama will govern just as far to the left as he's pushed into doing by the left itself, and probably not much farther.

In the current political world, I believe that Obama and the Democrats need a strong left wing that is out there agitating in order that we can continue to build popular support and also give them a political excuse to do things that the political establishment finds too liberal. Being cheerleaders all the time, however enjoyable that is, is not going to help them. Leaving them out there with no left wing cripples them.

One of the problems for Democrats has been that there has not been an effective progressive voice pushing the edge of the envelope. Therefore, when they inevitably "go to the middle" as politicians often feel they must do, the middle become further and further right. It is my belief that one of the roles of the progressive movement is to keep pulling the politicians back to the left, which often means that we are not being publicly "supportive," in order that we really do end up in the middle instead of farther to the right than the country actually is. […]

So, everyone needs to relax a little bit about the blogosphere criticizing Obama and the Democrats. We are necessary. If all Obama has is the Villagers and the right defining what change means, then those are the parameters within which he will have to operate. He needs us to "make him do it."

I'm sorry if that's a buzzkill, but things move fast in politics and there's no time to waste. The mandate is being defined as we speak. We can't just sit back and bask in our glory while the villagers are busily narrowing Obama's options.

Don't get me wrong; he's not off to a bad start, at least as far as his talking game goes:

Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.

That's all good. And he'll also need to hit the ground running on beginning to reverse the economic damage that the Bush administration has inflicted on the nation.

But there's something missing here. Conspicuous by its absence, one could say.

Here's a hint:



We're not America again until our basic Constitutional liberties and the rule of law--over which Bush and Cheney have run roughshod--are restored.

The ACLU has a good starting point, in its agenda for Obama's first day, first 100 days, and first year in office.

Day 1:
1. Stop torture and abuse.
2. Close Guantánamo, and restore the rule of law for detainees
3. End and prohibit the practice of extraordinary rendition.

Those are pretty hard to argue with. Obama's starting to make the right rumblings about closing Guantánamo, but the legal and constitutional pig's breakfast that the Bush administration has made of the Gitmo prisoners' status is not going to make it go as easily as it sounds. There will be plenty of temptation, and plenty of encouragement from tough-on-terrorism wannabes, to drag his feet on this one once the ugly complications become apparent. We can't let him do it. Shut Gitmo down.

First 100 Days:

1. End warrantless spying on US citizens.
2. Rein in ever-expanding and error-ridden watch lists.
3. Rescind the "Ashcroft Doctrine" undermining the Freedom of Information Ac.
4. End government monitoring of political activists.
5. Order the DOJ to resume civil rights enforcement by the Civil Rights Division.
6. Suspend the Real ID Act pending congressional review.
7. Rescind the abortion gag rule on foreign aid.
8. Ban all workplace discrimination against sexual minorities by the federal government and its contractors.
9. Implement a moratorium on the death penalty until the issue of racial disparities has been addressed.
10. End the practice of government-sponsored religious discrimination known as the "faith-based initiatives."

Of these, I'd move #7 up to Day One. The Reagan/Bush era restrictions were rescinded by Clinton on his first day in office. Bush 43 reinstated them again on his first day in office. Obama needs to show he's serious. Day One.

The list of constitutional protections to establish or restore for Obama's first year in office is a long one--too long to include here, so check it out at the ACLU's site. Many of the ACLU's Year One recommendations address the growing encroachment of government and corporate databases--some illegal, some error-ridden, some involving constitutional issues that no one's paying attention to--on our privacy.

Some of these are things Obama can do with the stroke of a pen on an executive order. Many will take the cooperation of Congress, so it can be an early chance for Democratic congressional leadership to take their newly-increased majorities out for a test-drive and see what they can do.

It's great that we've elected Obama. Now we have to make him do what needs to be done, and for that he has to have us in his grillwork. Obama was not elected by the center, and certainly not by the right. We need to make sure, in the famous phrase of Molly Ivins, that he knows he has to dance with them what brung him.


(Image via Mike Luckovich.)

FISA video smackdown

From the right:

From the left:

(And, as a follow-up, the Bush administration has now admitted it was only kidding, anyway.)

There's a reason the East Germans needed a name for it--but why do we?

Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter. Knock back a couple of shots of schnapps, say it in a whisper while hiding in a room with the blinds drawn, and you can hear its English cognates: unofficial, working with.

It amazes me--saddens me, alarms me--to realize how many people think that "America" refers only to the real estate with that name on it on the maps. The idea that the word refers to a set of political and moral standards that once defined us and made us the envy--rather than the terror--of the rest of the world has apparently eluded them.

The most obvious example I could point to--at least this week--would be our government's now-open embrace of torture as tool in foreign relations. (It makes me almost sentimental for a couple of weeks ago, when they still at least felt the need to deny it publicly.)

But there's another case all too much in point.

With the end of the German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany) in 1990, taking with it the Stasi secret police and its burgeoning network of private informers (the Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter), you'd expect to read passages like this only in the history books:

FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. At that time, the group had less than half as many members as it does today. "To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard," he said. "From our perspective that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America." He added a little later, "Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense."

He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they "note suspicious activity or an unusual event." And he said they could sic the FBI on "disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers." [...]

InfraGard is not readily accessible to the general public. Its communications with the FBI and Homeland Security are beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act under the "trade secrets" exemption, its website says. [...]

Schneck is proud of the relationships the InfraGard Members Alliance has built with the FBI. "If you had to call 1-800-FBI, you probably wouldn't bother," she says. "But if you knew Joe from a local meeting you had with him over a donut, you might call them. Either to give or to get. We want everyone to have a little black book."

This black book may come in handy in times of an emergency. "On the back of each membership card," Schneck says, "we have all the numbers you'd need: for Homeland Security, for the FBI, for the cyber center. And by calling up as an InfraGard member, you will be listened to." She also says that members would have an easier time obtaining a "special telecommunications card that will enable your call to go through when others will not." [...]

This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.

"The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage," he says. "From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we'd be given specific benefits." These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out. But that's not all.

"Then they said when -- not if -- martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn't be prosecuted," he says. […]

Curt Haugen is CEO of S'Curo Group, a company that does "strategic planning, business continuity planning and disaster recovery, physical and IT security, policy development, internal control, personnel selection, and travel safety," according to its website. Haugen tells me he is a former FBI agent and that he has been an InfraGard member for many years. He is a huge booster. "It's the only true organization where there is the public-private partnership," he says. "It's all who knows who. You know a face, you trust a face. That's what makes it work."

He says InfraGard "absolutely" does emergency preparedness exercises. When I ask about discussions the FBI and Homeland Security have had with InfraGard members about their use of lethal force, he says: "That much I cannot comment on. But as a private citizen, you have the right to use force if you feel threatened."

"We were assured that if we were forced to kill someone to protect our infrastructure, there would be no repercussions," the whistleblower says.

Read the whole thing, if you can stomach it. "It's all who knows who," indeed.

If a presidential candidate promised to shut this unholy alliance down by 12:15pm Eastern time, January 20, 2009, I'd vote for them no matter how many other planks in their platform I disagreed with. But none of them will, and the sad truth is this: Once something like this gets started, it's much harder to kill it than simply to (deliberately or inadvertently) drive it a little farther underground.

Recall the formation (animated by much the same "let's pitch in" spirit) that created the current abortive "don't fly" list used by Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, imagine that multiplied a thousand-fold to include anyone who someone else thinks is a workplace "troublemaker," and now imagine the harm to innocent individuals--including the near impossibility of getting a name off that list once it's been wrongly put there.

(Hat tip to Digby. Image sources: Stasi emblem and Stasi archives.)

The unforgiving minute

If you’re one of many Americans alarmed by the eagerness of the telecoms to abet the Bush administration’s program of warrantless wiretapping, there may be a tiny gleam of hope from an unlikely quarter:

Telephone companies cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time, according to a Justice Department audit released Thursday.

The faulty bookkeeping is part of what the audit, by the Justice Department's inspector general, described as the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. Poor supervision of the program also allowed one agent to steal $25,000, the audit said.

More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.

And at least once, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation — the highly secretive and sensitive cases that allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies — "was halted due to untimely payment."

"We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence," according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

At a time when privacy and protection from unconstitutional search sometimes seem to hang by a thread, I suppose there's some thin comfort in the thought that the Bush administration might be deadbeats.

Minute’s up.

The unforgiving minute

On September 10th, 2001, there were less than 20 names on the terrorist watch list maintained by the US government.

Today, there are over 755,000 names and counting (including multiple aliases; the number of specific individuals is estimated at around 300,000).

Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Are there that many more terrorists around, after six years of the Bush War on Terror?

Or is something else making that list balloon?

(Here's a hint.)

Minute's up.

Further proof that the typical GOP bright light doesn't get the Internet

You can read up on the sleazy details here, but the short version is: One former Senate staffer is suing another for publishing a blog that described his sexual preferences--handcuffs and submissives yes, condoms no, apparently--while they were dating. Gives "Grand Old Party" a depth of meaning that wasn't there before.

The key defense strategy? According to MSNBC, "[defense attorney] Billips argues that [naughty blogger] Cutler never intended to make the blog public."

You see, on the Blogger.com settings page, you can control whether Blogger includes your blog's URL on its own promotional listings of blogs. (Click the image at left.) But, as Wonkette.com snarkily points out, this has no effect on the rest of the net-surfing planet's ability to find the URL through ordinary means such as a search on Google (which owns Blogger, by the way, and is unlikely to make its own products unfindable). This is akin to claiming in one's defense that, while one had a skywriter fill the sky over downtown with the message, one didn't put a flier in the local Shop 'n' Go. Good luck with that.

Bad cases make bad law, they say, but this is simply beyond the pale. The thought that this lawsuit--if it isn't tossed out, and the judge on the case appears to be losing his patience--could in any way help shape privacy law for the Internet is depressing.

People with a grasp this shaky of how things work on the Web--and I'm talking about the whole pack of nitwits with their helpful ideas about "the Google," "the Internets," and the "series of tubes"--should under no circumstances be allowed to make up rules about who gets access to it, or what rights they have once they get there.

The 2006 p3 Top-10 Meta-list

From the p3 Institute for Strategic Redundancy Institute international headquarters, this year’s top-10 list of top-10 lists:

Top 11 most outrageous comments by conservative commentators in 2006 (Media Matters): Hannity on things worth dying for! Limabugh on obesity! Colter on love and death!

Top 10 national stories of 2006 (Steve Gilliard @ The News Blog): ISG report--DOA. The Karl Rove mystique--over. Gay Republicans--apparently flourishing, as it turns out, thanks for asking.

Top 10 Myths about Iraq 2006 (Juan Cole @ Informed Comment): Starts with the myth that the Iraq war/occupation is something that we can somehow "win" at this point, and marches steadily and depressingly on through the evidence from there.

Top 10 time-shifted TV programs in 2006 (Nielsen ratings, via Lostremote.com): Number One is "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," which may take some of the logistical heat off Lance Mannion if he’s going to keep live-blogging it--now he can simply wait until Wednesday or Thursday to do it.

Top 10 Yahoo! Searches in 2006 (Yahoo!): Here’s a shocker: Iraq, Israel and Lebanon, and the North Korea nuclear program didn’t quite manage to nose out Steve Irwin’s death and Anna Nicole Smith’s baby.

Top 10 places to live in the US in 2006 (Money Magazine): And for those of you outside the state, Oregon is nowhere on the list. Honest. Nothing to see here. Keep moving. Have a lovely visit. Don’t stay.

Top 10 books of 2006 (NYTimes): Comedies of manners, searing memoirs, revisionist histories, and the inevitable, even obligatory allusion to Borat.

Top 10 online scams of 2006 (Consumer Affairs): Approach at your own risk: I wrote about the Nigerian scam last summer, and within a week or two the amount of that crap my email filters were catching went up by an order of magnitude. I’d recommend reading this list on a friend’s computer. You never know.

Top 10 insider political events in Oregon in 2006 (NW Republican): They’re absolutely right to list the rise of the Oregon-based political blog (including Blue Oregon and my cronies over at Loaded Oregon as well as their own blog) near the top. The comments are as juicy as the list.

Top 10 viral videos (The Viral Factory, via Countdown with Keith Olbermann): The enduring clip of Oregon’s exploding whale (350 million hits) is #3, but it probably says more about the ephemeral nature of the overall topic that #10 is already no longer available.

Top 10 signs of the impending US police state (Alternet): Nothing new here, alas, but it's definitely disturbing to see them lined up end-to-end. The Democratic Congress has its work cut out for it. If they’re up to it.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Illegal Domestic Surveillance

From Wired online:

The first public meeting of a Bush administration "civil liberties protection panel" had a surreal quality to it, as the five-member board refused to answer any questions from the press, and stonewalled privacy advocates and academics on key questions about domestic spying.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which met Tuesday, was created by Congress in 2004 on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, but is part of the White House, which handpicked all the members. Though mandated by law in late 2004, the board was not sworn in until March 2006, due to inaction on the part of the White House and Congress.

The three-hour meeting, held at Georgetown University, quickly established that the panel would be something less than a fierce watchdog of civil liberties. Instead, members all but said they view their job as helping Americans learn to relax and love warrantless surveillance.

"The question is, how much can the board share with the public about the protections incorporated in both the development and implementation of those policies?" said Alan Raul, a Washington D.C. lawyer who serves as vice chairman. "On the public side, I believe the board can help advance national security and the rights of American by helping explain how the government safeguards U.S. personal information."

And--since each new outrage by the Bush administration tends to drive out memory of the last one--here's some context:

Federal agents continue to eavesdrop on Americans' electronic communications without warrants a year after President Bush confirmed the practice, and experts say a new Congress' efforts to limit the program could trigger a constitutional showdown.

High-ranking Democrats set to take control of both chambers are mulling ways to curb the program Bush secretly authorized a month after the Sept. 11 attacks. The White House argues the Constitution gives the president wartime powers to eavesdrop that he wouldn't have during times of peace.

"As a practical matter, the president can do whatever he wants as long as he has the capacity and executive branch officials to do it," said Carl Tobias, a legal scholar at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

Lawmakers could impeach or withhold funding, or quash judicial nominations, among other measures.

The president, however, can veto legislation, including a law demanding the National Security Agency obtain warrants before monitoring communications. Such a veto would force Congress to muster a two-thirds vote to override.

"He could take the position he doesn't have to comply with whatever a new Congress says," said Vikram Amar, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings, and a former Supreme Court clerk.

Douglas Kmiec, a former Justice Department official under former presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, speculated the younger Bush would assert executive authority to continue eavesdropping in the face of new legislation - perhaps leaving the Supreme Court as the final arbiter. [...]

On Dec. 17, 2005, Bush publicly acknowledged for the first time he had authorized the NSA to monitor, without approval from a judge, phone calls and e-mails that come into or originate in the U.S. and involve people the government suspects of having terrorist links.

Bush said he had no intention of halting what he called a "vital tool" in the war on terror.

When the Republican-controlled Congress adjourned last week, it left the spying program unchecked. .

Feeing safer yet?

What's in a name? That which we call a rose / by any other word could face extraordinary rendition.

Prologue: A college roommate of mine and I stayed in touch off and on after graduation, then, during the 1990s (and mainly because of me) we fell out of touch. Contact resumed around 6 years ago, shortly after which his work email address stopped working. I wrote this fact off to the end of the dot-com bubble (his employer was one of the older companies but went through turmoil same as the upstarts) and assumed he'd be in touch once the dust settled and he landed on his feet.

Now I'm beginning to worry that it may not be that simple. You see, my old roomie is an uncommon fellow, but he has a very common name. Here's why that detail matters:

Thousands of people have been mistakenly linked to names on terror watch lists when they crossed the border, boarded commercial airliners or were stopped for traffic violations, a government report said Friday.

More than 30,000 airline passengers have asked just one agency - the Transportation Security Administration - to have their names cleared from the lists, according to the Government Accountability Office report.

Hundreds of millions of people each year are screened against the lists by Customs and Border Protection, the State Department and state and local law enforcement agencies. The lists include names of people suspected of terrorism or of possibly having links to terrorist activity.

"Misidentifications can lead to delays, intensive questioning and searches, missed flights or denied entry at the border," the report said. "Whether appropriate relief is being afforded these individuals is still an open question."

When questions arose about tens of thousands of names between December 2003 and January 2006, the names were sent back to the agencies that put them on the lists, the GAO said. Half of those were found to be misidentified, the report found.

In December 2003, disparate agencies with counterterrorism responsibilities consolidated dozens of watch lists of known or suspected terrorists into the new Terrorist Screening Center run by the FBI.

People are considered "misidentified" if they are matched to the database and then, upon further examination, are found not to match.

Yeah, lord knows that bit of bureaucratic insight makes me feel safer. How about you?

It would be one thing if the system gave a false-positive on a Kabul-to-JFK passenger booked under the name "Fred bin Ladin," but, according to tomorrow night's CBS "60 Minutes," the system isn't even that close to getting it right.

The name of David Belfield who now goes by Dawud Sallahuddin, is not on the list, even though he assassinated someone in Washington, D.C., for former Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini. This is because the accuracy of the list meant to uphold security takes a back seat to overarching security needs: it could get into the wrong hands. "The government doesn't want that information outside the government," says Cathy Berrick, Director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues for the General Accounting Office.

Berrick says Homeland Security would probably agree that leaving such names off the list is a concern. The Transportation Security Administration is trying to fix the list through a program called "Secure Flight," says Berrick, but after three years and an estimated $144 million spent on the program, there's "nothing tangible yet," she says.

Even if the list is made more accurate, it won't help thousands of innocent travelers who share a common name on the list and who get detained, sometimes for hours, when they attempt to fly.

Gary Smith, John Williams and Robert Johnson are some of those names. Kroft talked to 12 people with the name Robert Johnson, all of whom are detained almost every time they fly. The detentions can include strip searches and long delays in their travels.

"Well, Robert Johnson will never get off the list," says Donna Bucella, who oversaw the creation of the list and has headed up the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center since 2003. She regrets the trouble they experience, but chalks it up to the price of security in the post-9/11 world. "They're going to be inconvenienced every time … because they do have the name of a person who's a known or suspected terrorist," says Bucella.

Kevin Drum pointed out:

You know, I'll bet if there were some senator named Robert Johnson, the FBI would figure out a way to make this list a little more user-friendly. Maybe we should try to elect one.

--which is not a bad idea, but longtime p3 correspondent Doctor TV has a better one:

The point about electing a member of Congress named Robert Johnson is one solution. The other is to add the names Donna Bucella and Cathy Berrick to the list.

Epilogue: While we're waiting for that: Rob, if you're out there and you're not in GITMO, could you drop us a line to let us know you're okay? Thanks.