The Weaknesses of Watch-Listing

The Weaknesses of Watch-Listing
by Jim Harper

“Watch-listing” — the practice of putting bad people’s names on a list and treating them differently at places like airports — is fraught with difficulty.

As to sophisticated threats, it’s a Maginot line. Easy to evade, it provides no protection against people who haven’t yet done anything wrong, who haven’t come to the attention of security officials, or who have adopted an alias. Terrorist planners are nothing more than inconvenienced by having to use people with “clean” records.

Paying to inconvenience any such terrorists are (taxpayers, of course, and) all the people wrongly treated as suspects because they have the same or similar names as listed people.

- rest at www.cato-at-liberty.org/2006/10/06/the-weaknesses-of-watch-listing