Monday, April 28, 2008

Identity Checks and Government Blogging

Here's an article on changes being made by DHS in handling their no-fly list and here's the DHS blog's post on it . (If I understand, Ted Kennedy gets stopped all the time, because there's a suspected terrorist (or at least someone on the no-fly list) with a similar name, so they have to establish Ted isn't the same person. Now, under the proposal, if Ted allows his date of birth to be added to the airlines data, he can go right through.)


The proposal makes sense to me, but not to the first four comments on the blog. Maybe they aren't into genealogy, where you have to distinguish among multiple John Rippeys or even worse, William Smiths. Much less try to reconcile the data between ASCS and SCS to determine whether each agency was dealing with the same people. But then, I'm just a retired bureaucrat who tends to trust bureaucracies, at least in some instances.

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