My country is officially paranoid.
According to Wikipedia, paranoia is described thusly:
Paranoia is a thought process heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs concerning a perceived threat towards oneself. Historically, this characterization was used to describe any delusional state.
That pretty much describes what's going on with 6-year-old Alyssa Thomas:
A new front in the war on terror may have opened in the first grade.
A family in Ohio learned that their six-year-old daughter is on Homeland Security’s terror watch list when they attempted to make a flight from Cleveland to Minneapolis.
A ticket agent informed Santhosh Thomas that his daughter Alyssa was on the list.
"She may have threatened her sister," Thomas told CNN. "But I don't think that constitutes Homeland Security triggers."
Alyssa was still allowed to fly, but had to go through extra security.
And Alyssa's not unique.
For example, there's the case of 8-year-old cub scout Mikey Hicks:
"Meet Mikey Hicks," said Najlah Feanny Hicks, introducing her 8-year-old son, a New Jersey Cub Scout and frequent traveler who has seldom boarded a plane without a hassle because he shares the name of a suspicious person.
Of course, children's Fourth Amendment rights have seldom been more than illusionary. Nowadays, however, protection from unreasonable search and seizure is AWOL for all Americans. Heck, even Ted Kennedy was on a watch list. Fortunately for Senator Kennedy, he was able to have his name removed from the list with the help of his personal acquaintance Tom Ridge. Such a remedy isn't available for average Americans.
We may be giving up our rights but at least we can sleep well at night knowing that the government is "keeping us safe."
Update: In response to the commenter who wondered where the ACLU stands in regard to watch lists:
Tell Congress to Rein in Government Travel Abuses
Planning a vacation? Thinking about traveling outside the country?
If you travel outside the United States, you can kiss your right to privacy, and perhaps your laptop, digital camera and cell phone, goodbye.
With no suspicion and no explanation, the U.S. government can seize your laptop, cell phone, or PDA as you enter the United States and download all your private information -- including your personal and business documents, emails, phone calls, and web history.
And what happens if you refuse to let the agents download your personal photos? Or if you have encrypted your private information? Then Border Patrol -- which is now an agency of the Department of Homeland Security -- can simply copy your entire hard drive or even take your device and hang on to it indefinitely.
Tell Congress: it’s time to rein in travel abuses by the Department of Homeland Security.
Unfortunately, seizing laptops and cameras at the border isn’t the only travel security measure that infringes on our civil liberties.
The U.S. government's "terrorist watch list" has surpassed 1,000,000 names and is growing by over 20,000 names per month. The watch list includes the names of prominent people, like Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), plus hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans many of them with common names like Robert Johnson and James Robinson. Your name might be on the list. But there's no way to know for sure until you are delayed or even detained for hours in a back room. If you discover your name is on the list, it's nearly impossible to get off. It actually took an Act of Congress to get Nelson Mandela off the list. No joke. An Act of Congress.
These abuses have something in common: They make all of us into suspects, with no rule of law and no accountability.
TSA Watchlist- One Million Underserved
The roll-over to one million confirms the warnings the ACLU has been making for years: the TSA is pinning American security on a system of watch lists that are bloated, inefficient, ineffective and unfair.
It is time to stop adding innocent people to this ineffective list and go back to the drawing board. Any travel monitoring system must have:
# due process
# a right to access and challenge data upon which listing is based
# tight criteria for adding names to the lists
# rigorous procedures for updating and cleansing names from the lists.
There's also this petition:
The Department of Homeland Security is misusing its power. Travel abuses have only escalated since the attempted Christmas airline attack. In America, we now have:
* A terrorist watch list with over one million names on it, growing by twenty thousand names per month. American citizens kept in exile in foreign countries barred from flying back to the US.
* Security agents that seize laptops, cell phones, and PDAs as Americans enter the United States, with no suspicion of wrongdoing.
* Invasive airport scanners that let agents conduct virtual strip searches of passengers.
Traveling shouldn't mean checking your rights when you’re checking your luggage.
Tell Congress: it's time to rein in travel abuses by the Department of Homeland Security. Or, read more.
Finally, there is this lawsuit which doesn't directly go after all watch lists, but does go after the no fly list:
ACLU Challenges Government No Fly List
The ACLU and its affiliates in Oregon, Southern California, Northern California, and New Mexico have filed a legal challenge on behalf of ten U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents who cannot fly to or from the United States or over U.S. airspace because they are on the "No Fly List"—a component of the government’s watch list system. None of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, including a disabled veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, a U.S. Army veteran, and a U.S. Airforce veteran, have been told why they are on the list or given a meaningful chance to clear their names. Yet, they have been prevented from visiting relatives, accessing employment and educational opportunities, and—for those stranded abroad—returning home to their families, jobs, and needed medical care in the United States.