You’ve *got* to be kidding

It seems that the no-fly list is even more useless than I had any reason to think.

It turns out the name Edward Allen popped up on the TSA’s ‘no-fly’ list. Unbeknownst to his parents, the little four-year-old was a wanted man.

So, this seems to imply that the no-fly list contains “Edward Allen.” Just that name. No further identifying notes. This is worse than useless. Given that any terrorist with even a fragment of a brain will travel under an assumed identity, this gives us a system that not only cost billions of dollars, but penalizes only non-criminals, and in no way inconveniences the bad guys, other than undermining the credibility of the entire anti-terrorist effort.

Any database designer would be embarrassed by a schema where the only identifying data was someone’s first and last name. You’d think that the first time this happened, they’d think, hmm, maybe this system isn’t well-designed. But given that this happens again and again and again, they seem impervious to that sort of simple logic. Ya think that maybe a hint that the Edward Allen in question isn’t 4 years old would be in order?

The mind boggles. How can our government *be* so stupid?