Reply #12: Strictly speaking, he wasn't [View All]

[Euromutt]

The situation was that there was an Edward Kennedy on the watch list, who was not the same person as the late Senator Kennedy. The problem is that the watch list consists of names, not specific individuals, and the names don't have identifying information appended to them.

Which is why the inclusion of the name "Cat Stevens" on the list resulted in the wife of Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska getting hassled; her name's Catherine, but she usually goes by "Cat." It's fairly fucking obvious that she's not the same person as the singer-songwriter who now goes by the name Yussuf Islam, but the watch list doesn't make that distinction.

The ACLU estimates that there are now well over a million names on the watch list. Not people, just names (including aliases), with no identifying information to tell the relevant individual apart from anyone else who happens to have that name.