Nun Terrorized by Terror Watch

[tocqueville]

As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' secretary for education, Sister McPhee oversees Catholic education in the United States, from nursery school through post-graduate. Her job includes working with the Department of Education, speaking frequently at conferences and scrutinizing religious textbooks to clear them with the teachings of the church.

For nine months in 2003 and 2004, Sister McPhee also took on the task of clearing her name from the government's no-fly list, an endeavor that proved fruitless until she called on a higher power, the White House.

"I got to the point I could hardly go to the airport, because I couldn't anticipate what would happen and I couldn't do anything," she said in an interview with Wired News. "I missed key addresses I was to give. I finally got to the point where I always checked my bag, because after I got through the police clearance, then they would put me through special security where they wand you from head to foot all over. They would dump out everything in your bag, then roll it into a ball and hand it back to you."

McPhee is not the first high-profile individual to be caught by the government's watch lists. Sen. Edward Kennedy and former presidential candidate John Anderson both found that their names matched names on the list, but like McPhee, were able to resolve the problem by contacting powerful officials.

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,68973,00.html

[Occulus]

1. Does anyone else get the feeling that these lists are really

just randomly generated to randomly catch random people? "John Anderson" seems to me to very likely be a common name.