A good percentage of past, present, and future US-based terrorists (and criminals in general) hold driver's licenses. Where's the outrage about that?
More than a million convicted criminals hold US driver's licenses (maybe it's only a few hundred thousand, maybe it's over 10 million: the level of "outrage" should be high regardless).
Is there a single case where the issuance of a US pilot's license has aided a terrorist? Perhaps the feds should be searching for terrorists, not mining lists of people certified to do XYZ for "suspicious" people.
The Transportation Security Administration cannot determine the real identity of thousands of the people to whom the Federal Aviation Administration has issued licenses as pilots and aircraft mechanics
Typically pilots' licenses require that the licencee provide an address, records of training (with certified instructors), records of medical certification, etc. If the TSA must find out the identity of such people, perhaps they should... talk to the dozen or more people involved in certifying a pilot.
Of course that would involve work beyond paying a contractor to do a database search, which would most likely be a waste of time and money (personal experience seems to indicate that that's part of the TSA's mission).
An initial computer scan found 29,000 certificates that matched names on the government’s Terrorist Screening Data Base, but further study found that 28,500 of the matches were invalid; 506 were turned over for closer scrutiny, yielding the 27 names.
Lesson: the so-called "Terrorist Screening Data Base" is useful for terrorizing innocent people, but not particularly useful at identifying actual threats to transportation security.
Originally Posted by
lobster7
The TSA failed at something else again?!
Well they're quite good at terrorizing innocent US persons.