The loose use of government lists Unreliable databases can punish more law-abiding citizens than terrorists

Federal government lists are vulnerable to inaccuracy, and misuse by politicians to push political agendas. The proposal to use the no-fly list as the basis for stripping U.S. citizens of constitutional rights is a case in point. Regardless of one’s position on gun control, using a secret government process to tinker with the Bill of Rights is wrong, and very dangerous.
“What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon?” President Obama recently asked, suggesting falsely the no-fly list is a list of known terrorists, inferring that using it would have made a difference in San Bernardino, although the names of neither of the San Bernardino terrorists appeared on it. In his exploitation of yet another terrible gun tragedy, the president has created a false argument, politician-speak, internally consistent, but based on untruths. Who indeed would argue for allowing terrorists to buy semi-automatic weapons?
The problem is not people the president would have you believe want terrorists to have guns, but politicians, lacking imagination, who want to use a flawed, unreliable, secret government process to brand U.S. citizens as terrorists, without a court hearing, and then deny them their constitutional rights.
The no-fly list is demonstrably inaccurate, a product of subjective decision-making, using the lowest possible legal standard of proof, to identify people “reasonably suspected to have engaged in terrorism or related activities.” The courts recognize the standard, but it is not enough to arrest or indict anyone, or even get a search warrant, much less a criminal conviction. It’s best described as gut instinct, the kind that allows a police officer who sees something not quite right to stop people briefly, and question them about what’s going on. The president would use gut instinct to tinker with fundamental freedoms.
There is no shortage of stories about Americans wronged by the no-fly list: children under 5, a Marine returning from Iraq, a brigadier general, Sen. Ted Kennedy, Rep. John Lewis, Rep. John Young, reputable journalists, outspoken political figures, the list goes on and on. In some cases, the mistake is so egregious that it helps the victim to muscle their way through an opaque bureaucracy to get off the list, but that is not true for most folks. For them, redress is virtually nonexistent, a fact recognized as a violation of the Constitution by at least two federal courts. A classified government document, leaked in 2014, showed that about 40 percent of people on the watch list had “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” This is the president’s list of “terrorist suspects.”
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