Oh, good lord--there's security, and then there's stupid harassment

Meet Mikey, 8: U.S. Has Him on Watch List

The Transportation Security Administration, under scrutiny after last month’s bombing attempt, has on its Web site a “mythbuster” that tries to reassure the public.

Myth: The No-Fly list includes an 8-year-old boy.

Buster: No 8-year-old is on a T.S.A. watch list.

“Meet Mikey Hicks,” said Najlah Feanny Hicks, introducing her 8-year-old son, a New Jersey Cub Scout and frequent traveler who has seldom boarded a plane without a hassle because he shares the name of a suspicious person. “It’s not a myth.”

Michael Winston Hicks’s mother initially sensed trouble when he was a baby and she could not get a seat for him on their flight to Florida at an airport kiosk; airline officials explained that his name “was on the list,” she recalled.

The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.

After years of long delays and waits for supervisors at every airport ticket counter, this year’s vacation to the Bahamas badly shook up the family. Mikey was frisked on the way there, then more aggressively on the way home.

The simple explanation of the problem is that he shares the same name as someone on that list, and airlines have been determining who should be screened by names alone. But its not a simple problem--thousands of travelers have been put through the ringer based on a similarity of name. One Canadian man went so far as to change his name to be free of harassment. Others mispell theirs, which if you think about it, any terrorist could do as well. New procedures will involve taking down dates of birth and genders of passengers, which should help. Mikey, after all, was born a month before September 11th, so that should flag him as okay. But I think there must be better ways to improve security than a list of suspicious people. It's too easy to avoid for the real culprits and too hard to avoid for the innocents.

For that matter, it's not just names. I have a co-worker who gets frisked every time, probably because she had a darker complection (I think she has American Indian in her) and looks slightly ethnic as a result. She has complained a couple of times of having to strip to her bra. Her husband, lighter complected, has no trouble.

I'm not in the business of security, so I don't have a lot of ideas for alternatives. I suppose face-recognition programs might help, although technology is never perfect either. But there are lots of people in intelligence who are paid big bucks to come up with plans for protecting us, and I think they can do better than a list where an 8-year-old can't go anywhere on a plane and enjoy a simple family vacation without being frisked.