… but this story (again culled from The Register.co.uk) shows the lengths the US government goes to to stop these known terrors from getting on planes via the Terrorist Screening lists maintained by the Dept Homeland Security.
“USA Today tells the story of a Disney World-loving 6-year-old who shares a name with someone on the “additional screening” list. Little John Anderson hasn’t made it onto the cleared list because his mum finds the TRIP web site confusing.”
So Little Johnny Anderson can’t fly to Disney World without having to prove he isn’t a terrorist. Hard to do for a tired and pissed off six year old, as any parent will tell you. I can only imagine how they explain it to him:
Mommy Anderson: Now Johnny, the nice TSA man only wants to make sure you won’t try to fly a plane into the Magic Kingdom and kill Goofy
L’il Johnny: Whhaaaaaahhhhhh…. iwannagoseegoofynmickeynminniendonalducknowmommy…whahhhh (Johnny kicks TSA agent… join us next week for L’il Johnny goes to Cuba).
Processes are in place for people to get themselves taken of the list via a website… but Johnny’s mother finds the website confusing. Having looked at the site it doesn’t seem to have any clear process entry point for “The US Government thinks (correctly) my child is a terrorist but good God I can keep them under control, please let us go to Disney”. It would seem that Mommy Anderson might need to get L’il Johnny to fill out a form to allow her to make a complaint on his behalf. He’s six. He may not understand that words like pursuant, perjury or that if he lies on the form he could to prison until he is ELEVEN!!
So the process to correct errors in the information is not customer focussed. Mommy Anderson and L’il Johnny just have to put up with his being on a watch list because the process to correct the list isn’t friendly to the information consumer/creator.
L’il Johnny isn’t alone. The Register points out that he shares his story with Javaid Iqbal, a seven year old British boy who was stopped repeatedly at US airports when on holiday in Florida (which if you are seven years old translates as Disneyland). He shared his name with someone who had been deported from the US. His name was shared, not his age. L’il Javaid’s passport is now stamped that he underwent high level security checks, pretty much condemning him to a life of Eurostar trips to EuroDisney from now on. Imagine if his name had been Lee Harvey Oswald.
These are the easy funny stories that highlight weaknesses in the quality of information and processes in this important function of the US Dept of Homeland Security. A less funny story is that
- There is some confusion about how big these lists are… a government report says 7555000, but a spokesman for the TSA says that he thinks it is less than half that
- 97% of people who have managed to get through the process that Mommy Anderson finds confusing are simply namesakes of people on the lists.
- Less than half of the requests to be taken off the lists (to correct inaccuracy in information and improve quality) have been processed since the facility went ‘live’ in February. 41% are “still being discussed” or are awaiting further documentation to prove the claims of the people who complained.
Why is this an IQTrainwreck?
- The level of inaccuracy in the information causes disruption to people… L’il Johnny or L’il Javaid won’t understand what is going on. And in Javaid’s case it may actually affect his ability to re-enter the US (or other countries) in later life.
- There appears to be a lack of consolidated governance and control… not being able to answer “how many names are on the lists” and get a consistent response is like asking a company how many customers are in their CRM systems and getting mixed responses….( ohhh – bad example).
- The processes for correcting information are not ‘customer friendly’ and don’t seem to cater for the existence of children with names who might be too young to understand the processes or even the forms. The fact that parents find the process difficult to navigate suggests there is scope for improvement.
In any other context I’d be in favour of any measure that keeps screaming children off planes, particularly long flights (by which I mean any flight that lasts longer than 6 minutes).
However, I am reminded in these cases of why my father (a civil servant in the Irish Republic and, at the time, a senior trade unionist) used to hate going on trips to the North of Ireland. Every so often some British Army squaddie or RUC officer would take him out of the car or off the bus for questioning because:
- He had glasses
- He had a beard
- He wasn’t speaking with an English accent
- therefore he must be Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein and his id papers must be faked.
My parents had a hard time explaining that to the snotty-nosed crying kids in the back seat…
