I caught a bit of the Al Franken Show on Air America at lunchtime today. One of their guests today was Laura Poitras, a documentary maker, who spent a bit of time talking about her appearance on the terror watch list after having made a documentary in Iraq.
She reported that she has a very high “threat score” associated with her, meaning that airlines have to call up Homeland Security to get permission to let her board planes when she flies, and that she’s essentially met at the door of the plane when she returns from international travel, whereupon she’s escorted to a holding room for generally a couple of hours while passport control folks get permission to let her into the country.
When she was able to get some friends to look into why this was the case, she learned that there has been an accusation made against her, but the accuser and the nature of that accusation is classified. There’s a suspicion that it’s a documentary she shot in Iraq, one which was generally unfavorable to the administration, as she didn’t start having problems with the watch list until the documentary was released.
While I think it’s good that the government is using analytic tools to analyze risk and to focus resources where they’d be most useful… there really ought to be a way for a person to face an accusation made and have it resolved.