{"id":258,"date":"2004-09-22T19:19:00","date_gmt":"2004-09-22T19:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/security\/its_a_wild_world.html"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"1970-01-01T05:00:00","slug":"its_a_wild_world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/2004\/09\/22\/its_a_wild_world","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s a Wild World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> Does anyone else find it bizarre that so many news outlets are reporting that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mtv.com\/news\/articles\/1491275\/20040922\/stevens_cat.jhtml?headlines=true\">Cat Stevens (aka Yusuf Islam) was denied entry to the United States because he appears on a terrorist watch list<\/a> with a straight face? I know content providers pretend to separate editorial\/opinion pieces from &#8220;straight news&#8221; stories, but this one is so implausible it&#8217;s almost a sign of bias to not go into a little more detail about the absurdity of it. At least <a href=\"http:\/\/news.mainetoday.com\/apwire\/D858OIF80-265.shtml\">this AP story printed in the Portland Maine Press Herald<\/a> includes the statement that officials &#8220;said Islam was denied entry on national security grounds, but had no details about why the peace activist might be considered a risk to the United States.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p> A couple of comments on this case, in the form of rhetorical questions. I realize I&#8217;m not the first person to ask these questions: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How is it that someone can be so dangerous that they shouldn&#8217;t be allowed on an airplane nor permitted to enter US borders, but harmless enough that they can&#8217;t be arrested or detained? If we&#8217;re so worried about them, why do we let them go once we have them in our clutches? If they&#8217;re a risk to airplane flights, why aren&#8217;t they also a risk to subways, baseball stadiums, and Britney Spears concerts?<\/li>\n<li>With all these &#8220;false positives&#8221; (i.e., clearly harmless people appearing on security watch lists, including, for example <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/2004\/08\/20\/senator_kennedy_on_n.html\">Senator Ted Kennedy<\/a>), isn&#8217;t our confidence in the whole system shot? If every third person to walk through a bomb detector sets off the alarm, aren&#8217;t the guards eventually going to just ignore the alarm? Have we reached the point where the secret terrorism watch lists and no-fly lists are so voluminous as to be useless?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Does anyone else find it bizarre that so many news outlets are reporting that Cat Stevens (aka Yusuf Islam) was denied entry to the United States because he appears on a terrorist watch list with a straight face? I know content providers pretend to separate editorial\/opinion pieces from &#8220;straight news&#8221; stories, but this one is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}