The No Fly List, according to me, is discriminatory in nature. This is because most of the victims who are found in this list are there because of their names. The whole list of the victims on the No Fly List has their rights denied. They are treated as guilty even before there is a proper investigation undertaken. There is no due process at is taken to prove that they are innocent. Most of the victims are Muslims and they are denied their rights to freely move within and outside the United States. Barring someone because of their religious affiliations is discriminatory. Most of the members in the list did not know how they found their names in the list. They have been locked in foreign countries without the permission to travel in those countries. This is discriminatory and denies these victims their freedom to interact with members of their faiths. Many of the members are permanent and lawful citizens of the United States. There are many of them who are veteran members of the US army (Holmes, 2009). There are some individuals in these lists who find themselves on the list because their names match some in the list. There are members in the list who have died and their names have not been deleted from the list. This is unfair and discriminatory to those who have similar names. They will be victimized for nothing. This is discrimination and denial of access to freedom of travel. Those who find themselves on the list while they are still in the United States are denied rights to travel outside the United States. They are denied rights and access to education and jobs outside the United States. This is not constitutional as the constitution allows one the right to travel in search of employment as long as they do so lawfully. There are members of the list who found their names in the list while they were in foreign countries. These people have had their rights of travel violated. They have been exiled in these foreign countries. They are denied their rights to interact and be with their families. From time to time, these victims are innocent and find it hard to find out the reasons for their inclusion into the list. This process has been made harder by the government (Florence, 2006).
The No Fly List is not the best airlines defense programs. I do not agree with the statement. This is because there are many flaws that are found in the program. One of the flaws is that there are many people who are in the lists and yet they have long died. There are also criminals who are not on the list. The basis for the membership is majorly religion. There is no vetting of individuals before they are listed in the list. I strongly believe that if a criminal finds that his name is in the list, they will forge their way by using other means and get false identification documents. This makes the list not a strong defense. Unless false pretense and personifications can be eradicated, this is no strong defense for the airlines. There is a need to have a probe into how people are suspected to be terrorist groups (Ross, 2010). I strongly believe that it will be one of the best defenses for the airline industry if these flaws are eradicated. The duplicate names should be removed and the names of the dead should also be removed from the list. This will eradicate the discriminatory nature of the list. It will be one of the best defenses if it is improved. The government of the United States has also not provided the victims whose names are on the list the process and the right to find out the reasons they are in the list. They find it hard to challenge t decision because the government has denied these processes to the victims (Donnelly, 2004).
I agree with the statement that the No Fly List is costly, prone to false positives and is easily defeated. It is costly because of the legal fees for the victims who seek legal redress when they are accused falsely. The government pays for the defense lawyers who are in courts most of the time to defend the government. There are court proceedings everywhere. These court proceedings take place in many different countries. The government spends lots of resources in interrogating and searching for victims whose names appear in the list and yet they have been declared innocent in other places. This is one way in which he program can be said to be costly. There is no way of leaving those who have already been declared as innocent in other places. The victims whose names are in the No flying List have not been described further. It is hard for the people in the airports to identify and prove that the person on the list is indeed the victim they are searching. There are no further descriptions regarding the physical features, date of birth or religion of the person. In this case, there are many false positives that come from the process because of the lack of detailed information. There are also false positives that arise from the No Fly List. This is because most innocent victims who have the same names turn out to be the wrong people.
Most of those suspected are suspected and denied travel rights but eventually turn out that they bear the same names as the culprits. There should be other means of identification apart from using names alone. There should be use of other distinctive means like using biometric identification to get culprits. There is another form of false positive in that most of the victims are from one religion, Islam. Victims may be victimized because they are from this religion. In the end, most of the victims are found to be innocent citizens. There is also another source of false positive where there are many duplicated names in the list. His has led to people being victimized because they bear the same names. Most of the time, the law enforcers will assume that there are many people who are victims who have been put on the list and have the same name. Those who happen to have the same name will be victimized for nothing. They will be released after it is known that it was just another case of duplicate names in the list. After all these faults have been identified, they are defeated when closely scrutinized. Most of the time, the victims seek legal redress and in most of the times, they are found to be innocent. They are found to be victims because of the names or religions they profess (Friscolanti, & Patriquin, 2008).
References
Donnelly, S. B. (2004, October). Should the No-Fly List be grounded? Time, 16, p. 17. Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171, 995387,00.html
Florence, J. (2006). Making the no fly list fly: A due process model for terrorist watchlists. The Yale Law Journal, 2148-2181.
Friscolanti, M., & Patriquin, M. (2008). Caught in the no-fly web. Maclean's, 121(37), 50–52.
Holmes, M. (2009). Just How Much Does That Cost, Anyway? An Analysis of the Financial Costs and Benefits of the No-Fly List. OHIO STATE UNIV COLUMBUS.
Ross, B. (2010). Why no-fly? Nightline ABC, p.1–1.
