Emergent Chaos

Ryan Singel opens an excellent article "Feds' Watch List Easts Its Own," with a pertinent question. The article is worth reading for its enumeration of how the watch list catches senior military and State Department officials, who also can't get off the list. It opens:

What do you say about an airline screening system that tends to mistake government employees and U.S. servicemen for foreign terrorists?

Well, at least it's catching someone.

Because the sad truth is, the no-fly list hasn't snagged a single real terror suspect. If it had, we'd have heard about it.