The Department of Homeland Security must take steps to curtail the repeated interrogation of people at international airports or border posts simply because their names resemble those of terror suspects, says a report released Monday by the department’s inspector general. The problem, the report says, is not that customs officials stop and question a person whose name matches or is a close match to one of the approximately 200,000 names of known terrorists or terror suspects. What is troubling, it says, is that after individuals have been interrogated once, they are far too frequently interrogated again and again, each time they try to enter the United States. (New York Times, Tuesday)
We're the government. It's what we do.
FEE Timely Classic
This Is America? by James R. Otteson