You’re assuming US prisons. I hope I won’t be extradited.
Ordinary extradition is so rule-of-law.
Extraordinary rendition is the preferred method of the spooks.
We know that a lot of people on the list are there because of name similarity (not even identity) with someone who has been linked (not confirmed) to “terrorist related (not actual terrorist) groups.”
We know this because it’s one of the few things that’s been previously confirmed (as in, babe-in-arms on the no-fly list thanks to a name similar to an Irish separatist.)
3 Likes
I hope you’re right, but a lot of countries are trying to get ahead of the USA in that particular race. See, for instance, recent news on Australia and the UK.
1 Like
I think even there the flying cars were restricted to law enforcement, and even Decker didn’t rate.
Are you talking about the “No Fly” list or this database? They are two different things, and it appears that there isn’t even necessarily a whole lot of overlap between the two lists (as in, there are people in this database allowed to fly, and people not allowed to fly who aren’t in this database). I imagine that if there are separate records for each alias and name variant, it increases the risk of false matches, both within the system and in the creation of other databases such as the no fly list. But then, I remember immediately after 9/11 that some people were being denied access to flights because of supposed “linguistic similarities” between their names and those of the hijackers. Except that the people denied flights were Indian and not even Muslim, so the “linguistic similarities” apparently were that their names used letters or weren’t of European origin.
Pretty sure Deckard wasn’t allowed to fly because he was a replicant. Besides, if you want to see the common man flying, just go watch The Fifth Element. In it, Bruce Willis drives a flying taxi. 
2 Likes
It’s simple. Being a terrorist is the new communist scare of the 50s. To get on the list I’m sure all that has to happen is that someone reports you.
Being on a secret list; it’s what a free country is all about!
5 Likes
That’s what happens when you give people in power too much free time on their hands…
They don’t even need to get all the way to 7 billion, just within three ‘hops’ of 7 billion. Depending on what they actually consider a ‘hop’, that target number might be depressingly small.
So why aren’t more clamouring for deleting the list altogether, since it seems to hinder rather than help crime prevention?
I suspect it is defective by design, gummed up by toadies out to prove that government is the problem by making it worse until we are in the Snow Crash world after all.
Aside from consuming The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic (“not the easiest magazines to give away in prison”) nose to tail, Genis lavished the bulk of his attention on serious fiction, especially the long, difficult novels that require ample motivation and time under the best of circumstances. He read Mann, James, Melville, Musil, Naipaul. He vanquished “Vanity Fair” and “Infinite Jest.” He read, and reread, the Russians, in Russian. He kept up with Chabon, Lethem, and Houellebecq. At first, Genis resisted “Ulysses,” but his father kept bringing it. “I argued that he wouldn’t have the willpower to get through it once he became a free man,” Alexander Genis told me. The reading solidified the sometimes fragile connection between father and son. “I don’t think my dad ever really accepted the reality of my imprisonment, and the books were something we both enjoyed and could discuss without arguing,” Daniel Genis said.
And yes, he did spend time in solitary.
The seven volumes of Proust took Genis a year to finish. Much of it was spent in solitary confinement—he had been charged with “unauthorized exchange” after several prisoners “sold [him] their souls” for cups of coffee (“some Christian guards didn’t care for my sense of humor”).
4 Likes
That would be 2004, when Bush jr was re-elected. It gave them legitimacy, if only in their minds. And when spoken against, you were deemed a traitor or ant-patriot. Republicans were ever smug about winning that election, Alberto Gonzales even called it a referendum on torture.
2 Likes
Yeah… or maybe it goes back to WWII, when the US government convinced most of the world they were the good guys, despite Dresden, Horishima, Nagasaki, etc, etc, etc…
Fuck international law, I think was the gist. Civilisation’s been broken from the outset.
Anyone want to bet that just posting to the BoingBoing BBS is enough to land you on the list?
3 Likes
Heck, just reading it is enough to be labeled “tragically hip.”
I think the problem is that revealing their sources and methods would be inextricably linked with losing face.
If they reveal how haphazard, unreliable, politically and racially motivated, and generally kafkaesque those sources and methods are, they will look like tragicomic figures cut from the film Idiocracy for not being plausible enough.
2 Likes
Sif we sren’t all just operating on the assumption it’s as utterly half-arsed and bogus as the NSA, the TSA, the DEA, the ETC…
1 Like
Come on, we were promised flying cars in Back to the Future 2 in 1985. Actually, according to that movie, we should have them by next year.
