I'm just sayin' - when HIS OWN FATHER (an ex-government official and prominent citizen) calls up and says his son has developed EXTREME VIEWS and might be in YEMEN, SOMEBODY NEEDS TO PAY ATTENTION! WTF??
This is an excerpt from the NY Times article:
... A law enforcement official said it was not unusual that a one-time comment from a relative would not place a person on the far smaller no-fly list, which has only 4,000 names, or the so-called selectee list of 14,000 names of people who are subjected to more thorough searches at checkpoints.
The point of the Tide database, the official said, is to make sure even the most minor suspicious details are recorded so that they can be connected to new data in the future.
“The information goes in there, and it’s available to all the agencies,” the official said. “The point is to marry up data from different sources over time that may indicate an individual might be a terrorist.”(www.nytimes.com)
This was a bit more than one random comment by A relative, and though privacy is important, shouldn't a one way overseas ticket with no baggage just by sheer oddity raise at least one red flag? Obviously their Tide database is not as interactive as it should be and is not to be counted on as an important working part of 'the system'. The 'system' didn't work, but rather, the system was dependent on diligent passengers acting above what should be assumed behavior - thankfully! Perhaps too, we might have been fortunate that due to such in-climate weather, many flights were cancelled. We'll likely never know.