Terrorist/No fly watchlist

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Has anyone noticed that they have to be on one of these lists?

My name is so rare google search yields only results that are about me so I know I don't just share a name with a trouble maker.

However out of 9 flights in the past 2 years, I was selected for the "100% entirely random full search" 9 times - that includes searches in Canada, Netherlands, and Spain in addition to the US.

Do you really think that's random? I mean what are the odds of that?

are you non-white, visited the Middle East or South Asian, non-christian, member of the American Democratic, Green, or Non-Republican party, active in peace or environmental groups, or just gave the Customs agents a hard time or just have a strange name? Nowadays, there's no telling who gets on or not, I think they use the same people as they do for your credit scores...

sorry to hear about that. Maybe this will all change on Jan 20....

Nope, I'm a white 5'1 woman who is often mistaken for a 14 year old.


Hmmm, actually that might be the problem now that I think about. They look at my boarding pass and see "26 years old" and think I must be using a fake id

Though the Canadians didn't trust even after a full search. The Edmonton airport is so small everyone waits in the same area. About 10 minutes after I sat down a guard came out with a bomb/drug sniffing dog and led him straight to me - he didn't walk the dog around anywhere else. But the only thing the guard learned from doing that is that the dog was interested in the person next to me's sandwich

I didn't know about google searches. How do they know our names in the first place to do a search on it?


My family has been pulled over to check our stuff out when we were going home from Arizona. They even had to open my wallet and dump out my change, open my bag and look at all my GBA games. They even turned on my Dad's laptop. It was so annoying for my whole family. My dad told me they randomly check people like that and we happened to be picked. That is another reason why we arrive at the airport early.

No I mean when I do a google search of my first and last name there are only 20 results all of which apply to me. Which is odd considering neither name is uncommon.

actually i must be on the terrorist watch list.


I just read this article about people on the list not being able to check in without an agent. http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/19/tsa.wa ... index.html

That happens to me to - its happened since 2005. I had a flight to and from new england that I was fine with but every flight after that there has been some problem, though it was always explained to me as something like I showed up at the airport to early before my flight (apparently you can't check in more than 2 1/2 hours before your planes due departure in edmonton), a delay meant they were redirecting passengers of that flight to other planes, people traveling out of the country or on the waiting list for the next available flight are not permitted to check in to the airport without an agent (is that true?), and similar stories.

hmmm, I wonder what I did between that new england flight and the one I took 6 months later to edmonton that raised the red flags. i don't recall writing to any politician and as far as I know I didn't attend any terrorist group meetings. maybe it was registering my own website about photographs of animals that a friend took. You know how those terrorists like to go out, pretend to be doctoral students researching animal behavior, make recordings of that animal behavior, and then publish their findings under the guise of studies about animal behavior all the time.

Is it possible atypical presentation has triggered someone's attention due to profiling? A lot of 'every-day autistic' behaviours are mentioned as cause for suspicion in terms of profiling airplane passengers (stimming, lack of eye contact, non-typical communication etc).

I suspect that once someone triggers further attention as a result of their presentation/behaviour at the airport being consistent with one or more item in the profile tools being used (to screen passengers), that perhaps even if nothing is found, if those involved in singling you out and investigating whether or not you are up to something untoward still feel suspicious about you, that might result in something being tagged to your identity so that from then on you might be a person of interest every time you attempt to fly.

Personally I hope it's a coincidence and you can fly in the future without being subjected to these intrusions and hassles, but it does seem unlikely that it is merely coincidence. It's certainly reasonable to wonder why supposedly random checks seem to uniformly entail you.

And this is why I want to move.

I think they pull you out if you look any way unconvential. From what we know from the people we know, guys with long hair and/or beards always seem to get searched at Customs in the UK. As my husband is in this category, it's shoes off every time we go through Heathrow. SeaTac was a lot quicker, but it's also a much smaller and less busy airport. I've heard certain airports in the US (notably JFK) are worse for security checks than others, but not having been through any others I couldn't say.

How would they know you're a Christian by appearance? Or republican? Or whatever the heck?

The canadian search was the funniest. The woman was very terse until.......she discovered that my backpack was full of tampons and pads. Her demeanor changed immediately upon seeing that.