The brilliant DHS / TSA no-fly list strikes again - in this case the dangerous individual suspected of being a terrorist was a 9-month-old baby - apparently they train 'em young these days.

An article from Reuters reports that Sarah Zapolsky was checking in for a flight to Italy when she discovered her 9-month-old son's name was on the United States' "no-fly" list of suspected terrorists. "We pointed down to the stroller, and he sat there and gurgled," Zapolsky said, recalling the incident at Dulles International Airport outside Washington in July. "The desk agent started laughing. ... She couldn't print us out a boarding pass because he's on the no-fly list."

Zapolsky said she was initially amused by the mix-up. "But when I found out you can't actually get off the list, I started to get a bit annoyed."

This is just another example of how severely flawed the TSA's no-fly list is, and to make matters worse, once you're on the list you can never be removed. According to the TSA, more than 28,000 people have applied to the TSA redress office to get on the 'cleared list', which takes note of individuals whose names are similar to those on the terrorism watch list, but does not guarantee an end to no-fly list hassles (and does not remove their name from the no-fly list). The TSA does not reveal how many or which names are actually on the list, and complaints do not get names removed since they refer to suspected terrorists. The best innocent travelers can hope for is a letter from the TSA which the TSA says should facilitate travel, however John Graham, a 63-year-old former State Department official, said his TSA letter had not helped at all.

Nobody is safe from this victimization either - in addition to babies, the victims of mistaken identity on the no-fly list have included public figures such as Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts (there's some karma for you), Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska and Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia.

TSA spokesman Christopher White said the agency had seven people working full-time on processing applications to get on the cleared list. Wow really, seven whole people? gee.. Considering the number of applications, that works out to more than 4,000 complaints per redress officer. "We do take the cleared list very seriously, and it's also important for us to focus on the right people. It does us no good to focus on the wrong John Doe," White said.

So why is the TSA still harassing babies and US Senators when it's more than obvious they are not terrorists? The American Civil Liberties Union calls the no-fly list system unconstitutional, saying it treats people as guilty without a trial and unfairly deprives them of freedoms. It also says the system is an inaccurate and ineffective security method.

A big problem is that if a name is on the list, everyone in the US with the same name is stopped - regardless of whether they're a US Senator or a 9-month-old baby - and that's where this list becomes so ridiculously ineffective, particularly when the TSA refuses to remove names and continually victimizes innocent individuals who have already proved their innocence when boarding previous flights.

Peter Johnson, a retired bibliographer at Princeton University, said travel became 'hellish' after he discovered his name was on the no-fly list in August 2004. "I'm not sure if what's behind this is an effort to simply control people or if it's largely mismanagement and poorly conceptualized programming," Johnson said, adding a TSA official had told him there were more than 2,000 other Peter Johnsons in the United States who reported similar problems.

Sources estimate the no-fly list includes tens of thousands of names, if not more. How comforting.

Based on this information, the no-fly list must easily take up thousands of additional hours of TSA labor every week with the time taken to verify the innocence of false positives, yet the TSA hires only seven people to process the 'cleared list'? Looking at this purely on a financial operational level, there is obviously a huge disparity here, yet the TSA continues to be obtuse about the whole matter. Actually this doesn't surprise me all that much - often paramilitary-style organizations do not allow room for common sense - you are not paid to think, and policy is policy no matter how utterly ridiculous it may be. The TSA certainly falls in to this category, unfortunately it is the general public that have to suffer for it - and the taxpayers who fund it.