It was originally marketed as people directly involved with terrorism. "These are people who might blow up a plane." It's so much vastly bigger, it has to be some dumb trolling for data. Like lets add all the people who went to a mosque where a bad guy once went.
From the original Daily Dot article:
> The list, according to crimew, appeared to have more than 1.5 million entries in total. The data included names as well as birth dates. It also included multiple aliases, placing the number of unique individuals at far less than 1.5 million.
> On the list were several notable figures, including the recently freed Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, alongside over 16 potential aliases for him.
> The aliases comprised different, common misspellings of his last name and other versions of his first name, as well as different birthdays. Many of the birthdays aligned with the recorded date Bout was born.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/no-fly-list-us-tsa-unprotecte...
So there aren't 1.5 million people on the no fly list, but there's still a hell of a lot of people to ban secretly and arbitrarily from flying with no clear justification given and no clear way to get off the list.
That guy doesn't belong on the list. He sold weapons to terrorists, including anti-aircraft missiles, but I don't think that's a reasonable cause to believe he might attack an airplane himself. I wouldn't feel uncomfortable flying on the same plane as him.
If you're putting people on the list for other reasons, even selling weapons to terrorists, then the list is being used punitively and therefore it shouldn't be secret.
He seems like a thoroughly unpleasant man to me and I think he belongs in prison, but I don't think anything in his past suggests that he'd be a direct threat to other passengers if allowed to fly. Banning him from the country makes a lot of sense, maybe even banning him from airplanes as part of his sentence after a trial. But secret punishments are no bueno, even when the guy is a scumbag.
Why is 1M too many?
I’m not sure I follow your logic beyond it’s how you feel things should be. How did you arrive at those numbers and that conclusion?
Consider this: you can buy gun powder at walmart with cash, no ID needed, but how many pipe bombs are going off every day? It's incredibly rare. Obviously there are very few people out there with terroristic inclinations.
Expanding that we’re talking worldwide (and I bet most of the list is non-American) I feel like we could get to 50k pretty easily. The list isn’t just terrorists, but anyone who has been a real safety risk to flights (we’ve seen them in YouTube videos).
And the list accumulates year after year. I wonder how many are dead?
> Worrying about terrorism is extremely foolish.
I'm not debating the merit of the list or terrorism policy. But if you have a list in the first place then it's illogical to say its size should be relative to the number of successful terrorist attacks on planes. Not without more information about the distribution of terrorism inclination in the population.
I can’t think of a time where a way to take away rights without judicial overview wasnt massively abused, often to target politically disfavored groups.
Look at asset forfeiture and police robbing cash on highways.
By my back of the envelope math, there are ~0 American planes being blown out of the sky on an annual basis. Nor am I even hearing reports of attempts to do such things (the FBI loves to pat themselves on the back after they catch a terrorist they recruited, trained, and supplied just before the act was supposed to occur).