Having recently taken to the cautiously friendly skies on a trip to Florida and, in so doing, endured the scrutiny of the Transportation Security Administration, I can say with some relief that it does not appear I am presently on any government terror watch list. (I may at one time have been on a rabble-rouser watch list, but the feds reportedly ditched that list after it grew longer than the Great Wall of China.) As a result, I was permitted to come and go without any extraordinary suspicion or examination and did not have to worry about being whisked away to the Club Dread in Guantanamo, Syria, or some other godawful locale. Tens of thousands of other innocent travelers are less fortunate than I, however, as noted in a recent article by Leslie Miller of the Associated Press:

Report: Thousands wrongly on terror list

Thousands of people have been mistakenly linked to names on terror watch lists when they crossed the border, boarded commercial airliners or were stopped for traffic violations, a government report said Friday.

More than 30,000 airline passengers have asked just one agency—the Transportation Security Administration—to have their names cleared from the lists, according to the Government Accountability Office report.

Hundreds of millions of people each year are screened against the lists by Customs and Border Protection, the State Department and state and local law enforcement agencies. The lists include names of people suspected of terrorism or of possibly having links to terrorist activity.

“Misidentifications can lead to delays, intensive questioning and searches, missed flights or denied entry at the border,� the report said. “Whether appropriate relief is being afforded these individuals is still an open question.� [full text]

Among the misidentified—who have endured Orwellian scrutiny and Kafkaesque treatment and struggled mightily to clear their names—have been the following citizens, whose tales are well worth reading and considering:

• Sister Glenn Anne McPhee, a nun and the secretary of education for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops;

• Carlos Garcia, the Superintendent of the Clark County School District in Nevada;

• Mike Hamm, an engineer and former Navy man who once held a Department of Defense security clearance.