The whole point, as far as I'm concerned, is there are 700,000 people being inconvenienced (close friends of mine - she's Persian, he's Moroccan - are on that list and lemme tell ya, it's not a transparent thing), persecuted and otherwise hassled and the list isn't even good enough to flag someone for "hey maybe we ought to watch this guy more closely." If it can't do that, what is it doing, exactly? It's not like maintaining a database of three quarters of a million potential terrorists is free or easy. there's money and effort being spent there. What's the point? I thought if we had people on watch lists, they were being "watched." Now it appears that they're not "watch" lists but "black" lists, which in the case of an extremist who feels persecuted for his race or religious identity, can only fuel the fire. Terrorists aren't 3rd-worlders from Waziristan, they're educated and disaffected young men who grow up surrounded by privilege they can't partake in. In this case, that "watch" list isn't just useless, it's actually harmful.