On adding more trouble to existing trouble

I can't resist commenting on this news item: Delta Air Lines wants to make disruptive customers eligible for an FBI watch list that keeps suspected terrorists off flights.

Really?? The "no fly" list and the "terrorist watch" lists have been an impenetrable, arbitrary, biased morass since they were expanded in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The government won't reveal who is on these lists, how a person might get off them -- essentially anything that might uphold a personal "right to travel."

Adding airline customers who act out on flights would only make a dubious instrument that even less creditable and equitable.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg knows a questionable idea when he encounters one:

“Obviously, there are enormous implications in terms of civil liberties, in terms of how you administer something like that. I mean even when it was over terrorism, it was not a simple thing to set up.”

I understand an airline might want to toss this hot potato off to the feds, but I doubt they'll pick it up. Unless perhaps one of these traveling idiots assaults a powerful Senator. Bashing a flight attendant is one thing; messing with a pol, another thing.

Perhaps Buttigieg's department can work through the Federal Aviation Administration to make it easier for airlines to bring criminal charges against unruly passengers. It's not only good business to keep flights peaceful -- it should also be enforceable law.

Full disclosure: This issue is personal for me. Erudite Partner and I were told at the San Francisco airport in 2002 that we were on the no fly list. Through the ACLU, we sought disclosure about this secret list in a federal suit that dragged on through 2006. The government never revealed why we'd been stopped but neither of us subsequently had additional trouble and the ACLU was awarded court costs in the lawsuit.