David Nelson, last time he checked, is a 56-year-old investment broker from Barrington, a father of three grown children, an avid Cubs fan and, by his own assessment, a pretty decent golfer.
He is not, to the best of his knowledge, a terrorist.
Neither is David Nelson, the Northwestern University journalism professor. Or David Nelson, the Oregon state senator. Or even David Nelson, the exceptionally non-threatening high school guidance counselor from rural north-central Wisconsin.
Yet all four David Nelsons, and hundreds of others across the country, are having a heck of a time getting on planes these days. They’re being pulled from ticket lines, quizzed about their identities, asked to unpack their bags and told to slowly pull each ID and credit card from their wallets.
“I asked for an explanation and they said, `Your name is on a terrorist list,'” said Nelson, the investment broker. “That’s when I started to realize I had a problem.”
The root of that problem lies with the computers that some airlines use to cross-check passenger lists with the Transportation Security Administration’s list of suspected terrorists.
These computers will sometimes throw up a red flag when a passenger name is similar to a name on the “no-fly list,” or even if the name of the passenger and the name of the suspected terrorist share only a few common letters.
TSA officials will not say whether a suspected terrorist named David Nelson exists. But they do say that deficiencies in airline computer systems have allowed innocent people–from passengers with Arabic names to two California peace activists named Rebecca Gordon and Janet Adams–to be inadvertently flagged as posing what the TSA defines as a threat.
By next summer, a new system will be in place that will allow TSA to do all the cross-checking itself, and federal officials say that change should make life easier on both airlines and passengers.
Opponents of the no-fly list, however, say the David Nelson phenomenon is a compelling, albeit somewhat amusing, example of the fallibility of wide-sweeping airline security measures in the post-Sept. 11 age. For some, it raises disconcerting questions about what names and information the government is harboring in the name of national security.
“We’re troubled by the notion that there is this secret list that exists, where nobody knows the criteria for someone being placed on the list,” said Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.
“That’s a troubling performance of government and performance of power. I think what you see in this particular instance is that they don’t really add anything to our safety. We’re not more secure because David Nelson can’t fly.”
According to a number of frequent-flying Nelsons, the delays range from 15 minutes to a half-hour and have never caused them to miss a flight. It did create a few moments of panic, however, for a 57-year-old Nelson who recently accompanied a group of 40 students on a trip to New York.
The crowd of kids from Owen-Withee High School in Owen, Wis., passed through a security checkpoint at the Minneapolis airport, with their guidance counselor, David Nelson, pulling up the rear. When Nelson tried to pass through, he was stopped, then kept apart from the students for about 15 minutes.
“It really made it very difficult to supervise them,” Nelson said. “They’re pretty good kids, but we’re from rural Wisconsin. Half our kids had never even flown before.”
Nelson was thoroughly searched and questioned in Minneapolis and Chicago, and again at New York’s LaGuardia Airport on the way back.
At first he found it a bit amusing, but by the end he was downright confused why he was being singled out.
“I’m a 57-year-old Scandinavian,” Nelson said. “I don’t think I fit too many terrorist profiles.”
Sen. David Nelson of Oregon said he and his wife now expect long security delays whenever they go to the airport: “My wife just says, `David, you’re on your own.'”
“The part I don’t like is basically they can track me,” Nelson said. “They can tell what I’m doing, where I’m flying, wherever I’m going. If I’m not the person they’re looking for, why do they need to keep track of me?”
David Nelson, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, said he’s been delayed at least three different times, though it hasn’t happened to him for several months.
“After the last time it happened, a flight attendant came up as a courtesy and handed me a chilled bottle of chardonnay,” Nelson said. “I said, `This is nice, but it’s 10 o’clock in the morning.'”
To address the David Nelson predicament, the TSA has provided a phone number–571-227-2383–to their ombudsman’s office.
TSA spokesman Brian Turmail said the office will help the David Nelsons of the world fill out a “passenger identification verification form” with information such as their Social Security number, address and date of birth.
Once the TSA is satisfied with the information, it is kept on file to ensure that the person won’t be hassled on future trips, Turmail said.
Though much less publicized, the TSA has provided the same service for members of the Islamic community.
Earlier this month, the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, announced that passengers who have been delayed because of the no-fly list can clear their names through the ombudsman’s office.
“We just wanted to, in this case, allow law-abiding Muslim and Arab travelers to go about their business without having the weight of the FBI and local law enforcement fall on them each time they approach a ticket counter,” said council spokesman Ibrahim Hooper.
“The problem is nowadays, security trumps everything, trumps civil rights, trumps due process. Whenever we try to defend civil rights or due process, they say we’re against security,” he said.
For better or worse, the ACLU’s Yohnka said, the David Nelson situation has drawn considerable attention to the controversial no-fly list, and guaranteed that people will remain watchful of the methods government is using to ensure airline safety.
“It’s interesting to me that David Nelson was the name, and these were the people that made folks wake up and pay attention to this list,” Yohnka said. “There are a whole lot of people who have Arab and Muslim names that have been getting harassed since 9/11. We should not think that David Nelson from middle America is the first person getting harassed as a result of this policy.”
For his part, David Nelson of Barrington, the Cubs fan with three children, is content to live with the inconvenience, and sympathizes with the monumental task the government faces in trying to keep air travel safe.
“I’m happy to be doing this,” Nelson said. “I’d rather have them err on the side of extra security. I’m happy to go through this until they get it worked out.”
In the meantime, the attention has turned Nelson into a bit of a celebrity. He was interviewed recently by Brian Williams on the cable news station CNBC.
The next day Nelson had to catch a flight out of Chicago and he was, predictably, stopped for a thorough security screening. As he walked into the security area, one of the guards recognized him.
“He goes, `Hey, you’re the David Nelson that was on TV last night,'” Nelson said, chuckling. “I said, `Yeah, I guess I am.'”
