Not the one’s you might be thinking of…the TSA has accidentally revealed that they are using a terrorist threat scale formula to permanently rate anyone who travels. They assign a value to every passenger, according to this AP article:

The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments, which the government intends to keep on file for 40 years.

The scores are assigned to people entering and leaving the United States after computers assess their travel records, including where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.

Diabetic meals probably have a negative value that could cancel out motor vehicle issues. I wonder if they plan on storing this type of information in the electronic passports. If they rank all of this personal information in order to create a digest score, it basically becomes the full identity of a person, only numeric and relative (pun not intended). “Hi, my name’s Joe, but my score is 42.32672. What’s your score?”

I thought this comment on Bruce’s blog was actually quite good:

I am an underage illegal immigrant, but I’ve lived here in the United States for most of my life, and my parents have worked very hard to do everything right, and to this day they have not broken any laws, or been in any type of legal matter. I just think it is unfair that I’m treated the way I am. Yes this isn’t my native country, but it’s not my fault that I’m here. I was bought here as a child, and couldn’t fight my parents decision. It was come or die, and I mean to everyone, no matter were you’re from, life is something presious. I’m a great student in school, and no one can tell me apart from an illegal immigrant, or if I was born here. Why not? Because just like everyone else I want to be someone in life.

A fine contrast to the stories of twilight roundups by the “ICE” squads.