Continental's good deed

Today, Wired posted a story about the travelers' watch lists kept by various governmental agencies and airlines. The story highlights cases of mistaken identities between legitimate and illegitimate travelers. The article highlights the story of Princeton professor Walter Murphy, "one of the nation's most respected constitutional law professors," who was put on a watch list--even though he is not a threat to the U.S. Here's the good news: In February, the Department of Homeland Security set up a new webpage that allows people to "resolve possible watch list misidentification issues." But the process isn't as effective as many people would like it... It's unnerving to be pulled aside by passport control officials, as I can say from personal experience.... My name comes up on at least one of the U.S. government watch lists. It seems that my name and birth-date are shared by someone on a watch list who is alarming to U.S. officials. Whenever I return from a trip overseas, I'm taken aside by passport control officials. The delays can be inconvenient. My most recent visit with passport control officers lasted more than 80 minutes. Now if an 80-minute per trip delay were the price of liberty, I'd accept it quietly. But I bet that my predicament is due to a bureaucratic snafu that could be quickly resolved. And, as Wired's article points out, thousands of people appear to be wrongly identified as potential threats. One of the travelers quoted in Wired's article says, "It was unnerving sitting in that little room even for a short period of time. You get a sense of what people who are not senators and not citizens go through." How true. When I was pulled into a passport control office this past February at J.F.K. airport, I wasn't the only guy there. One of the other travelers was an elderly man who spoke a foreign language that none of the officials in the room spoke. One of the officials joked that they'd have to detain him indefinitely, and the others laughed. The elderly man may not have spoken English, but he knew they were laughing at him.

I was in L.A. for a conference of travel editors, and at times it was a bummer. Not the editors--they were lovely. But most are editors of newspaper travel sections, and newspapers have been having a tough time lately (in part because so many people are getting their news from TV and the Internet). At the beginning of the conference, everyone got a chance to say how things were going, and many of them had grim reports: shrinking budgets, fewer pages, layoffs and buyouts... It was depressing, and not just because they're good people getting a raw deal. When I got to see the kind of work the various editors were doing--everyone handed out samples--I was incredibly impressed. They deserve praise and support. I'm sure that the newspapers' management think that travel is somehow not as important as so-called hard news, and that's a shame. If you like your local newspaper's travel section, I hope you'll consider sending the travel editor--and the managing editors--a note saying so.

I'm just back from L.A.--managed to get home yesterday despite the hideous weather. I'd been to L.A. a few times since the Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in 2003, but I'd never visited it. I went on a tour this trip, and was just blown away. You can't really understand the power of Frank Gehry's building until you stand next to it. (This is probably true of the Guggenheim Bilbao, too, but I have yet to make it there...) Next time I'm in L.A., I'll absolutely go to a concert at the concert hall, but I'd encourage anyone and everyone to take the tour (from $12) even if they don't have performance tickets. Info on tours is available here.