After the failed attempt to blow up the Northwest Airlines Flight 253 that departed from Amsterdam on Christmas Eve of 2009, one question arose time after time: how did the alleged bomber manage to board the plane? An extraordinary simple and straight answer is that the suspect was actually included in one of the several currently existing terrorism databases but not particularly in the so-called American ‘No-Fly List’. Indeed, several records are simultaneously kept by the American Government, and although sometimes their contents overlap, sometimes they do not. To achieve a clear outlook of what these lists are and how they work, those databases – along with the one currently in effect in Canada – are revised in this article.
Air and Space Law