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When I was in office, the ACL among others, who were very critical about the no

fly list. Oh, there are millions of people on it. It's terrible. It's unfair.

So finally, we declassified the number of people on the list. It was relatively

small number of few thousand and the number of individuals, most of the more

were forms, very few Americans. You'll remember in December of 2009, but then I was out of the

list. There was the underwear barmer who got on a plane in Nigeria then went to

Rotterdam switch and got on the plane because the U.S. was not on the no fly list.

The very next day, I happen to be an embassy party and a U.S. senator who I will not name,

who have been a vociferous object to the no fly program, comes up to me and says,

I don't understand why you guys don't have more people on the no fly list. In many ways, that

captures the problem. Everybody says to the intelligence community, don't do this, don't do that.

And they know that when something is missed, the very next day, they'll be asked

why you didn't do something. I'm Benjamin Widis and this is the law fair

podcast March 8, 2014. That was former DHS Secretary Michael Churdoff talking

about the frustrating bind the intelligence community is in and the whiplash it experiences

at the hands of policy makers. It was a rare moment of solid agreement between him and

Anthony Romero who heads the ACLU and who debated Churdoff at a Federalist Society event last

week in Washington. In a discussion moderated by Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post and

...