This story received a lot of coverage; the Boston Herald has a representative version. In brief: the immigration service computers crashed in the early afternoon so that incoming international passengers could not be processed - or at least, couldn’t be matched against the computerised lists of people with outstanding warrants for their arrest, known criminals and terrorists, and all those other weary, unwanted huddled masses. “You can’t just tell by looking at them,” says an immigration official quoted in the story. Yet, for many years until fairly recently that’s precisely how entry decisions were made.

There are a couple of big things here:
- a major airport’s complete inability to handle a computer crash (by all accounts, thousands of people spent 10-12 hours sitting on planes on runways waiting to be able to disembark, although as they had access to food, water, and bathrooms they may in fact have been better off than the unfortunates stuck in the crowded terminal). No back-up, no alternative.

- the cure may be worse than the disease. Some reports say that they are now considering issuing immigration personnel with laptops they can work with offline to process people if the system goes down. With, presumably, all the synchronization and other security issues involved in deploying thousands of laptops.

- the computer glitch arguably caused greater disruption than some terrorist threats.

- immigration officials are now taught to rely on the computer system and do not learn whatever skills their predecessors had. (I note however that tests at the time suggested that immigration officials were not particularly good at picking out the undesirables - or at least, no better than the college student control group ISTR they were tested against.)

- on the other hand, in the interests of controlling climate change, making flying as miserable an experience as possible might just be a very good strategy.

wg