http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/02/aclu_warns_of_terrorwatch_list.html#moreACLU warns of terror-watch list inflation
by Frank James
The American Civil Liberties Union is warning today that by July there could be as many as one million names in terrorist watch-list databases maintained by the federal government, with many of the names those of innocent people who get repeatedly hassled by additional security scrutiny when they attempt to fly.
To reinforce its point, the ACLU has a website with a counter (odometer-like counters are very popular with advocacy groups in Washington) which provides a visual reminder of how large the watch lists are.
Here's part of what the ACLU said in its release:
“At the current rate of growth, the U.S. watch lists will contain a million records by July. If there were a million terrorists in this country, our cities would be in ruins,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program. “The absurd bloating of the terrorist watch lists is yet another example of how incompetence by our security apparatus threatens our rights without offering any real security.”
The new counter features a rolling, odometer-style display with a real-time readout showing how many individuals are on the list at a given moment. The figures are extrapolated from a September 2007 report by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, which reported that the Terrorist Screening Center had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007, and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month. As of today, the list stands at approximately 917,000 names.
“Homeland Security’s handling of the watch lists is typical of this administration’s blundering approach to the war on terror,” said ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel Tim Sparapani. “Create sprawling new systems for sifting through the population, throw an indiscriminately broad range of names into the mix, fairly or not, and treat the rights of innocent people as an afterthought.”
The watch lists are used for a growing array of purposes, most notably for subjecting domestic airline passengers to additional screening (and often far more intense law enforcement scrutiny), selecting individuals for scrutiny and interrogation at the nation’s borders, and for excluding people from the country entirely. The ACLU criticism makes sense. Lists that have as many non-terrorists on them as those maintained by the federal government aren't very sensitive.
When you're stopping Sen.Edward Kennedy from boarding a flight because his name popped up on a terrorism watch list, as was once the case, you're obviously wasting valuable resources and may actually be making it more likely that you miss an actual terrorist threat.
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