Originally posted by: wetech
Originally posted by: jpeyton
Agreed on all counts. A list is necessary, but detaining 6 year old children, Senators, and a dozen guys named Robert Johnson is a huge waste of resources. God knows where they are digging up 20,000 names per month to add to the list, but it's clear that this list needs some serious oversight before it grows out of hand.
Text
In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) 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.1
At that rate, our list will have a million names on it by July. If there were really that many terrorists running around, we'd all be dead.
Terrorist watch lists must be tightly focused on true terrorists who pose a genuine threat. Bloated lists are bad because
* they ensnare many innocent travelers as suspected terrorists, and
* because they waste screeners' time and divert their energies from looking for true terrorists.
Small, focused watch lists are better for civil liberties and for security.
The uncontroversial contention that Osama Bin Laden and a handful of other known terrorists should not be allowed on an aircraft is being used to create a monster that goes far beyond what ordinary Americans think of when they think about a "terrorist watch list."
This is not just a problem of numbers. The numbers are merely a symptom. What's needed is fairness. If the government is going to rely on these kinds of lists, they need checks and balances to ensure that innocent people are protected. (See ACLU Backgrounder on Watch Lists for more)
Wow, and you guys accuse the gov't of fear mongering and distorting facts. The ACLU is using
this report as the basis for their numbers. The report does not say that there are 700k names in the database, but 700k
records. Reading the report (page 32):
The reported figure represents the number of records in the system. This does not equate to the number of known or suspected terrorists in the system as a single person may have multiple records to account for the use of aliases, alternate identities, and multiple identifying documents. As such, the number of records generally will be larger than the number of suspected or known terrorists on the watchlist.
And then:
According to TSC officials, there were approximately 150,000 records in the TSDB in April 2004.27 TSC data indicate that by July 2004 the number of records had increased to about 225,000 records, representing approximately 170,000 unique terrorist identities.
So if we assume the same percentage can apply (about 1.3 records for each unique identity), the 700k records account for about 540k identities. It looks like 1 person can have multiple identities (aliases, etc), so the actual number of people on the list is actually less.
Originally posted by: Skoorb
Bloody hell. I knew this government was incompetent, but this will be one out of 300 people on a terrorist watch list. Considering the US is attacked by less terrorists in a given decade than shark attacks, I think that's fvckin absurd.
The database doesn't just cover the US.
The vast majority of these records are international terrorist records ? less than 1 percent of records related to the identities of suspected domestic terrorists.
So it's not 1 in 300 people. If you're looking at just domestic, it's more like 1 in 55,000 (540k identities * 1% / 300mm)
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