One Million Terrorists!

America has one million terrorists, or will in July when the DHS watch list will grow to one million names. Somehow that doesn't seem quite right. [Link]

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)

They've had five years to get this right. Why haven't they? They say they need to have the list this broad to protect us, but there are far too many false positives. I don't see it getting better anytime soon, though.