Terrorist Watch List Hits 1 Million
March 11th, 2009You want growth? We got growth.
Via: USA Today:
The government’s terrorist watch list has hit 1 million entries, up 32% since 2007.
Federal data show the rise comes despite the removal of 33,000 entries last year by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center in an effort to purge the list of outdated information and remove people cleared in investigations.
It’s unclear how many individuals those 33,000 records represent — the center often uses multiple entries, or “identities,” for a person to reflect variances in name spellings or other identifying information. The remaining million entries represent about 400,000 individuals, according to the center.
The new figures were provided by the screening center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to requests from USA TODAY.
“We’re continually trying to improve the quality of the information,” says Timothy Edgar, a civil liberties officer at the intelligence director’s office. “It’s always going to be a work in progress.”
People put on the watch list by intelligence and law enforcement agencies can be blocked from flying, stopped at borders or subjected to other scrutiny. About 95% of the people on the list are foreigners, the FBI says, but it’s a source of frequent complaints from U.S. travelers.
In the past two years, 51,000 people have filed “redress” requests claiming they were wrongly included on the watch list, according to the Department of Homeland Security. In the vast majority of cases reviewed so far, it has turned out that the petitioners were not actually on the list, with most having been misidentified at airports because their names resembled others on it.
There have been 830 redress requests since 2005 where the person was, in fact, confirmed to be on the watch list, and further review by the screening center led to the removal of 150, or 18% of them.
Without specific rules for who goes on the list, it’s too bloated to be effective, says Tim Sparapani, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.
A 2007 audit by the Government Accountability Office said more needed to be done to ensure the list’s accuracy, but still found that it has “enhanced the U.S. government’s counterterrorism efforts.”
I have advised all my friends with sons and daughters approaching potential military age to get their children added to the list. Then, in the event these young people are foolish enough to be conned by military recruiters, the potential “cannon fodder” will not be able to board an aircraft to get to “boot camp.” It may save many lives and parents a lifetime of heartache.
The adult population of the US is 218 million. So, nearly one in every 200 adults is on the list.
This must include just about every US adult who has every publicly expressed an opinion that could be construed as disloyalty to the State–i.e., questioned or protested or attempted to influence government actions or policies.
Several sources say that one in every 32 US adults (3.2%) is in jail or prison.
Adding these two figures together (which may be a questionable procedure), sounds like nearly one in 25 of your everyday contacts are either criminals or terrorists, if you live in the US.
I can’t find any figures on the percentage of US adults who have a prison record, but who are not currently incarcerated. Then there are the vast numbers of unapprehended criminals we know to be running our banks and corporations–besides those who I suppose are running our streets.
It is tempting to guess what percentage of the population we would be looking at, if we added together all the people who are in prison, have been in prison, would likely be in prison if they got caught, are on the terrorist watch list, and those who WOULD be on the terrorist watch list but whose thought-crimes have thus far gone undetected.
I’m thinking there are no more than four or five adults in my whole county who are not criminals or terrorists.
I’m not sure those FEMA camps are big enough.