Privacy Digest

NPR : Inside the Terrorist Screening Center: The Terrorist Watch List that was formed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is the responsibility of the Terrorist Screening Center. The Center, run by the FBI, compiles the watch list and tracks suspected terrorists in the United States. Dina Temple-Raston is the first journalist ever allowed inside the center.

To visit the Terrorist Screening Center, you have to make some promises. The first is not to divulge where the center is — aside from saying it is in a secure location in Northern Virginia. A reporter has never been allowed inside the center, and NPR was not allowed to record the analysts who work there, in case someone said something that was classified.

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Share within the community, that is. Average Americans have a dearth of information about the watchlist. For example, the TSC won't say how big it actually is. Most informed unofficial estimates put the total at several hundred thousand people.

What is more certain is the number of hits the TSC gets from the list and its link with local law enforcement. In 2004, the year the TSC opened its doors, it had some 5,400 hits. This year, the FBI expects to log more than 22,000.

Those kinds of numbers worry civil liberties advocates like David Sobel, the senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"The bottom-line problem is the government since 9-11 has gotten into the business of making lists of suspicious people," he says. "This has happened without much discussion of the criteria or how affected people might get some recourse and get their names off if they mistakenly have been put on such a list."

Theorectically, the names that go on the watch list are put there based on rigorous — but classified — criteria. Boyle says the TSC won't tell anyone whether they are on the list, but it has set up a redress unit to help people who say they have been mistakenly included.

"What we can do for people if they are being misidentified — we can give them information to help them avoid or minimize the inconvenience that they face," he says.

(Read Original Article - Via NPR.)