Report: FBI Mishandles Terror Watch List

Submitted by MacRonin on May 6, 2009 - 8:41pm

Report: FBI Mishandles Terror Watch List: Via Threat Level.

The FBI can’t figure out the right way to add or remove suspected terrorists from the country’s unified terrorist watch list, subjecting citizens to unjustified scrutiny from government officials and possibly putting the country at risk, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog said Wednesday in a new report.

“We found that the FBI failed to nominate many subjects in the terrorism investigations that we sampled, did not nominate many others in a timely fashion, and did not update or remove watchlist records as required,” the Inspector General report (.pdf) said. “We believe that the FBI’s failure to consistently nominate subjects of international and domestic terrorism investigations to the terrorist watchlist could pose a risk to national security.”

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), a longtime civil liberties advocate, took issue with the nation’s premier law enforcement agency letting innocent citizens languish on a secret list.

“Given the very real and negative consequences to which people on the watchlist are subjected, this is unacceptable,” Leahy said.

The FBI is responsible for adding domestic threats to the list, while the intelligence community nominates foreigners.

Inspector General Glenn Fine’s findings are not surprising, given the Fine’s 2007 audit of the watchlist found that the list full of duplicate entries and bad information.

As of December 31, 2008, the centralized terrorist watch list contained more than 1.1 million known or suspected terrorist names, referring to an estimated 400,000 individuals. The list is used by local police to screen speeding drivers, by the State department to vet visa applicants and by Homeland Security to create the No-Fly list and pick-out travelers for interrogation.

In 15 percent of terrorism cases the office reviewed, FBI agents failed to add the subjects to the list, while in 8 percent of closed cases, people were left on the list, in violation of policy. In 72 percent of the closed cases people weren’t removed in a timely manner, causing people to undergo unjustified screenings by the Secret Service and at the airport.

Neither the FBI or the inspector general knows how many people the FBI has put on the list, but the IG’s best estimate is the FBI has nominated between 68,000 and 130,000 known or suspected terrorist identities since 2003. Of the 68,669 known or suspected terrorist identities in the database the IG could attribute to the FBI, 35 percent were outdated or had no known link to terrorism cases.

Additionally the FBI has added tens of thousands of name s of Afghani and Iraqi citizens stopped and fingerprinted by the military with help from crack FBI teams. These entries have little information attached and no process for removal.

The Terrorist Screening Center, which runs the list, says it is constantly scrubbing unjustified entries from the list. When the systems record a hit for a rogue speeder, the trooper calls the center to clarify the person stopped is the person on the list and what should be done.

At the TSC, analysts sit in front of giant monitors, checking information called in against the intelligence that put the person on the list. Along one wall, the center plots encounters on an electronic, color-coded, electronic map of the United States..

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