ACLU urges action to 'fix' growing terrorist watch list
Group charges that list now has over 1 million names, including members of Congress.
Congress or the next president should take action to improve the process of compiling the government's terrorist watch list to remove innocent people and ensure that only those seeking to harm the country are included, representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union said Monday.
The ACLU charged that the federal terrorist watch list has grown to include more than 1 million names, including members of Congress, war heroes, nuns and other innocent people.
"Putting a million names on a watch list is a guarantee that the list will do more harm than good by interfering with the travel of innocent people and wasting huge amounts of our limited security resources on bureaucratic wheel-spinning," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's technology and liberty program. "I doubt this thing would even be effective at catching a real terrorist."
But a spokesman for the Terrorist Screening Center, which maintains the list, said the ACLU is mistaken. "It's frankly a pretty massive overreach," he said.
The spokesman said there are 400,000 individuals on the watch list, about 95 percent of whom are foreigners. He said there are individuals on the list who have multiple records, such as when they use different names or aliases, meaning that the number of records on the watch list is slightly more than 1 million.
"A single individual could generate literally hundreds of records in the database," he said. He pointed to a Government Accountability Office report last October that concluded as much.
"For example, if an individual on the watch list has 50 known aliases, there could be 50 distinct records related to that individual in the watch list," GAO said.
Regardless, the ACLU is calling on Congress to pass laws, or the White House to take executive action, to make the watch list more accurate.
"Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon," said Caroline Fredrickson, the ACLU's top lobbyist.
The group might find several allies in Congress. The ACLU cites examples that Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., have experienced problems flying when their names were compared to aviation watch lists, which is a subset of the overall terrorist watch list.
"There needs to be true due process procedures in place, so that innocent people who find themselves on any watch list can remove themselves," Fredrickson said. People on the list should be able, for example, to challenge the reasons why they are listed, she said. Now, nobody is allowed to know whether he or she is on the list.
The ACLU also asserts the government should have "tight criteria" for adding names to the list and "rigorous procedures for updating and cleansing names" on it.
The Terrorist Screening Center spokesman said the agency initiated a new program about two months ago to review the records of individuals who have frequent encounters with the watch list to ensure those records are accurate. He noted the GAO report concluded that watch list encounters have led to arrests and the denial of foreigners to enter the country.
GAO said "there is general agreement [among federal agencies] that the watch list has helped to combat terrorism."