[Mb-civic] 325,000 Names on Terrorism List - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

325,000 Names on Terrorism List
Rights Groups Say Database May Include Innocent People

By Walter Pincus and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 15, 2006; A01

The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 
325,000 names of international terrorism suspects or people who 
allegedly aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the 
fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials.

The list kept by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) -- created 
in 2004 to be the primary U.S. terrorism intelligence agency -- contains 
a far greater number of international terrorism suspects and associated 
names in a single government database than has previously been 
disclosed. Because the same person may appear under different spellings 
or aliases, the true number of people is estimated to be more than 
200,000, according to NCTC officials.

U.S. citizens make up "only a very, very small fraction" of that number, 
said an administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity 
because of his agency's policies. "The vast majority are non-U.S. 
persons and do not live in the U.S.," he added. An NCTC official refused 
to say how many on the list -- put together from reports supplied by the 
CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies -- 
are U.S. citizens.

The NSA is a key provider of information for the NCTC database, although 
officials refused to say how many names on the list are linked to the 
agency's controversial domestic eavesdropping effort. Under the program, 
the NSA has conducted wiretaps on an unknown number of U.S. citizens 
without warrants.

The government has been trying to streamline what counterterrorism 
officials say are more than 26 terrorism-related databases compiled by 
agencies throughout the intelligence and law enforcement communities. 
Names from the NCTC list are provided to the FBI's Terrorist Screening 
Center (TSC), which in turn provides names for watch lists maintained by 
the Transportation Security Administration and other agencies.

Civil liberties advocates and privacy experts said they were troubled by 
the size of the NCTC database, and they said it further heightens their 
concerns that such government terrorism lists include the names of large 
numbers of innocent people. Timothy Sparapani, legislative counsel for 
privacy rights at the American Civil Liberties Union, called the numbers 
"shocking but, unfortunately, not surprising."

"We have lists that are having baby lists at this point; they're 
spawning faster than rabbits," Sparapani said. "If we have over 300,000 
known terrorists who want to do this country harm, we've got a much 
bigger problem than deciding which names go on which list. But I highly 
doubt that is the case."

Asked whether the names in the repository were collected through the 
NSA's domestic intelligence intercept program, the NCTC official said, 
"Our database includes names of known and suspected international 
terrorists provided by all intelligence community organizations, 
including NSA."

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee 
last week that he could not discuss specifics but said: "Information is 
collected, information is retained and information disseminated in a way 
to protect the privacy interests of all Americans."

The NCTC name repository began under its predecessor agency in 2003 with 
75,000 names, and it continues to grow. The center was created as part 
of a broad reorganization of U.S. intelligence agencies after the 
failure to disrupt the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It is the main agency 
for analyzing and integrating terrorism intelligence and is under 
direction of Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte.

Its central database is the hub of an elaborate network of 
terrorism-related databases throughout the federal bureaucracy. 
Terrorism-related names and other data are sent to the NCTC under 
standards set by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 6, signed by 
President Bush in September 2003, according to a senior NCTC official. 
The directive calls upon agencies to supply data only about people who 
are "known or appropriately suspected to be . . . engaged in conduct 
constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to terrorism."

"We work on the basis that information reported to us has been collected 
in accordance with those guidelines," Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, the 
center's director, said in a statement.

Analysts at the NCTC review all incoming names and can reject them if 
they do not have an apparent link to international terrorists, officials 
said. "That is not common, but it does happen," an NCTC official said, 
citing as examples a domestic or foreign drug dealer or a member of a 
U.S.-based extremist group, when neither has any sign of international 
terrorist connections.

The NCTC then sends a subset of the repository list to the FBI's 
screening center, and each entry includes a reference "to how the 
individual is associated with international terrorism," according to a 
June 2005 report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. 
This reference is assigned one of 25 codes such as "Member of a Foreign 
Terrorist Organization," "Hijacker" or "Has Engaged in Terrorism," 
according to the report. The report also notes that the codes are split 
in two categories: "Individuals who are considered armed and dangerous 
and those who are not."

Fine's office criticized the TSC for including nearly 32,000 records of 
people in the "armed and dangerous" category but giving them the lowest 
handling code, which means that no report needs to be sent back to the 
FBI if they are encountered in the United States by law enforcement 
officers.

The TSC consolidates NCTC data on individuals associated with foreign 
terrorism with the FBI's purely domestic terrorism data to create a 
unified, unclassified terrorist watch list. The TSC, in turn, provides, 
for official use only, a version giving each person's name, country, 
date of birth, photos and other data to the Transportation Security 
Agency for its no-fly list, the State Department for its visa program, 
the Department of Homeland Security for border crossings, and the 
National Crime Information Center for distribution to police.

Shannon Moran, a spokeswoman for the FBI screening center, declined to 
answer detailed questions about the center's work, including how many 
names are on its list, how many U.S. citizens are included and whether 
the FBI database includes names linked to the NSA program. Fine's office 
reported last year that the FBI database contained more than 270,000 
names, including a large number of people associated with domestic 
terrorist movements such as radical environmentalists and neo-Nazi white 
supremacists.

"If being placed on a list means in practice that you will be denied a 
visa, barred entry, put on the no-fly list, targeted for pretextual 
prosecutions, etc., then the sweep of the list and the apparent absence 
of any way to clear oneself certainly raises problems," said David D. 
Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who has been sharply 
critical of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies.

The growth of terrorist-related data networks within the U.S. 
intelligence community has greatly accelerated since Sept. 11, 2001. 
Before the al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 
there were databases containing terrorist identities at the CIA, Defense 
Intelligence Agency, FBI and State Department. In addition there were 13 
independent watch lists, but the lists or databases were not interoperable.

Currently, according to an NCTC official, there are 26 classified data 
networks carrying terrorism material. In a December 2005 interview on 
Federal News Radio, Redd said his agency "is really the only place in 
government and certainly in the intelligence community where all 
counterterrorism intelligence comes together." He also said that 
analyses of terrorism issues from all 15 intelligence agencies come into 
the NCTC, which then puts them on its Web site.

"What that means," Redd said, "is about 5,000 analysts around the 
counterterrorist intelligence community can pull up that Web site and 
see . . . what every other agency has as well, assuming they have the 
clearances."

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information 
Center, said the size of the NCTC list and other terrorism-related 
databases underscores the severity of the "false positive" problem, in 
which innocent people -- including members of Congress -- have been 
stopped for questioning or halted from flying because their names are 
wrongly included or are similar to suspects' names.

"One of the seemingly unsolvable problems is what do you do when someone 
is wrongly put on this watch list," Rotenberg said. "If there are that 
many people on the list, a lot of them probably shouldn't be there. But 
how are they ever going to get off?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/14/AR2006021402125.html?nav=hcmodule
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