US terror suspect list rises to 325,000

Civil liberties organizations expressed outrage on Feb. 15 after it was reported that the database of terrorist suspects kept by the US authorities now holds 325,000 names, a fourfold increase in two and a half years. The list, maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), includes different spellings of the same person's names as well as aliases, but the Washington Post quoted NCTC officials as saying that at least 200,000 individuals are on it. They said that "only a very, very small fraction" of that number were US citizens, but that insistence did little to defuse the reaction. Timothy Sparapani, an expert on privacy rights at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said the ACLU's response was one of incredulity, and alarm that many people are likely to be on the list by mistake, with serious impact on their lives and few, if any, means of getting themselves off it. "The numbers continue to grow by leaps and bounds," Sparapani said. He had no idea what methods were being used to add names to the database, but added: "I have to say we're probably adding names faster than we can figure out how to deal with them... We worry greatly about the potential stain to anyone's life who ends up on this list." It is unclear how many of the names on the list were collected as a result of a domestic wiretapping program by the National Security Agency, the existence of which only became known through a leak in December. Administration officials refused to confirm or deny the reported size of the NCTC list. Thousands in the US have only discovered their name, or a similar one, is on the list when they have been prevented from taking a commercial flight. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) found himself in that position in 2004. Sparapani said he had heard officials from the Transport Security Agency estimate that about 30,000 people a year had been denied the right to board a flight because of the list. The database was set up in 2003, initially with 75,000 names. The NCTC is the principal agency for analyzing terrorist data, under the control of John Negroponte, the director for national intelligence. Marc Rotenberg, the head of a watchdog group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said: "It's problematic not simply in the big brother way with the loss of privacy, but it's also problematic because it doesn't seem to work." He said it was virtually impossible for those wrongly listed as terrorist suspects to clear their name. "We passed a very good law in the 1970s... at least when the US government makes a decision about a US citizen, that process had to be transparent and people had to be able to appeal those decisions, but now those agencies get exemptions to the law."