Watchlist purgatory
I missed a couple of stories this week on the shoddy, ineffective, and inaccurate compilation of federal "terrorism" watch lists, and the consequences of unfettered government surveillance without appropriate oversight.
First, this story details two reports by the inspectors general of the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department. The reports conclude, among other things, that the lack of consistent standards has resulted in a fragmented, unreliable, and inaccurate swamp of conflicting lists.
The problems include inter-office FBI and DEA reports being intercepted by or forwarded to the National Counter-terrorism Center (which is under the DNI) or the Terrorist Screening Center (which is under the FBI) without the knowledge of the reports' authors. This has resulted in people being erroneously added to the lists without any justification.
Also:
Agency field offices, for instance, have submitted names of people who are not subjects of terrorism investigations directly to the National Counterterrorism Center. In doing so, they bypass the required headquarters review that could catch errors, the report says.
The FBI does not always update records with new information about the subject of an investigation, the report found, and watch-list nominations from field offices were "often incomplete or contained inaccuracies." [Justice Department Inspector General Glenn] Fine found delays of up to four months in submitting information to headquarters, although FBI policy allows only 10 days.
"Accurate and current identifying information is critical for identifying suspected terrorists during screening practices, lowering the risk to frontline screening personnel and reducing misidentifications of innocent individuals who are not suspected terrorists," Fine said.
The Terrorist Screening Center, which I mentioned above, does more than just compile watch lists based on law enforcement and/or intelligence sources:
It [also] consolidates a dozen government watch lists as well as a growing number of new sources, such as airline passenger data. The government has said it will keep the data for as long as 99 years and plans to expand the data sharing to some private-sector groups.
The original mandate which emerged after 9/11 called for better and more streamlined information sharing between government agencies regarding terrorism suspects. We should all get the heebie-jeebies at the thought of the Church Committee's conclusions being cast aside and the FBI and CIA once again sharing domestic intelligence without oversight (as they once did), but at least in theory, international and domestic intelligence should have a mechanism for doing so, under carefully constrained circumstances, with appropriate judicial and legislative oversight. However, that's a long way from the government doing blanket sweeps and storing data on innocent airline passengers for 99 years. Blanket surveillance, even after the fact, is not a trait of a free society.
And just who are these "private-sector groups" they intend to share the data with, and for what purpose are they sharing it?
The consequences of this unconstrained sweeping are not hard to imagine. People end up on watch lists because their names are similar to other suspects, or they're placed on lists for reasons they are not allowed to know, to rebut, or to correct. To wit:
One man went into a Glen Burnie, Md., Toyota dealership to buy a car, only to be told that a name check revealed he was on a U.S. Treasury Department watchlist of suspected terrorists and drug dealers. He had to be "checked for tattoos," he said, to make sure he wasn't the suspect.
An 18-year-old found he could not open an account to accept credit card payments for his fledgling technology consulting business because his name was similar to that of a Libyan official on the watchlist.
A former U.S. Navy officer who served in the Persian Gulf and whose father was killed in the Korean War when he was a child, found himself locked out of his PayPal account because his name was similar to one on the watchlist.
"What do I need to do to remove my name from this list?" the officer wrote to Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which compiles the list. He signed off, "An EXTREMELY insulted veteran of the U.S. Navy."
This Kafkaesque scenario is made worse by the fact that companies are now barred from doing any kind of business with anyone on the list. A person stuck on the watch list will be consigned to a limbo from which there is no easy escape. Our politicians are guilty of the worst kind of cowardice in this matter: they have sacrificed our freedom to fear.