[Infowarrior] - Feds' Watch List Eats Its Own

[Richard Forno]

Feds' Watch List Eats Its Own

By Ryan Singel| 
02:00 AM May, 04, 2006

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70783-0.html

What do you say about an airline screening system that tends to mistake
government employees and U.S. servicemen for foreign terrorists?

Newly released government documents show that even having a high-level
security clearance won't keep you off the Transportation Security
Administration's Kafkaesque terrorist watch list, where you'll suffer missed
flights and bureaucratic nightmares.

According to logs from the TSA's call center from late 2004 -- which black
out the names of individuals to protect their privacy -- the watch list has
snagged:

    * A State Department diplomat who protested that "I fly 100,00 miles a
year and am tired of getting hassled at Dulles airport -- and airports
worldwide -- because my name apparently closely resembles that of a
terrorist suspect."

    * A person with an Energy Department security clearance.

    * An 82-year-old veteran who says he's never even had a traffic ticket.

    * A technical director at a science and technology company who has been
working with the Pentagon on chemical and biological weapons defense.

    * A U.S. Navy officer who has been enlisted since 1984.

    * A high-ranking government employee with a better-than-top-secret
clearance who is also a U.S. Army Reserve major.

    * A federal employee traveling on government business who says the watch
list matching "has resulted in ridiculous delays at the airports, despite my
travel order, federal ID and even my federal passport."

    * A high-level civil servant at the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation.

    * An active-duty Army officer who had served four combat tours
(including one in Afghanistan) and who holds a top-secret clearance.

    * A retired U.S. Army officer and antiterrorism/force-protection officer
with expertise on weapons of mass destruction who was snared when he was put
back on active-duty status while flying on a ticket paid for by the Army.

    * A former Pentagon employee and current security-cleared U.S. Postal
Service contractor.

Also held up was a Continental Airlines flight-crew member traveling as a
passenger, who complained to TSA, "If I am safe enough to work on a plane
then I should be fine to be a passenger sleeping."

The outcomes of these complaints are not recorded in the documents.

Attorney Marcia Hoffman with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who
obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, emphasizes that
"an effective redress process to clear your name from the list is critical."

Currently, individuals who want to clear their names have to submit several
notarized copies of their identification. Then, if they're lucky, TSA might
check their information against details in the classified database, add them
to a cleared list and provide them with a letter attesting to their status.

More than 28,000 individuals had filed the paperwork by October 2005, the
latest figures available, according to TSA spokeswoman Amy Kudwa. She says
the system works. "We work rigorously to resolve delays caused by
misidentifications," Kudwa says.

Citing national security, Kudwa declined to state how many of those 28,000
were ultimately placed on the cleared list, nor would she say how many names
are on the no-fly and "selectee" lists or what the selection criteria for
those lists are. Those on the no-fly list are banned from air travel and are
likely to be arrested at the airport if they attempt to fly, while those on
the selectee list face additional scrutiny at the airport.

The watch list is still not very accurate, according to 31-year-old
Massachusetts resident Bethan Brome Lilja.

Two weeks ago, Lilja finally grew tired of her and her son's continual
selection for extra screening and contacted the TSA call center. An employee
named Eva told Lilja that the FBI was looking for someone with her name, and
advised her to watch what she was saying since the call was recorded and
"some guys might come knocking on your door," Lilja told Wired News.

"I interpreted that as a threat," says Lilja, a full-time mother and
entrepreneur. "When I call a government agency to ask for help and they tell
me someone might come knock on my door, you have to take it seriously."

Lilja thinks her full name is too distinctive for it to match someone
else's, and notes that her husband Jonathan does not get pulled aside for
extra screening.

The TSA's lists are only a subset of the larger, unified terrorist watch
list, which consists of 250,000 people associated with terrorists, and an
additional database of 150,000 less-detailed records, according to a recent
media briefing by Terrorist Screening Center director Donna Bucella. The
unified list is used by border officials, embassies issuing visas and state
and local law enforcement agents during traffic stops.

That larger list and its increasingly wide usage concerns Lilja, who
wonders, for example, what will happen when she visits Canada this summer
and attempts to return to the states.

"If I get pulled over for speeding by some small-town cop from western
Massachusetts, who sees I'm a terrorist suspect from Boston, it's hard to
know if someone is going to overreact," Lilja said.

Lilja has since contacted her congressman, sought legal advice and launched
an online campaign called Americans for Terror Watchlist Reform.

Lilja isn't the only one interested in reforming how watch lists are used or
how citizens can contest false matches or false inclusions.

Currently, airlines check their own passengers' names against the lists
provided to them by the TSA, but each airline chooses how it will match
variations of names such as Ted, Teddy and Theodore.

For the past three years, the TSA has been trying to replace the current
system, known as CAPPS, with the so-called Secure Flight program that would
require airlines to forward passenger lists to the government, a process the
TSA hopes will reduce the number of false name matches by standardizing the
process.

Some notable homeland security experts suggest, however, that more
transparency and responsiveness are needed.

A paper published last year by the conservative Heritage Foundation
suggested the government should establish a centralized
watch-list-dispute-resolution clearinghouse that would handle complaints
about all terrorism watch lists and report publicly on its work.

That paper, which also advocated for the right to take watch list disputes
to court, was co-authored in 2005 by technologist Jeff Jonas -- best known
for his work catching casino cheats in Las Vegas and then adapting that
software to enable data sharing within the federal government -- and Paul
Rosenzweig, a former Heritage Foundation research fellow who recently joined
the Department of Homeland Security's policy office.

Rosenzweig's faith in transparency seems not to have filtered down to the
TSA's Freedom of Information Office.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed an identical request for the
2005 complaint logs last month, but the TSA denied the organization's
arguments that the records are in the public interest, and wants to charge
the group nearly $70,000 to search for the database records. EPIC is
appealing that decision.