[Infowarrior] - The Terrorist Watch List, Jumbled in Translation

[Richard Forno]

The Terrorist Watch List, Jumbled in Translation

By JOE SHARKEY
Published: September 1, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/business/02road.html

NOBODY likes the way the terrorist watch lists work. Not the federal  
government, not the airlines, and certainly not the innocent travelers  
who are flagged and delayed at the airport when an airline finds a  
match of their name on the federal master list.

There’s even dispute about how many names are on the list. A million  
(!) says the American Civil Liberties Union. Not even close (!),  
responds the Transportation Security Administration.

The federal Terrorist Screening Center database contained more than  
724,000 “records” as of April 2007, according to an audit by the  
inspector general’s office of the Justice Department, which said the  
number of records was growing by 20,000 a month.

The American Civil Liberties Union, after extrapolating, issued a  
report in July saying that the “nation’s terrorist watch list has hit  
one million names.”

It added that “members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other  
‘suspicious characters’ with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith  
have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list.”

Whoa, says Kip Hawley, the director of the Transportation Security  
Administration. “The list has no more than 50,000 names,” Mr. Hawley  
said in a recent interview.

As he begins to wrap up his three-year tenure at the T.S.A., Mr.  
Hawley says he is perplexed by the commotion over the watch list.

The Terrorist Screening Center maintains the list to flag names of  
people in two categories: those with known terrorist ties who are on  
the “no fly” portion of the list, and those with names that for  
various reasons are on a broader “selectee” list.

The selectee list is responsible for much of the ridicule directed at  
the T.S.A. That list contains many common names — like Michael Kirby,  
who was featured in last week’s column.

Like Mr. Kirby, many people who share names or variants of names on  
the selectee list can’t print a boarding pass in advance. Every time  
they want to fly, they must report to the airline ticket desk to be  
cleared before they board.

The Justice Department found that the Terrorist Screening Center “has  
not done enough to ensure that the database was complete and accurate.”

The confusion is compounded because the airlines, not the government,  
are usually the point-of-contact arbiter of who actually is flagged at  
the airport.

Airlines compile their lists using names on the federal list, Mr.  
Hawley said. But depending on how the airline puts together its list,  
passengers with the same or even vaguely similar names as ones on the  
federal list can turn up as “false positives,” Mr. Hawley said.

“Depending on how the airline filters it, you may end up with hundreds  
of people being told they’re on the selectee list,” Mr. Hawley said.

The airlines, he said, “decided that rather than investing in  
technology to work this out, we’ll have you go over to a ticket agent  
because it’s no skin off our nose if you stand in line. At that point,  
they look up the government list, which has more detailed data, and  
they will see that the real person on the watch list is 60 years old  
and you’re 25 years old, and they say O.K., you’re obviously not the  
person. But all those people go away mad, thinking ‘What’s the T.S.A.  
got against me?’ ”

The airlines dislike the cumbersome task of matching their passenger  
lists, which don’t contain personal data like birth dates, against the  
federal list, which does. The airline industry strongly supports a  
federal initiative called Secure Flight, which would require the  
T.S.A. itself to check names against passenger lists supplied by  
airlines in advance of every flight.

In a statement, the Air Transport Association said, “The airlines have  
been given assurances for more than four years that T.S.A. would soon  
be taking over responsibility for vetting passenger names against  
government watch lists. With recurrent T.S.A. delays in meeting that  
commitment, airlines invested millions of dollars in programming costs  
to minimize the number of misidentified passengers.”

Secure Flight, which Mr. Hawley says he supports, is expected to be in  
place next year. It has been stalled while the Homeland Security  
Department addresses concerns raised in Congress about privacy.

E-mail: jsharkey at nytimes.com