Crossposted from SmokeyMonkey.org.
[Update]: Soj posted this diary today, The NSA's Brave New World. There is some great background there.
This is just a crazy figure, but that is only the very brief part of the initial outrage. Walter Pincus writes this article for the Washington Post (MSNBC version here) with Dan Eggen. The scarier part is where those have come from.
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 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.
I could not find a website for the NCTC that listed these 26 agencies are. A few are pretty obvious, and the article lists a few. However, there is really only one that counts: NSA.
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."
I have read elsewhere (check Soj's diary linked above) about how the various databases have been commissioned, decommissioned, reconstituted, moved to other departments, etc. TALON was an example that was used. This lumping of names into a single database supposedly occurs with review of each name to assure that it is appropriately listed in the database. However, I think by the many examples of peace movements and officials being stuck on the no-fly list, that we can properly call this database a mess.
More importantly, what is this database ultimately used for?
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.
Distribution to police? No-fly list is a good thing, avoiding giving visas to terrorists is a good thing, preventing terrorists crossing our borders is a good thing. But what does the everyday cop need this list for? I think it goes a little too far to give a list of suspected "bad people" to a bunch of gun-toting, donut-eating, fat-ass, mustached pigs just itching to beat the crap out of a 'terrist'.
"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.
I don't know if you have ever been arrested because you happen to have failed to pay a parking ticket or a traffic violation, but I have. The police would not tell me why they were arresting me ("there is a warrant out"), and they may not even honestly have known. Can you imagine how easy it would be for a cop to get a hit from a database query and arrest you because you have the same name as someone that mentioned talking to someone about possibly protesting next week?
I respect the need for a centralized database of terrorists. However, if all the intelligence agencies are doing is compiling a data-mined set of names, I am against this. Just to finish off, here is what the article quotes as the justification for getting onto the list:
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."
Given the current debate regarding the Patriot Act Reauthorization and its weak 'relevence' standard for 215 requests and NSL's, I am very uncomfortable with the phrase 'conduct constituting' terrorism. Doesn't Bill O'Reilly's call to destroy San Francisco get him on this list?