U.S. terror watch list has 1 million names

WASHINGTON, March 11 (UPI) -- The number of names included on the U.S. government's terrorist watch list has reached 1 million, up 32 percent from 2007, a study indicates.

The data indicate the rise came despite the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center deleting 33,000 entries to purge the list of outdated information and remove names of people cleared in investigations, USA Today reported Wednesday after reviewing the information.

The center uses multiple entries for a person to reflect variations in spellings or other identifying information, so the actual number of people taken off the watch list is unclear, federal officials said.

The remaining 1 million entries represent about 400,000 individuals, the center said.

"We're continually trying to improve the quality of the information," said Timothy Edgar, a civil liberties officer at the national intelligence director's office. "It's always going to be a work in progress."

People included on the list can be blocked from flying, stopped at borders or subjected to other scrutiny. Foreigners make up about 95 percent of the people placed on the list by intelligence and law enforcement, the FBI said.

U.S. travelers have filed 51,000 "redress" grievances during the past two years, claiming they were wrongly placed on the watch list, the Department of Homeland Security told USA Today. The majority of cases reviewed revealed the petitioners weren't really on the list, but had been misidentified because their names resembled others on it, DHS said.