Analysis: A third of U.S. watch list wrong

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 (UPI) -- The U.S government’s consolidated terrorist watch list contains more than three-quarters of a million names, is growing at the rate of 20,000 names a month, and is consulted several million times a day. But more than a third of the records examined in a recent audit contained inaccurate or inconsistent information.

The audit, by the Justice Department’s inspector general, also found that the watch list, maintained by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, contained more than 6,000 duplicate records; that there was no effective process in place for checking and correcting errors on the list; and that complaints from people who believed they had been wrongly listed took too long to resolve.

On Monday, FBI Director Robert Mueller told a Senate hearing, “We have taken each one of the recommendations from the (inspector general) and are working on those recommendations.”

“But,” he added, the watch list “is and has been exceptionally successful in terms of doing what it was established to do, and that is identifying persons whom we do not want to let into the country, identifying persons who may be in the country and giving us some indication as where they are and what they're doing.”

The inspector general’s report, published Thursday in redacted form to protect what the FBI said was sensitive information, found that 270 million individuals had their names checked against the list every month by frontline agencies like U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which screen the names of everyone entering the United States, or local police forces, which check those encountered during traffic stops and other routine activities.

If a name matches one on the list, the agencies can contact the Terrorist Screening Center’s 24-hour call center.

Since the center was set up in 2003 and given the job of merging the dozen or so separate watch lists previously maintained by different U.S. government agencies, it has received nearly 100,000 calls from frontline agencies that believe they may have encountered someone on the list. In just over half of those of those cases, center staff found that the individual encountered was a positive match with someone on the list.

But the results of the audit suggest that even a positive match does not mean the person is really a “known or appropriately suspected terrorist” -- the center’s standard for inclusion on the watch list.

Individuals are added to the watch list by the center after they have been “nominated” by a U.S. law enforcement or intelligence agency. The National Counter-Terrorism Center forwards the names of suspected foreign terrorists to the center, while the FBI is the gatekeeper for those Americans who will be added.

Once they have been processed by center staff, names from the watch list are then exported to a series of “downstream” databases maintained by frontline agencies -- like the “no fly” list kept by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration.

The auditors checked a sample of 105 watch-list records that had been subjected to a routine “quality assurance process” by center staff. More than one-third still contained “errors or inconsistencies,” often because the incoming data from the agencies nominating that individual to the list was “inaccurate and incomplete.”

When erroneous records were spotted by the routine reviews, the report said, it took an average of 80 days to correct them, because center staff had to go back to the nominating agencies to resolve the issue. As of February, there were more than 3,000 records identified as containing questionable or inaccurate information awaiting correction -- and the number was growing every day because the center was identifying errors faster than the nominating agencies were correcting them.

The auditors said that more thorough reviews of watch-list data -- like the recent scrub of the “no fly” list that halved the number of names on it -- were generally more effective at removing or correcting inaccurate records.

The auditors also reviewed the center’s redress process for dealing with complaints from individuals who believe they have been wrongly watch-listed. Since establishing a special office to deal with these complaints in 2005, the center has received 348 of them.

Auditors found that, in 45 percent of those cases, the records of the complainant needed to be corrected because they had inaccurate information in them, or deleted altogether.