WASHINGTON, DC -- The FBI's Terrorist Watch List is growing at 20,000 additional names a month, says an official at the nation's investigative agency the Government Accountability Office.
That would bring the number of names in the nation's database of terrorist suspects to 880,000 this month. There were 860,000 names in the database as of late October when the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last held an oversight hearing about the operation of the Terrorist Screening System.
The database of 880,000 doesn't contain 880,000 individuals, but rather contains several aliases, or variations upon a name.
The Senate's House counterpart held its own oversight hearing on Thursday. Committee members grilled Leonard C. Boyle, the director of the Terrorist Screening Center, as well as Kathleen Kraninger, director of the Departmnt of Homeland Security's Screening Coordination Office, over how they can work on improving the efficiency of the system. Eileen Larence, the director of the GAO's Homeland Security and Justice Issues, as well as Glenn Fine, the Department of Justice's inspector general, also testified.
Between February and late October this year the DHS recorded almost 16,000 requests for redress from travelers who asked to be removed from the database. The DHS has set up a central office called the Traveler Redress Inquiry Program to deal with individuals' protests at their inclusion in the system. Just over half of the requests have been responded to with a letter, and the rest of the requests are pending because the individuals haven't provided the necessary paperwork, says Kraninger.
Kraninger says that the goal is to reduce the time it takes to deal with such requests to a month. It currently takes an average of 67 days to resolve the issues, and that's because the vetting process has to go through multiple levels of bureaucracy and databases.
"We are as troubled about the errors and inefficiency as anyone because of the trouble caused to the public," she said in testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee on Thursday. But it's also a problem because it diverts resources away from DHS' ongoing operation, she says.
Both Boyle and Kraninger lobbied committee members on Thursday to resuscitate DHS' plans for its controversial flight screening system called Secure Flight. That system has been run into the ground because of continual embarrassing snafus with the way DHS has handled passengers' data.
Congressional appropriators for their part have throttled funding for the project until DHS meets 10 criteria established by the GAO.
Fine said during the hearing Thursday that the watch list "continues to have significant weaknesses."
One of the big problems is that there are at least two lists of people with different names on them, which contributes to the confusion and delays in getting people off the list. DHS officials said during Thursday's hearing that there is no way to guarantee that someone once cleared is permanently removed from the list.
New York Democrat Yvette Clarke on Thursday said that she plans on introducing a bill next week that would require the Transportation Security Administration to share its "Cleared List," of travelers with the rest of DHS and other relevant government departments.
The "Cleared List" is a list of people who have similar names as people on the terrorist watch list, but who have gone through the redress system.
The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday used the data to continue to challenge the premise of the list, which was first established at the end of 2003.
"If finding a terrorist is like finding a needle in the haystack, the Terrorist Screening Center has been hard at work creating a bigger haystack, by adding thousands of new names with no end in sight," said Tim Sparapani, the ACLU's senior legislative counsel in a statement.
House Homeland Security Committee members on Thursday were clearly befuddled and frustrated by DHS' testimony on the status of providing relief to travelers. A few committee members admitted that the current screening system of using names to identify terrorism suspects is fundamentally flawed.
"The more common your name is, the more difficult the problem is," said Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind.
"We're sort of between a rock and a hard place," he said, adding that he thought biometric screening systems would be much more efficient.
"Biometrics is going to be it," he said. "But a lot of people in my district are going to rebel against that."
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