United States law enforcement agents and partners reported "encounters" with suspected terrorists 55,000 times in the last year; a check against the terrorist watchlist found a match 19,000 times, according to testimony presented to the Senate on Wednesday.
The figure includes multiple hits on the same people, according to an FBI spokesman, who didn't know how many unique individuals were counted in the 19,000 hits.
The statistics appeared in testimony by the FBI's Timothy Healy, director of the Terrorist Screening Center, or TSC, to the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
Established in 2003, the TSC is a multi-agency clearinghouse for tips and other information about known and suspected terrorists that is shared with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, as well as intelligence agencies and 17 foreign partners.
The center maintains the terrorist watchlist, which currently has about 400,000 individuals on it, most of them non-U.S. citizens, and includes those suspected of providing financial assistance or aid to terrorists. A subset of this list, the No Fly list, includes people considered a threat to aviation or national security and contains about 3,400 names, of which about 170 are U.S. persons.
The list is used, among other things, to screen visa applicants and gun buyers as well as suspects stopped by local police. It's also used by airport security personnel to single out some travelers for extra screening or interrogation. The FBI notes that fewer than 1,000 background checks of gun purchasers between 2004 and 2009 resulted in a positive match against the list, and fewer than 10 percent of those people were prevented from buying the weapon as a result of the match.
In his testimony, Healy noted that the 24-hour center receives "between 400 and 1,200 unique additions, modifications, or deletions of terrorist identities" and about 150 calls a day requesting a determination of whether someone matches the list. During fiscal year 2009, the center processed more than 55,000 reports of “encounters," a number that is expected to grow as more overseas screening agencies are added to the program and begin submitting reports.
When a person who matches the list is encountered, agents will either arrest him, if there is an outstanding warrant for the person, notify the local fusion center where the suspect resides, or collect additional details about the person -- including biometrics, such as a fingerprint, or information about traveling companions -- to add to his profile.
A Justice Department inspector general report earlier this year found that the FBI was mishandling the watchlist and was failing to add legitimate suspects of terrorist investigation while also failing to properly update and remove records from the list, subjecting U.S. citizens to unjustified scrutiny.
The FBI failed to add subjects to the list in 15 percent of the terrorist investigations the inspector general reviewed. Agents also failed to remove people from the list after investigations involving them were closed in 8 percent of the cases reviewed. In 72 percent of the closed cases, agents failed to remove people from the list in a timely manner.
Healy addressed the Traveler Redress Inquiry Program, a Department of Homeland Security program that is supposed to address complaints of people who experience undue screening and feel they've been added to the watchlist in error -- a program that has been criticized for being ineffective.
Healy said that only 0.7 percent of complaints filed through the redress program actually had something to do with the watchlist. Of those, the center determined that about 51 percent of the people were appropriately on the watchlist, and 15 percent were removed from the list or downgraded as a result of their filing for redress -- for example, they might remain on the watchlist but be removed from the No Fly list.
The center will never confirm or deny that someone is on a watchlist, but Healy said that those who receive undue screening because their names are the same or similar to someone on the watchlist are designated with a “Primary Lookout Override" to help them move through screening without being harassed.
This post has been updated with statement from the FBI about multiple hits against the same person being included in the 19,000 figure.
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