Contain Your Shock: Huge Numbers of People on Watch Lists Have No Connection to Terrorist Groups

This will not come as a surprise to Reason regulars: More than
40 percent of the people on the United States federal government
terrorism watch lists have no discernable connection to any
terrorist group.

280,000 out of 680,000 people on the list of those whom
authorities are keeping their eyes on and pulling aside for further
examination at airports and border crossings have no actual
connection to terrorist groups. The analysis comes from journalists
Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux at The Intercept. They
just
recently exposed the complicated yet also terribly vague guide
the federal government uses to put people on the list. Now they’ve
gotten their hands on a classified document detailing the National
Counterterrorism Center’s (NCTC) list of accomplishments for 2013
and have crunched the numbers to provide the lovely graph
below:

Some of the other
interesting details:

• The number of people added to the no-fly list has skyrocketed
  under President Barack Obama by a factor of 10, to a high of
  47,000.
• The second-highest concentration of people within the United
  States suspected of potential terrorism and added to the watch list
  resides in Dearborn, Mich. (population: 96,000). Coincidentally,
  Dearborn has the highest concentration of Arab-American citizens in
  the country.
• The government adds either new names or new data about people
  already on the watch list at a rate of 900 records each day.

There are a lot of different numbers about the actual size of
the list. The Associated Press has reported the list has seen 1.5
million names added, but a source told The Intercept
there’s some confusion between new names being added and new data
about people already on the list being added.

But the first thing this report for 2013 (pdf) describes
as an “accomplishment” is adding its one millionth person to its
database:

On 28 June 2013, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment
(TIDE) passed a milestone of one million persons in TIDE. While
NCTC’s Directorate of Terrorist Identities (DTI) seeks to create
only as many person records as are necessary for our nation’s
counterterrorism mission, this number is a testament to DTI’s hard
work and dedication over the past 2.5 years.

It’s a monument to the twisted incentives that drive
bureaucracies. Having a watch list of a million people is
considered an accomplishment even though it contains hundreds of
thousands of people with no known ties to terrorist groups.

Read the latest story
here. Below, Reason’s Nick Gillespie interviewed Devereaux
about their last report detailing the guiding document for the
watch lists: