- Aug 27, 2008
- 18,450
- 1,823
- 205
early half of the people on the U.S. governments widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group, according to classified government documents obtained by The Intercept.
Of the 680,000 people caught up in the governments Terrorist Screening Databasea watchlist of known or suspected terrorists that is shared with local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and foreign governmentsmore than 40 percent are described by the government as having no recognized terrorist group affiliation. That category280,000 peopledwarfs the number of watchlisted people suspected of ties to al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah combined.
The documents, obtained from a source in the intelligence community, also reveal that the Obama Administration has presided over an unprecedented expansion of the terrorist screening system. Since taking office, Obama has boosted the number of people on the no fly list more than ten-fold, to an all-time high of 47,000surpassing the number of people barred from flying under George W. Bush.
When U.S. officials refer to the watchlist, they typically mean the TSDB, an unclassified pool of information shared across the intelligence community and the military, as well as local law enforcement, foreign governments, and private contractors. According to the governments watchlisting guidelines, published by The Intercept last month, officials dont need concrete facts or irrefutable evidence to secretly place someone on the listonly a vague and elastic standard of reasonable suspicion.
An August 2013 slide from the National Counterterrorism Center called TIDE By The Numbers lays out the scope of the Obama administrations watchlisting system, and those it is targeting. According to the document, which notes that the numbers are approximate, 680,000 people have been watchlisted, with another 320,000 monitored in the larger TIDE database. As of August 2013, 5,000 Americans were on the watchlist while another 15,800 were targeted in TIDE.
Barack Obamas Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers
When success is counted as how many names are added to these lists, with the weak standards for adding them in the first place, it's not surprising that the incentive would be to simply add people regardless of how much evidence you have that they're actually engaged in terrorist activities. Easy to see how such a system abuses people's rights.