EDITORIALS
Watch list is unwieldy
Government’s million-name checker more about bureaucracy than terror
Talk about finding a needle in a haystack. Civil liberties watchdogs estimate, without serious challenge from any public officials, that the U. S. government’s consolidated terrorist watch list has as many as 1 million names on it. How such an overwhelming list is going to do anyone any good in tracking down would-be mass murderers isn’t clear.
A more likely scenario is that the list contains so many names — and will cause unnecessary levels of scrutiny for people who just happen to have a similar moniker — that it will soon become almost as much of an annoyance to airport security screeners as it is to a few unlucky travelers.
Like a fire department that won’t be anything but grumpy about answering its 15th false alarm from the same building, airport security screeners and others who should be more careful are likely to develop a habit of waving through any reasonable-looking person whose name raises a security alert, just because such red flags won’t be rare enough to cause any concern.
Granted, 1 million names doesn’t mean 1 million people. It means, according to the government’s Terrorist Screening Center, about 400,000 people, many of whom are there two or three or more times, either because they travel under various aliases or because our English-speaking agencies aren’t sure how to spell their Arabic or other language names.
Still, the list has caused travel problems for such personages as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Rep. John Lewis and, more recently, a Clinton-administration assistant attorney general who still holds a valid security clearance.
The Bush administration might argue that that situation is an improvement over the government’s pre-9/11 “no-fly” list, which included only 16 people thought to be of particular danger. The new list resulted from a 2003 executive order to merge the watch lists held by various government agencies, which makes sense when part of the problem had been a lack of communication among those agencies.
But so many names, with so many of them inaccurate, old or based on rumor and guesswork, amounts to, at best, busy work for our security agencies. Piling on more names of potential bad guys is not the same as, and much less useful than, carefully checking out the accuracy of such names and their likely connection to real terrorism.
An overly broad watch list, combined with the current administration’s belief that it can watch, detain, deport, even torture anyone it sees as an enemy of the state, indicates that a lot more care is needed in the fight against terror. And the fight against bureaucracy.
