Barack Obama’s Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers
Nearly half of the people on the U.S.
government’s 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 government’s Terrorist
Screening Database—a watchlist of “known or suspected terrorists” that
is shared with local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and
foreign governments—more than 40 percent are described by the government
as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” That
category—280,000 people—dwarfs 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 47,000—surpassing the number of
people barred from flying under George W. Bush.
“If everything is terrorism, then nothing is terrorism,” says David
Gomez, a former senior FBI special agent. The watchlisting system, he
adds, is “revving out of control.”
The classified documents were prepared by the National
Counterterrorism Center, the lead agency for tracking individuals with
suspected links to international terrorism. Stamped “SECRET” and
“NOFORN” (indicating they are not to be shared with foreign
governments), they offer the most complete numerical picture of the
watchlisting system to date. Among the revelations:
• The second-highest concentration of people designated as “known or
suspected terrorists” by the government is in Dearborn, Mich.—a city of
96,000 that has the largest percentage of Arab-American residents in the
country.
• The government adds names to its databases, or adds information on existing subjects, at a rate of 900 records each day.
• The CIA uses a previously unknown program, code-named Hydra, to
secretly access databases maintained by foreign countries and extract
data to add to the watchlists.
A U.S. counterterrorism official familiar with watchlisting data told
The Intercept
that as of November 2013, there were approximately 700,000 people in
the Terrorist Screening Database, or TSDB, but declined to provide the
current numbers. Last month, the Associated Press, citing federal court
filings by government lawyers,
reported that there have been 1.5 million names added to the watchlist over the past five years. The government official told
The Intercept
that was a misinterpretation of the data. “The list has grown somewhat
since that time, but is nowhere near the 1.5 million figure cited in
recent news reports,” he said. He added that the statistics cited by the
Associated Press do not just include nominations of individuals, but
also bits of intelligence or biographical information obtained on
watchlisted persons.
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 government’s watchlisting guidelines,
published by The Intercept last month,
officials don’t need “concrete facts” or “irrefutable evidence” to
secretly place someone on the list—only a vague and elastic standard of
“reasonable suspicion.”
“You need some fact-basis to say a guy is a terrorist, that you know
to a probable-cause standard that he is a terrorist,” says Gomez, the
former FBI agent. “Then I say, ‘Build as big a file as you can on him.’
But if you just suspect that somebody is a terrorist? Not so much.”
The National Counterterrorism Center did not respond to questions
about its terrorist screening system. Instead, in a statement, it
praised the watchlisting system as a “critical layer in our
counterrorism defenses” and described it as superior to the pre-9/11
process for tracking threats, which relied on lists that were “typed or
hand-written in card catalogues and ledgers.” The White House declined
to comment.
