25 march 2007
Terror Database Has Quadrupled In Four Years
By Karen DeYoung
Each day, thousands of pieces of intelligence information from around
the world -- field reports, captured documents, news from foreign allies and
sometimes idle gossip -- arrive in a computer-filled office in McLean, where
analysts feed them into the nation's central list of terrorists and terrorism
suspects.
Called TIDE, for Terrorist Identities Datamart
Environment, the list is a storehouse for data about individuals that the
intelligence community believes might harm the
But in addressing one problem, TIDE has spawned others. Ballooning from
fewer than 100,000 files in 2003 to about 435,000, the growing database
threatens to overwhelm the people who manage it. "The single biggest worry
that I have is long-term quality control," said Russ Travers, in charge of
TIDE at the
TIDE has also created concerns about secrecy, errors and privacy. The
list marks the first time foreigners and
The watch lists fed by TIDE, used to monitor everyone entering the
country or having even a casual encounter with federal, state and local law
enforcement, have a higher bar. But they have become a source of irritation -- and
potentially more serious consequences -- for many
In 2004 and 2005, misidentifications accounted for about half of the
tens of thousands of times a traveler's name triggered a watch-list hit, the
Government Accountability Office reported in September. Congressional
committees have criticized the process, some charging
that it collects too much information about Americans, others saying it is
ineffective against terrorists. Civil rights and privacy groups have called for
increased transparency.
"How many are on the lists, how are they compiled, how is the
information used, how do they verify it?" asked Lillie Coney, associate
director of the Washington-based
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said last year that his wife had been
delayed repeatedly while airlines queried whether Catherine Stevens was the
watch-listed Cat Stevens. The listing referred to the Britain-based pop singer
who converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf
Islam. The reason Islam is not allowed to fly to the
So is the reason Maher Arar, a Syrian-born
Canadian, remains on the State Department's consular watch list. Detained in
TIDE is a vacuum cleaner for both proven and unproven information, and
its managers disclaim responsibility for how other agencies use the data.
"What's the alternative?" Travers said. "I work under the
assumption that we're never going to have perfect information -- fingerprints,
DNA -- on 6 billion people across the planet. . . . If someone actually has a
better idea, I'm all ears."
'Thousands of Messages'
The electronic journey a piece of terrorism data takes from an
intelligence outpost to an airline counter is interrupted at several points for
analysis and condensation.
President Bush ordered the intelligence community in 2003 to centralize
data on terrorism suspects, and
The 80 TIDE analysts get "thousands of messages a day," Travers
said, much of the data "fragmentary," "inconsistent" and "sometimes
just flat-out wrong." Often the analysts go back to the intelligence
agencies for details. "Sometimes you'll get sort of corroborating
information," he said, "but many times you're not going to get much. What
we use here, rightly or wrongly, is a reasonable-suspicion standard."
Each TIDE listee is given a number, and
statistics are kept on nationality and ethnic and religious groups. Some files
include aliases and sightings, and others are just a full or partial name,
perhaps with a sketchy biography. Sunni and Shiite Muslims are the fastest-growing
categories in a database whose entries include Saudi financiers and Colombian
revolutionaries.
Information Sharing
Every night at 10, TIDE dumps an unclassified version of that day's
harvest -- names, dates of birth, countries of origin and passport information --
into a database belonging to the FBI's
Between 5 and
Decisions on what to add to the
Some information may raise a red flag for one agency but not another.
"There's a big difference between CLASS and no-fly," Kopel said, referring to State's consular list. "About
the only criteria CLASS has is that you're not a
All of the more than 30,000 individuals on the TSA's
no-fly list are prohibited from entering an aircraft in the
With little to go on beyond names, airlines find frequent matches. The
screening center agent on call will check the file for markers such as sex, age
and prior "encounters" with the list. The agent might ask the
airlines about the passenger's eye color, height or defining marks, Kopel said. "We'll say, 'Does he have any rings on his
left hand?' and they'll say, 'Uh, he doesn't have a left hand.' Okay. We know
that [the listed person] lost his left hand making a bomb."
If the answers indicate a match, that "encounter" is fed back
into the FBI screening center's files and ultimately to TIDE. Kopel said the agent never tells the airline whether the
person trying to board is the suspect. The airlines decide whether to allow the
customer to fly.
TSA receives thousands of complaints each year, such as this one
released to the Electronic Privacy Information Center in 2004 under the Freedom
of Information Act: "Apparently, my name is on some watch list because everytime I fly, I get delayed while the airline personnel
call what they say is TSA," wrote a passenger whose name was blacked out. Noting
that he was a high-level federal worker, he asked what he could do to remove
his name from the list.
The answer, Kopel said, is little. A unit at
the screening center responds to complaints, he said, but will not remove a
name if it is shared by a terrorism suspect. Instead, people not on the list
who share a name with someone listed can be issued letters instructing airline
personnel to check with the TSA to verify their identity. The GAO reported that
31 names were removed in 2005.
A Process Under Fire
A recent review of the entire
A separate TSA system that would check every passenger name against the
screening center's database has been shelved over concern that it could grow
into a massive surveillance program. The Department of Homeland Security was
rebuked by Congress in December for trying to develop a risk-assessment program
to profile travelers entering and leaving the
Kopel insisted that private information on
Americans, such as credit-card records, never makes it into the screening
center database and that "we rely 100 percent on government-owned
information."
The center came in for ridicule last year when CBS's "60 Minutes"
noted that 14 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were listed -- five years after
their deaths. Kopel defended the listings, saying
that "we know for a fact that these people will use names that they
believe we are not going to list because they're out of circulation -- either
because they're dead or incarcerated. . . . It's not willy-nilly. Every name on
the list, there's a reason that it's on there."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/24/AR2007032400944_pf.html