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Terror Watch List Swells to More Than 755,000
rdavison writes "According to a USA Today story, the terror watch list has swollen to 755,000 with 200,000 people per year being added since 2004. Adding about 548 people daily every day of the year does not seem to lend itself to a manual process with careful deliberation given or double checking being done for each person added. It seems to suggests that data is being mined from somewhere to automatically add names to the list."
Surely it would be quicker to make an Anti-Terror list of people who are allowed to fly.
liqbase
As the Glasgow "terrorists" so brilliantly displayed, anybody can be a terrorist. All it takes is a car, a bunch of primitive explosive, flammable material and the motivation to endanger human life.
In my view, after September 11th the United States should have responded by doing one thing: Passing regulations that ensure that the cockpits of passenger aircraft are unable to be accessed from the passenger carrying part of the plane.
That's a proportionate response to the threat.
In reality, the terrorist threat is a several orders of a magnitude less than being killed by heart-disease. It's my view that in any problem solving situation, you should seek to solve the worst problem first and the smallest problem last.
The problem from where I'm sitting is that billions are being spent on a tiny fraction of deaths that occur in our countries. Where are the billions of dollars of funding to research heart-disease treatment, improving car safety, cancer treatments or the plethora of other much more likely ways you'll meet your sticky end?
What makes this irrational reaction so much worse is that we're selling our rights down the river for a false sense of security. If somebody passes me in the street and decides they want to kill me, there is nothing the long-arm of the state can do to stop them. I will likely die and the fact the person who killed me will spend a considerable time in prison is of little solace.
There are enough nut cases in the world to ensure that the chances of being killed in such a fashion are always going to be none zero. We all choose to walk about the street with our heads held high because we're not going to let that threat intimidate us. So why are we being intimidated by nutters who want to kill not just one person but quite a few of us?
It reminds me of the story of an elderly women in Warrington interviewed just after the IRA bomb detonated there, killing a young boy. The reporter asked why she was still shopping despite a bomb going off and she defiantly replied: "The Germans didn't stop me shopping so the Irish certainly won't."
Defiance is not giving away your freedom. Defiance is refusing to give away your freedom even if you life is at risk. We only need to look at those brave monks in Burma a few weeks ago to see what real defiance looks like. We've lost our back-bone and passed all sorts of onerous laws because we're afraid. We're pathetic and afraid.
When are we going to stand up and say - "To hell with stupid incompetent security. I want my freedom and I want it now."
Simon
Just add everyone, then implement a whitelist instead. We can issue travel papers and everything, it'll be great.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
On average, 548 people join Slashdot every day.
Coincidence?
Its McCarthyism all over again, report your friends, family, and neighbors to the Un-American Activities Committee if you see anything suspicious! And I'm sure this is just as effective as McCarthyism was. We don't have the man power or money to monitor roughly .25% of the population. At $750 per month for a wiretap thats $566 million per month if we were to wiretap all these people.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
If there are 755,000 terrorists in the USA, we're already dead.
What do you want to bet the false positive rate on that is? 99%? That's still 7,000. 99.9%? That still seems a bit high.
If your false positive rate is that high, then why even have a list at all?
One in 400 Americans is a Terrorist. You don't want to be a terrorist... do you? [shot of some guy going to the mall with his family] CONSUMERISM. My Anti-Terror.
God bless America....No, seriously...
:)
I threw the figures from the article into OO Calc quickly. It seems the rise is quite linear, and the total additions per year increasing somewhat from May 2005. Anything significant happen during May 2005 and 2007?
ilovegeorgebush
Then let's thank God and the powers that be for the terrorist watch list (TWL), because anybody can be on it !
"Wow, Ed got 20 this week, I gotta get more to stay in the game and get the promotion."
Assuming a population of six billion on the planet that means that 1 in 8000 is on the watchlist. That's a lot of terrorists.
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
So that's what happens to all those people posting words like "Terrorist", "Bomb", "Bin Laden", "9/11", "Echelon" on Slashdot and all over the intertubes. Luckily I don't do that kinda stuff.
So, in 175 years or so, 100% of the population of the United States will be on this secret list. I wonder if they'll have a process for getting off the list by then.
The airlines are going to be pissed.
- chrish
Terrorist watch lists punish people without trial. They are deeply unAmerican and are a direct violation of your right to due process. It is time to end this madness and call those who support it what they are, traitors.
These proscriptions deprive people of their liberty and property. Those on the lists are unable to use air transport, may be discriminated against when they seek employment and are harassed generally when they conduct business. In short, they are treated as a kind of felon. Needless to say, there's no jury involved before the conviction of "terrorist" is applied.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
First name on the list: Archibald Buttle, then Archibald Tuttle...
Aren't there more Democrats than that in this country?
Two extreme ways:
Be like the Dalai Lama or Ghandi and offer no violence and still hold up our heads high and work on why we're causing those people so much suffering and as a result of our peaceful and loving actions, gain the moral high ground and allies Worldwide and of ALL faiths because of it.
Extermination - like the NAZIs.
One of those extremes is the only way to beat the terrorists.
I prefer the first option myself.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Do we get the significance of that? The list is of names, not individuals. Remember Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy's little problem with the list?. Or how about this vicious 4 year old terrorist?
God help you if your name is John Smith, but it's probably even worse if your name is Mohammed or a variant of it. Oh, wait a second; most Islamic men's legal birth name is Mohammed.
If you want to fly without hinderance, you should probably just go ahead and change your legal name to your social security number, as it's the only way you're likely to get a unique one.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Is there some easy and legal way to get on the list or to put other people on it?
Stop the world; I need to get off.
This TWL and the various hues of Terror Alert (today it is brilliant opalescent blue alert level!) are activities done by the Government to show that it is doing something. The logic behind it is not much deeper than, "We need to do something, this is something, so we are doing it."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Really? You think the red scare is what mediated this effect?
Same really with the no-fly lists. Before the no-fly lists four aircraft where hijacked, and afterwards?</blockquote>
I thought this was Slashdot, not the convention for the retarded. You got an "Insightful" rating for this garbage?
COINCIDENCE != CAUSALITY
Given the data you presented, there is no way to logically come to your conclusion! Furthermore, even if I assume just as a matter of a thought experiment, that you're correct, and the no-fly lists did prevent at least one terrorist attack, it still doesn't make them any better at all, because while the relative risk reduction may have been 100%, the absolute risk reduction would be like 0.0001%... and I am simply not willing to sacrifice much of my freedom, and a colossal amount of my money, for a tiny benefit like that.
Simply put, the cost-to-benefit ratio of these measures is totally unacceptable.
First let's sing that old familiar song-- "Causation != Correlation. La la la la na na."
There were 4 planes hijacked before the no-fly list. Now there's none. If you cancel the no-fly list, and a plane gets hijacked, what'll you tell people?
There were 4 planes hijacked before the Obama ran for president. Now there's none. If you don't elect Obama, and a plane gets hijacked, what'll you tell people?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Right. America's not communist. I don't think you could seriously make that argument, as we spent most of the 20th century defining communism as "any form of liberalism currently not embraced by America"
The Soviet sort of Communism is indeed on the decline. It might have been sound in theory, but it was quickly overrun by corruption (the real enemy) and the political systems evolved to counter that. You could also say that the sort "democracy" that we had in 1920 is also on the decline, and be perfectly correct in that assumption. It all depends upon how you mince your words.
China's playing it by the book. They're going through their capitalist phase (and making a killing off of it in the process). Whether or not they'll eventually close their doors and embrace "real" communism remains to be seen (although history seems to suggest this, as China's been an astonishingly introverted nation for pretty much all of recorded history up until now). If that does come to pass, it will (at least initially) be a 'very bad thing' for the rest of us, regardless of which economic religion you subscribe to.
Socialism, communism's less intimidating cousin, on the other hand, is far from dead, and has more or less been accepted in some form or another across the industrialized world (apart from the US, which has spent far too much effort fighting the reds to allow such a thing to happen). Although communism was never proven to be a successful economic system, socialist-capitalist policies (ie. nationalized healthcare) have proven to be extremely popular and successful in nations that have the economic resources to support them.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
You know how there is a crisis in the copyright system because our successful and longstanding system of copyright laws is based on the assumption that copying is too hard for casual infringement?
Well there is another crisis going on that hasn't got nearly the same attention: The laws that protect our fundamental liberties are based on the assumption that suspicion is too hard to sustain for it to be used casually.
Generally speaking, placing somebody under suspicion and investigating that person is not considered a deprivation of liberty. In fact you can't have a functioning criminal legal system without suspicion and investigation, and generally the question of reasonableness isn't applied to the manner under which somebody falls under suspicion, but the manner in which the investigation is undertaken.
Suspicion and surveillance are not considered tantamount to punishment, because they are assumed to be temporary conditions. It's expensive (so the argument goes) to focus suspicion on somebody; if the suspicion is not productive, then the government surely must move its attention elsewhere, for it must have bigger fish to fry.
But what if there is a machine to the suspecting for the government? Furthermore, suppose the main expense is acquiring and maintaining the machine, and the marginal cost of adding more human grist to the mill is zero? Misplaced suspicion is no longer an inconvenience that one must bear occasionally as part of achieving a lower crime rate. It is quite feasible to make suspicion and detailed scrutiny a permament feature of someone's life. Furthermore, this can be done at no additional cost to the government, and it will surely catch at least a few additional miscreants. The entire system can operate without human effort, except to do things like additional pat downs at the airport. Many of those things are simply utilizing slack resources.
In the case of copyright, the government has given tools to private parties like the RIAA that, funded by deep pockets, can enforce and extend their economic interests. Where are the corresponding legal tools for the individual permamently and unjustly accused?
Society is divided into two groups: those who think technology is like magic, and those who understand how technology works. Of those who understand technology, some have a financial interest in technology being used more; some are simply so manifestly paranoid they have no credibility; and many, many more treat thinking about these issues as a boring waste of time. Unfortunately, big changes are coming, and in this case the paranoid people are right: they're the only one who have even considered that the changes that are coming might not be what we want.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
> Same really with the no-fly lists. Before the no-fly lists four aircraft where hijacked, and afterwards?
Actually, if you really want to argue this:
Before 2001, there were 0, repeat, 0 domestic hijackings within the United States for the previous 10 years. That is with none of these no-fly lists, nor the loss of liberties.
So, your arguement is useless as it goes on a false assumption. I would note that out of the 19 hijackers that day, most of them were already on a suspect list, and that's without "no fly" lists, warrantless wiretaps, and the like. It could be said that our overzealotness in making lists has actually increased a potential hijackers ability to "slip through" as now there's so much "noise" in the system.
The previous administration had recieved 36 terror convictions. The current? 1. Yes, read that number, 1. Our "new laws" have managed to actually decrease the number of convictions of terrorists. So, you really want to continue this arguement, or re-evaluate?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I got disgusted with America years ago and left. I think you discount Canada & Europe too quickly and I think I would look closely at the UK and Australia before moving there because they both appear to have social problems that the US has.
I *really* like living in a smallish city in Europe. My family is subjected to fewer of the myriad of minor prejudices that exist (compared to Atlanta). The traffic is lighter and the drivers more disciplined. Despite living in city which is supposedly 96% catholic I am not subjected to any sort of wackiness that is so popular from the religious right in the US these days. There is *no* telemarketing. I worked out a contract where I have 6 weeks paid and 12 weeks unpaid holiday. It's easy to be Green. It's easy to bicycle. It's easy to buy primarily local food stuffs. It's possible to have a mostly positive political conversation with people with significantly disparate views and no one is accused of hating Europe or Austria. No one cares what you do in the privacy of your own bedroom or wants to make a law about it. The government isn't spying on me. Public works are properly funded so we don't have bridges collapsing nor have we completely run out of water. The beer is better.
I could go on for hours...
One more thing.... The ISP with the really, really fast fiber doesn't do intrusive traffic shaping... Yet.
Bottom line there are a lot of really, really cool places in the world to live. Sure not all of them are primarily English speaking and there is no perfect place but you shouldn't let that slow you down.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
There is oversight and regulations of even a completely private thing like an individual's credit history. Banks can not simply claim: "we don't like this guy" — there are laws regulating, what records can be kept, and procedures allowing people to dispute inaccuracies.
The "terror list", which, allegedly, is used to not simply cause extra scrutiny, but to also deny boarding sometimes, is maintained by the (Executive) government and is in sore need of similar regulations. As a minimum, one must be able to inquire, whether he or she are on the list and to challenge the placing both in administrative proceedings or in courts.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
or something to that effect...
Next time when I see yet another story on how China limits the freedoms of its citizens I shall be sure to point out this story.
fuck karma, I like saying the truth better
The biggest reason there have been no hijackings is that WE SAW WHAT HAPPENED ON 9/11.
Do you really think any hijacker would stand a chance on a plane anymore?
I know that I would rip the tray table off of the seat in front of me and use it as a weapon against any terrorist activity on a plane. Sure I would probably die, but doing nothing, I would probably die as anyway.
The bad guys know this. They know they cannot get control of the plane as long as one person is still alive. That is why there have been no hijackings, we would rather die fighting than cowering.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
This is what passes as insightful nowadays? Feh!
I don't know if any reputable historians would agree with your implied premise that there was an actual, credible "communist" threat to the United States at any point in the past. If the threat never existed in the first place, it is kind of hard to disprove that drinking milk every day wasn't have an equivalent (or superior) deterrence against communism.
Assuming of course that there is an actual, credible terrorist threat...
I think a sense of proportionality is required here: there are thousands of aircraft flights in the United States every day. Over the past 10 years, exactly four flights were hijacked. On any given day in recent history, more people are killed by impaired drivers in the United States than are killed by terrorists.
And yet, some people applaud insulting and ineffectual security measures because it give the appearance that the government is doing something to protect them.
Sorry to break it to you dude, but terrorists are criminals, and the way to catch criminals is with boring, methodical police work. It's not glamorous, but it is effective. I (for one) find it hard to believe that making everyone remove their shoes at the airport has saved so much as a single life. At best, it might have given a woody to someone with a foot fetish, but that's about all that has been accomplished...
I really feel sorry that there are people out there who are so afraid that bogus security theater makes them feel safer. I hope that some day, they will realize that effective national security policies are not based on lame Hollywood movie plots.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Otherwise all those people would be shot dead as soon as they tried to book a flight.
like "Edward Kennedy?"
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
But wait, I thought the pubbies kept saying that they're only watching people who need to be watched, and are sticking to the law!? You mean the government is lying? I can't believe that! No way! I wish I knew why the heck people can't dig their heads out of the sand and realize what the hell is going on... do people just not realize how perilously close we are to living in the orwellian future forecast by 1984? Cameras are everywhere in the UK and soon in the US, unmanned spyplanes doing thousands of runs per day over our countries, arrests being made based on information garnered from satellites, every conversation is being monitored, people are being held without habeas corpus because the governments are creating black-bagging legal grey areas, fighting a war that can't possibly be won and using it as an attempt to unify and pacify your body-politic... its terrifying. Yet it seems like only a few people realize it. I just want my free frontal lobotomy so I don't have to care about it anymore.
So I guess in a couple of decades it will stop being a threat. When we run out of oil and they run out of funding and stop being interesting as an enemy.
I wonder who will be the new terrorists?
I propose vampires.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
See. here's the deal, sport; I am a long time registered libertarian, and have at times in the past been very active within the LP Party. I am one of the few who can honestly state that I voted for Paul to be President in 1988. I have also researched Paul, and have discovered that he is no longer a REAL Libertarian, nor would his policies lead "to reducing the government regulations and protecting personal liberties".
I feel that defining Paul as a "libertarian" almost reaches to the level of being personally defamatory. His campaign statements are oppositional to at least four of the Libertarian Party's Platform Planks:
I will expound upon this as I offer up evidence of Paul's less than unyielding defense of both liberty and The US Constitution by analysing a few of his proposed Bills and Resolutions in Congress this year.
Paul's whole anti-immigrant posturing is both anti-libertarian, and counter to the original Intents of This Nation's founding. If you are opposed to non-American born residents in the U.S., that is one thing, but DO NOT attempt to foist off this belief as "protecting personal liberties", as it hinders the personal liberty of many, who are just looking for a better life. It is facially opposed to The LPs Immigration plank too. This proposed Constitutional Amendment would go even farther, and would withhold citizenship from even humans born within The Nation's Border.
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
You mean Bushie's fictional war on terror that is a figment of his sociopathic metal state? Or how his cronies keep perpetuating his mental illness?
The fallacy of the War on Terror - http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1212-13.htm
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Position is that I fail to see a significant moral difference between crashing a plane of passengers and handing out sanctions that only serve to starve the poor, young, old, and sick except that one takes a few thousand lives and the other may be counted in the millions.
Perhaps instead of focusing on the belief that "they are evil, plain and simple and must be extinguished" and forming our (very expensive) policies around this extremely simplistic view we should be asking ourselves "why do so many people want us dead so badly?". This is not to suggest that the blame lies on the victims of terrorism, but perhaps a change in our destructive, aggressive, and state sanctioned terrorism of 3rd world nations might wittle down the shear numbers of people who view us as evil.
For example, infant mortality has increased six-fold since 1990 in Iraq and 32% of children under 5 are malnourished. facts & myths (with citations). Impacts on Iraq population since 1990 have been devastating.
There's no doubt Saddam was a classic "mad dictator", but only in his wildest dreams could he have effected the level of destruction seen over the past 17 years. Further, despite our beliefs that Iraq was a backwards nation full of dolts the population used be quite educated by global standards with literacy rates reaching the upper 80 percent. A good portion of the pop is quite aware of the US's (Rumsfield and the first Bush administration's) contribution to Saddams domination by supplying the tools needed to carry out his attacks against certain sections of the population and Iran.
I am not defending the actions of terrorists in any way, but we're making it pretty damned easy for various groups to attract new recruits.
Sure. I don't disagree at all. The road block though, is the folks who can't stand that we're (The USA) is being attacked. And, I personally know a few folks like this, we have to deal with the folks who firmly believe that the terrorists are this group of folks who are guided by an ideology that's beyond reason. The person I'm thinking of equates the Islamic Terrorists with the Japanese who refused to surrender. I found it quite enlightening that, even after dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, the "war council" (of WWII Japan) was STILL divided about surrendering to the US. They would have rather died than surrender - even if that included every last man and child on the Japanese Island. There are folks in the US who think that ALL Muslims have this ideology.
A book that I found to have a fresh interpretation of all of this is ThePower of a Positive NO
The Arab people are REALLY pissed off and some of them are soooo pissed off, they want die and take everyone else out with them. Add in religion (Islam) and you get a VERY powerful force. What I mean by "add in Islam", I'm sure you've seen the interview with some tribesman somewhere who's went fight in Iraq (or wherever) to help his "Muslim Brother".
That's how to beat the terrorists: refuse to be terrorized.,p/>Amen to that! But tell that to the folks who are saying "I need to protect my children!" Even thought the odds are that their children will die in an auto accident while their parents are driving. Or that their children will die because of all the fast food their parents feed them. You know what I'm talking about: folks do not understand risk and where it's coming from.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
http://www.papersplease.org/gilmore/
There's not "no right to transport." There's a dent in the constitutional protection of the right to travel predicated on the availability of alternative means of travel.
the gist of the opinion of the court is that because there are alternate means of travel, you can choose one of those rather than submit to searches and id checks.
Gilmore mentioned in his complaint having heard that similar measures were put in place for train travel, but these were rejected as hearsay. i guess he ought to have tried to travel by train and sued the TSA and both Amtrak and the airline. He didn't. Anyways, even if he had, it seems fairly clear that the court would have ignored reason yet again.
basically it's a cop-out and yet another instance of the courts turning a blind eye to the government's depredations.
feh!
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I hope you didn't mean to imply that non-USA citizens cannot be convicted in US courts, because they can. Anyway, presumably government added the people on the http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-holyland23oct23,1,1922726.story?coll=la-headlines-nationHoly Land Foundation donor list to the Watch List. Seized the foundation assets and investigated the case for six years but something went wrong with the trial. No guilty verdict. Are the people who donated still worth watching? (And for six years they have been watched in newly allowed ways.) Is there any way to get off the Watch List?
We must repeat.
Incorrect. Those 36 include plots that were not carried out, prevented by the pre-9/11 use of the FISA court and good old fashioned police work.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
The state knows that "everybody is guilty of something" - so they just put everybody on a "Watch List".
It doesn't matter that the "Watch List" is useless as an actual "Watch List". It's useful because at any time, for any reason, that some state official wants to mess with you, they can say, "You're on the Watch List."
It's a control mechanism. It has absolutely nothing to do with "terrorism", just like the TSA and the rest of the pointless measures they take will never, ever have any impact whatsoever on real, live terrorists whose job it is and whose training it is to get around such measures in the first place.
Nothing the US has done since 9/11 would necessarily prevent another 9/11 - even assuming terrorists are interested in doing another 9/11. There are probably a lot of reasons an identical 9/11 hasn't occurred - reasons having nothing to do with the security measures put in place since the first one, but more to do with issues of organization, target selection, finances, redirected emphasis on other priorities, or simple disinterest. Even simple competence at pulling one off in the first place - maybe they got lucky with the first one - or more sinisterly, maybe they had help they weren't aware of to allow them to pull off the first one.
By definition, as Rutger Hauer's character said in the movie "Nighthawks", "Remember, there is no security."
Dick Marcinko used to say the same thing with regard to his Red Cell SEAL Team exercises. He pointed out that security organizations operate by checklists. They run down a checklist making sure everything is secure. He said that terrorists don't operate by checklists. They hit targets of opportunity. So his Team would just wait until the security organization went through the motions - then bypassed whatever security they thought they had and made their hit anyway using methods that either hadn't been considered in the first place or which stressed and actually made use of the security measures in place to bypass the security.
Example: an alarm system. Throw rocks at it until the numerous false alarms make the security people turn it off for repair. The very security system you're using is used to bypass it.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't have security systems. It just means you have to remember that they're only there to "keep out the riffraff." As long as your only enemies are "riffraff", they might work.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!