Terrorist Database Delays Travel
Tens of Thousands of Travelers Misidentified as Terrorists Yearly
Mar 30, 2007
Tens of thousands of travelers are delayed years because of the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), the United States’ information warehouse of bits of information from around the globe.
“Misidentifications accounted for about half of the tens of thousands of times a traveler’s name triggered a watch-list hit”, reported the Government Accountability Office in September, 2006. Misidentifications can lead to “delays, intensive questioning and searches, missed flights, or denied entry at the border.”
Misidentifications “commonly occur with names that are identical or similar to names on the watch list,” says the report. “Most of these misidentified persons who are not on the watch list but have a similar name and, therefore, may be repeatedly misidentified.”
The Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) no fly list is compiled from a list of suspected terrorists generated by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC). The TSC receives between 1,000 and 1,500 new names of suspected terrorists daily from TIDE along with passport information, place of origin, and date of birth. The TSC then adds any information the FBI has collected on these individuals which can come from any number of sources including the CIA, DIA, and NSA, all of which have been recently scrutinized for questionable information collection practices.
This updated list is then distributed to other organizations such as the TSA, the State Department, Homeland Security, and the National Crime Information Center to create watch lists, according to John Scott Redd, head of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Much of the thousands of pieces of data received daily from sources both domestic and international by TIDE is “fragmentary”, “inconsistent” and “sometimes just flat out wrong”, said Russ Travers, of the National Counterterrorism Center, in a recent interview with the Washington Post.
The Post also reported on March 25th that the number of entries in TIDE has “ballooned from less than 100,000 in 2003 to more the 435,000.”
Once a name is entered into the list it is virtually impossible to have it removed even if the suspected terrorist is known to be dead. There is no way of knowing whether your name, or someone who shares a similar name, is on the list. There is also no procedure for refuting the data associated with a name even though it may not be correct.
As part of the Department of Defense’s Information Operation Roadmap, the data gathered by TIDE may then be used to engage perceived enemy combatants whether through traditional or new information based means.
