We're All Terrorists!
Found on Wired on Thursday, 19 July 2007
They may never know it, but U.S. air travelers and others set off silent terrorist warning alarms nearly 20,000 times in 2006 when their names matched against the government's centralized terrorist watch list, according to a statistic buried in a Department of Justice document.
The number represents a 27 percent jump over 2005, and points to the growth in the federal Terrorist Screening Center, a joint FBI and DHS operation that controls the government's master list of suspected terrorists. Agencies from the FBI to the NSA nominate names to the database and assign threat level codes to each name. The criteria for inclusion is considered classified.
27 percent more matches mean 27 percent more terrorists? I doubt so. This list is just not really effective if it causes so many false postitives. Otherwise, officials would have praised the list and boasted with its success, telling everybody how many terrorists have been arrested just because of that.