US terrorism watchlist has 35pc error rate

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A report from the US Justice Department has found the country’s 1.1 million-strong watchlist of suspected terrorists has a 35 per cent error rate and no established way to remove or update records.
The FBI watchlist audit, released Wednesday by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, shows that “large portions of the list are governed by no formal processes for updating or removing records,” said the rights group American Civil Liberties Union in a statement. “The audit confirms that the nation’s watchlist system is massively broken,” the ACLU added.
The report also “strongly suggests that hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified as terrorists,” said ACLU legislative director Caroline Fredrickson. “This is yet more confirmation of what we’ve been saying for years - that the watchlist is not only unfair for travellers, but it is also a waste of scarce resources,” she added.
The watchlist’s size - some 1.1 million names as of December 2008 - is “unmanageable and non-credible,” the rights group insisted. The Inspector General audit examined 68,669 of those identities and found 24,000 were out of date. Highlighting the difficulty of removing names, the ACLU said one subject remained on the list for nearly five years after the case was resolved. Two people still on the list, the rights group noted, were dead.
The audit “reveals just what a comedy of errors the watchlist is,” said ACLU attorney Chris Calabrese.
“But we did not need this report to know there is a problem with the effectiveness of any terrorist watchlist that includes over a million names,” he added.