It’s not often that mere citizens get to take a peek behind the curtain of the Terrorist Watchlist. Testimony last week at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs provided an insight into the Terrorist Watchlist and the extent to which it is being used throughout the country.
The current watchlist is made up of approximately 400,000 people. These are suspected terrorist as well as suspected bankers and money folk who subsidize terrorism. Of this universe of 400,000 the “No Fly List” is a small subset made up of only about 3,400 individuals including 170 U.S. persons.
This “No Fly List” is the list we interface with when purchasing a ticket on an airline, when boarding aircraft either domestically or bound for the U.S. The larger list is used by a handful of federal agencies and local law enforcement personnel whenever background checks are performed during routine traffic stops or arrests.
Over the past year, 19,000 hits to the larger Terrorist Screening Center list were positively matched to the list. This does not always result in arrest. Many times law enforcement is simply tracking suspects in hopes that they lead to other members of the suspected terrorism network.
Timothy Healy, the director of the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), run by the FBI, testified on December 9th regarding the current state of the Terrorist Watchlist. He provided a clear overview of his center.
Established in 2003, the TSC is a multi-agency center that connects the law enforcement communities with the Intelligence Community by consolidating information about known and suspected terrorists into a single Terrorist Screening Database, which is commonly referred to as the “Terrorist Watchlist.” The TSC facilitates terrorist screening operations, helps coordinate the law enforcement responses to terrorist encounters developed during the screening process, and captures intelligence information resulting from screening.
Of paramount significance is the TSC’s success in making this critical information accessible to the people who need it most – the law enforcement officers who patrol our streets, the Customs and Border Protection Officers who protect our borders, and our other domestic or foreign partners who conduct terrorist screening every day. In the six years since we began operations, the Terrorist Watchlist has become the world’s most comprehensive and widely shared database of terrorist identities. The current terrorist watchlisting and screening enterprise is an excellent example of interagency information sharing whose success is due to the superb collaborative efforts between the TSC, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and other members of the Intelligence Community.
As well as serving as the terrorist source for these federal and local law enforcement and bureaucracies, this list is shared with 17 different countries making it the most pervasive list of suspected terrorists in the world.
This list is impressive and has been culled from everything from fingerprints taken on battlefields in the Middle East, visa applications submitted to the State Department, traffic stops in remote localities, air travel records, passport applications, FBI records and more.
While advanced biometrics are not in use at land border crossings, the Terrorist Watchlist is fully operational and connected by computer networks directly to the mainframes at the FBI.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
