Half a Million and Going Strong

Does it bother anyone else that there are 509,000 names or so on the FBI's terrorist watch list? ABC News is reporting that it is so. Evidently a portion of the FBI's unclassified 2008 budget request posted to the Department of Justice Web site refers to "the entire watch list of 509,000 names," which is utilized by its Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force. As someone who deals with large amounts of data in computer data bases on an almost daily basis I can tell you that this amount of data is very unwieldly. It is just not a simple matter of a half a million records like a phone book but all sorts of ancillary information that might be hooked to the names

"It grows seemingly without control or limitation," said ACLU senior legislative counsel Tim Sparapani of the terrorism watch list. Sparapani called the 509,000 figure "stunning."

"If we have 509,000 names on that list, the watch list is virtually useless," he told ABC News. "You'll be capturing innocent individuals with no connection to crime or terror."

It would be very interesting to know exactly the size of the database and how it is structured and what the user interface is. How many Bill Smiths are on the list? How many people with your name are on the list? I can feel pretty sure that there is at least one. Just pick up a phone book and check for your name or your last names with the same initials. You might be surprised. What a mess.