Terror screening leads to few arrests

WASHINGTON — The government's terrorist-screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year. But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States.

A range of state, local and federal agencies and U.S. embassies overseas rely on the database to pinpoint terrorism suspects, who can be identified at borders or during routine traffic stops. The database consolidates a dozen government watch lists and a growing number of new sources.

The government said it plans to expand the data-sharing to private groups with a "substantial bearing on homeland security," though officials will not specify what that means.

Few other specifics are known about how the system operates, how many people get detained or turned back from borders, or the criteria used to identify suspects. The government will not discuss cases, nor will it confirm whether an individual's name is on its list.

Slightly more than half the 20,000 encounters last year were logged by Customs and Border Protection officers, who turned back or handed over to authorities 550 people, most of them foreigners, Customs officials said.

FBI and other officials said they could not provide data on the number of people arrested or denied entry for the other half of the database hits. FBI officials indicated the number of arrests is small.

The government says the database is a powerful tool to identify and track suspected terrorists and to share intelligence, and that its point is not necessarily to make arrests. But the new details about the numbers, disclosed in an FBI budget document and in interviews, raise fresh questions about the database's effectiveness and its impact on privacy, critics said.

They said the number of hits relative to arrests is alarmingly high and indicates the threshold for watch-list inclusion is too low, potentially violating thousands of Americans' civil liberties.

David Sobel, senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy organization, said the numbers "suggest a staggeringly high rate of false positives with respect to the identification of supposed terrorists."

"This really confirms the long-standing fear that this list is inaccurate and ultimately ineffective as an antiterrorism tool," he said.

But Jayson Ahern, deputy commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said focusing on arrests misses "a much larger universe" of suspicious U.S. citizens.

"There are many potentially dangerous individuals who fly beneath the radar of enforceable actions and who are every bit as sinister as those we intercept," he said.

The database is maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), a joint operation of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. Rick Kopel, the center's deputy director, called it "one of the best things the government has been able to accomplish since 9/11."

The government said some private-sector entities could also gain access to the data, which is kept for 99 years, according to a notice in the Federal Register last week.

The watch list includes information from the Transportation Security Administration's air passenger "no-fly" list, the State Department's Consular Lookout and Support System list and the FBI's Violent Gang and Terrorist Organizations File.

To be in the database, a person must be "a known or suspected terrorist such as those who finance terrorist activities, are known members of a terrorist organization, terrorist operatives or someone that provides material support to a terrorist or terrorist organization," Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Michelle Petrovich said.

According to the Justice Department Inspector General, the database contained at least 235,000 records as of last fall.

Using the database, U.S. and international authorities prevented "numerous attempts" at entry into the United States by an Egyptian citizen, Omar Ahmed Ali, who went on in 2005 to commit a suicide bombing in Qatar that killed one British citizen and injured 12, Petrovich said.