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Big Brother is watching you (if you have brown skin)
August 25, 2007 12:10 PM

The government's terrorist screening data base is growing larger every year:

The number of hits has surged since the second half of fiscal 2004, when the database was created. That year, the FBI reported 5,396 encounters, with some people having multiple encounters. In 2005, 15,730 hits were logged. Next year, the FBI projects 22,400 hits.

What exactly does this mean? It means that the chances that you're on that list is growing every year. And what happens if you get on that list? If you're name is foreign-sounding, you might just send up like this fellow:

Abe Dabdoub, 39, and his wife, both U.S. citizens, live in a Cleveland suburb. He said he has been detained 21 times at Michigan's border with Canada since last August. Dabdoub, who works for an electronics manufacturing company, said he has even begun to keep a spreadsheet. The first four times, he said, he was handcuffed. Once, his wife had to plead with the agents not to handcuff him in front of their 5- and 7-year-old boys, he said. The agents know him so well by now that they call him by his first name. Every time he asks them why he is being stopped, Customs officers tell him, "We can't tell you, for national security reasons," he said.

So, after being handcuffed four times, the Customs officers got to know him personally and started calling him by his first name...every time they arrested him therafter!

And why do we have this list out there?

The government says the database is a powerful tool for identifying and tracking suspected terrorists and for sharing intelligence, and that its purpose is not necessarily to make arrests.
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." He added that "this really confirms the long-standing fear that this list is inaccurate and ultimately ineffective as an anti-terrorism tool."

Or, it just confirms that we're making a decision as a society that Americans with foreign-sounding names, like Mr. Dabdoub (above), will be the ones to bear the cost of all of these false-positives.

The problem is that the government seems to have identified an awful lot of terrorists in this country:

To be included 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 organizations, terrorist operatives, or someone that provides material support to a terrorist or terrorist organization," said Michelle Petrovich, a spokesman for the Terrorist Screening Center. According to the Justice Department's inspector general, the database contained at least 235,000 records as of last fall.

235,000 possible terrorists in this country. How effective can this list really be?


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