WATCHLIST WOES

It was everybody’s top home­land secu­rity action item after 9/​11: con­sol­i­date the government’s dozen ter­ror watch lists into a sin­gle, usable data source. But nearly four years later, it’s a project that remains largely undone, Business Week reports.

Computer incom­pat­i­bil­i­ties, slow inter­a­gency nego­ti­a­tions, and for­mi­da­ble data-​​crunching chal­lenges are hin­der­ing the coor­di­na­tion of U.S. intel­li­gence data.
While it has made progress, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) says it doesn’t know when it will fin­ish con­sol­i­dat­ing infor­ma­tion from a dozen dif­fer­ent crim­i­nal data­bases into a mas­ter “ter­ror­ist watch list” data­base that can be checked by state and local police, bor­der agents, air­port work­ers, and oth­ers…
The TSC has also faced myr­iad tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties: While the State Dept.‘s data­base had extremely sophis­ti­cated code for sort­ing through com­pli­cated for­eign names, it’s slow. On the other hand, the Justice Dept.‘s National Crime Information Center, which is designed to help law-​​enforcement offi­cials do back­ground checks, oper­ates much faster, but it can’t han­dle com­plex Russian or Arabic names well…
The present capa­bil­i­ties are a big step from just a few years ago, when no out­side agent could get direct access to another intel­li­gence agency’s data­base. And a group that didn’t even exist before 2003 needs to start some­where…
[But] cur­rently, state and local law-​​enforcement offi­cials use the Justice Dept. data­base to con­nect to the TSC list, mean­ing they still expe­ri­ence the same lookup prob­lems. When a match comes up, the offi­cer must then dial the TSC call cen­ter, where an ana­lyst can check the sys­tem directly for them. Eventually, the TSC wants to incor­po­rate the bio­met­ric data and make it pos­si­ble for law-​​enforcement per­son­nel, bor­der offi­cials, and other agen­cies to query the watch list directly, using its own search engine. Officials at the TSC said they don’t have a spe­cific date when they think this could be com­pleted, however. 

THERE’S MORE: An “Air France flight cur­rently enroute from Paris to Boston has been ordered to divert and land in Bangor, [Maine] after a rou­tine check of the pas­sen­ger man­i­fest found a poten­tial match with the no-​​fly list,” NBC News is say­ing.
“The incred­i­ble dan­ger and tremen­dous incon­ve­nience caused by not clear­ing names with the ter­ror­ist watch list before a flight takes off is com­pletely unac­cept­able,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, who’s always quick to blast out a press release. “We must check the ter­ror­ist watch list before air­planes head to the United States.”

May 12th, 2005 | Homeland Security | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.