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 750,000 terrorists on "useless" terrorist watchlist
October 26, 2007
Posted by Stuart Trew
According to a recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), as of May 2007 there were over 755,000 names on the FBI's terrorist watchlist. That's over three quarters of a million people, "who are reasonably suspected of having possible links to terrorism -- in addition to individuals with known links," said the report.
"They are quickly galloping towards the million mark -- a mark of real distinction because the list is already cumbersome and is approaching absolutely useless," said Tim Sparapani of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in a USA Today article about the FBI list, which has been growing at an insane rate of 200,000 names per year since 2004, and which Canadian airline companies continue to use to screen passengers flying to the United States as per the SPP.
Also useless, says the ACLU, is the so-called Secure Border Initiative (SBINet), a multi-billion dollar project to "secure" the southern and northern borders of the United States with walls (on the Mexican border) as well as high-tech radars, ground sensors, watchtowers and, on the Canadian border, aerial drones.
According to another GAO report released this week, the first segment of SBINet along the U.S.-Mexico border, called Project 28, is incomplete more than four months after it was supposed to become operational. Furthermore, according to the ACLU: "The volatile weather and untamed environment have resulted in fuzzy, unfocused images, and the technology is incapable of doing the tasks it was created to do. In addition, the communication between the surveillance towers and the command center in Tucson is delayed because of the physical distance, creating even more problems with SBINet."
The border initiative, which is being constructed by Boeing, "raises serious privacy concerns," says the ACLU. "The long-range surveillance cameras are capable of observing the activities of everyday Americans living along the border, disrupting the daily lives of ordinary people. The looming guard towers, visible for miles in the spare Southwestern landscape, casts a mood of constant surveillance for border residents."
Said Sparapani in statement, "SBINet is not a realistic alternative – it’s Big Brother at the border."
The difference between the FBI watchlist and SBINet is that the former is an SPP initiative gone mad while the latter is proof that the SPP cannot and will not make life easier for people in North America. The Department of Homeland Security is obviously not interested in easing the flow of people across borders. It is interested in controlling and monitoring (and in the Mexican case, blocking) the flow with expensive, faulty and invasive technology.
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