We're All Terrorists! Watch List Makes 20k 'Matches' in '06

July 19, 2007 — -- They may never know it, but U.S. air travelers and others set off silent terrorist warning alarms nearly 20,000 times in 2006 when their names matched against the government's centralized terrorist watch list, according to a statistic buried in a Department of Justice document.

The number represents a 27 percent jump over 2005, and points to the growth in the federal Terrorist Screening Center, a joint FBI and DHS operation that controls the government's master list of suspected terrorists. Agencies from the FBI to the NSA nominate names to the database and assign threat level codes to each name. The criteria for inclusion is considered classified.

The list now reportedly includes more than 500,000 names, according to a similar document reported on by ABC News in June. (The Justice Department has since removed that document from its website.)

The State Department queries the list before issuing visas, customs and border agents use it to vet incoming travelers and a subset of the list is exported to airlines for their passenger rating systems. More than 800,000 local and state police can also query the database when they pull over a speeding car or run a detained person's name through their computer system.

Officers who encounter a person on the watch list are put in contact with an employee at the center, who then directs the officer to arrest the person or to try to get valuable details that can be reported back to intelligence agencies.

The Justice Department's proposed budget for 2008 reveals for the first time how often names match against the database, reporting that there were 19,967 "positive matches" in 2006. The TSC had expected to match a far fewer number 14,780. The watch list matched people 5,396 and 15,730 times in 2004 and 2005 respectively.

The report defines a positive match as "one in which an encountered individual is positively matched with an identity in the Terrorist Screening Data Base, or TSDB."

It's not clear from the report whether those numbers include individuals whose names only coincidently match one of those on list, such as when Sen. Ted Kennedy was confused with a former IRA terrorist also named Kennedy.