Over 700,000 people are on terrorist watchlist, according to US gubmint
Now I understand why we have to do away with that pesky Bill of Rights -- there are over 900,000 names on US soil on a U.S. government terrorist watch list. The ACLU has a counter to show the latest number.
"At the current rate of growth, the U.S. watch lists will contain a million records by July. If there were a million terrorists in this country, our cities would be in ruins" said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program. "The absurd bloating of the terrorist watch lists is yet another example of how incompetence by our security apparatus threatens our rights without offering any real security."Link (Via Gerry Canavan)The new counter features a rolling, odometer-style display with a real-time readout showing how many individuals are on the list at a given moment. The figures are extrapolated from a September 2007 report by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, which reported that the Terrorist Screening Center had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007, and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month. As of today, the list stands at approximately 917,000 names.
the latest
latest episodes
Dn't lt th scrt t, Shhhhhhhh
If we could actually get 1,000,000 people to show up on the National Mall to protest not the war but the use of torture and the violations of the 4th and 1st Amendments maybe we could actually change something in this country.
But it would take at least that many.
generally, one should be quick to blame incompetence, but I suspect that in this country it is malice which is driving much of the "Homeland Security" theater we see today.
you need an environment of fear to justify the HS security complex, and if there isn't a real threat, there exists an unbelievably strong fiscal motivation to make one.
it's already gotten pretty silly. my favorite example is the "Music Pirate == Terrorist" meme being floated around by media industry lobbyists.
Awesome!
1) One number
2) One growth rate
3) Extrapolate
4) ??
5) FUD!
Talk about abusing statistics. You don't draw a line between two data points and make conclusions.
well OK then, what do YOU make of it?
damned lies!
"According to the Prison Policy Initiative Web site, the national prison population nears 1.5 million, plus an additional 700,000 in local jails-half a million more prisoners than in the much more populated China."
I personally don't like the watch list but I think their numbers are wrong. The watch list doesn't just contain "terrorists on US soil" in theory it would contain "terrorists on the planet" so it isn't 1/300 it is roughly 1/6800.
And where would be the ACLU "... counter to show the latest number"?
I'd like to see a snappy benetton styled "I'm one" PSA for this. why shouldn't the government print office get involved in this.
So, wait. This would seem to suggest that an "incompetent security apparatus" is the major flaw here, and that giving up the Bill of Rights would be okay if only the DHS was good at its job.
If the security watch-lists were super-duper accurate, and only had 5 names between them, then would they be OK? How about 50 names, or 500? Is there a cutoff between "okay to hassle the following people" and "too many false positives"?
What's this I hear about 1 in 300 being a tourrist? Why would our government not want us to be tourrists? You get to meet unusual people, and eat strange foods, why Americans make great tourrists, it's good for business too.
What's that you say? Not tourrists? What?
Never mind.
Since I have a very common name, I don't have to guess the chance that my name is on the list- it's 100%!
Hey Tomic, how is Roseanna?
The idea of the list to have a large, arrestable segment of population to round up to show "something is being done" when the next inside-job explodes.
Between them, all muslims, anyone who ever posted on the web, they should have enough bodies to frighten the rest into submission when they see the size of the camps.
Pretty soon the presidential candidates going to chasing the elusive Terrorist Vote.
Well 1 in 100 are in prison, so one in 300 being a terrorist sounds about right to me. Assuming the US defines 'terrorist' as broadly as it defines 'criminal'.
Gotta love Amerikkka. I know I do.
About as much as I love steaming piles of feces.
"We have met the enemy and he is us!" Pogo, fellow traveler.
###
Hold on a minute! You're misunderstanding the number. 900,000 isn't the number of suspected terrorists, it's the number of names on the list. Some (many, even) of those names are held by more than one person.
Some of those records aren't even full names. Some just have an initial instead of a name, like "E KENNEDY". So you can get hassled if your last name is Kennedy and your first is Edward, or Elizabeth, or Emma. So that list of 900,000 records covers more than a million people.
You know as much as I dislike how things are, using FUD, abusing statistics and bad arguments is not the way to go about creating change. A knee jerk is a knee jerk whether right or left.
There's an interesting list of argument fallacies which makes an interesting read if you think about the actions of the current government, but equally as important, the actions of groups like the ACLU.
How much are you willing to bet that this counter never goes down? Hell, it's always a constant rate of growth, and that my friends is a bowl of pudding. I've been told there's proof in it...
OK, how would YOU create change?
Actually what I would like to know (and I'm certain it has come up before) is "Does anything come of reporting these facts?" At least in America? I am pretty amazed when I see reports of Canadians or people in the UK banning together to stop DRM or to play Anonymous but do Americans do anything about the scary things that get posted here?
Fudge the numbers. Isn't that SOP for government statisticians?
I'll let you know come November :^)
Doesn't the watch list cover the whole world? So my sliderule says: One name for every 7,179 humans and 157,389 Americans.
Now please don't let this detract from the "The watchlist sucks" theme of this post, I'm totally on board with that...
Other comments on that list.
Is the the terrorist watch list an actual tool in the so-called "war on terror"? Or just busy work to make it look like the DHS is doing something valuable? Or a distraction from something else they are doing which is either more effective, or maybe more sinister?
The watch list is foolish, as are most attempts to stop terrorism. It's like stopping a glacier-- you can't do it with a fist or a hammer or a pickax or a thousand pickaxes. The only way to do it is to change the entire atmosphere of the world, which means two things: either make the entire world a police state on permanent lockdown, or make the entire world fair and equitable for all humans so there is no need for one man to blow himself up in a crowded market. Which world would you rather live in?
The watch list isn't helping to make it the latter.
From the report (TSC = Terrorist Screening Center):
The summary of the report also says that the number of names in April 2007 was 700,000 and the rate of growth was about 20,000 names per month. And that 38% of records that had already been reviewed for accuracy by the TSC still had significant errors in them. And that records the duplicated the "secret" five identifying fields (I'm thinking: firstname, lastname, height, weight, birthdate) were quite common, which is as radical an indictment of the whole sorry mess as one could imagine.
As a card-carrying Bayesian I have no problem drawing inferences from such sparse data, because we have lots of prior information. For example, the proposition, "Rates of change in government agencies are so slow as to be safely considered zero over periods of months or years" is plausible as hell. Ergo, linear extrapolation over a year or so is probably justified based on historical data.
The BB headline, however, is false. That peculiarly American institution, the "gubmint", actually says that fewer than 10,000 Americans are in the Terrorist Screening Database, probably no more than 1 in 25,000.
In free and public debate no good is ever served by anything other than the truth.
All we need now is some kind of national ID card with and RFID tracking chip to make us all safe. If we could somehow have the chips implanted under the skin that would be ideal. And then if we could just merge Canada and the U.S. and Mexico into one North American Union everything would be great, no more immigration problems or pesky borders to secure. How many Ameros would this all cost and which CFR candidate do you think is the best one to bag and tag us all? Obama? Hillary? McCain?
From someone's online post on another topic...
"It's not a pretty sight when the lug nuts of reason have fallen off the wheels of progress on the SUV of misinformation causing the occupants to drive off the road of wisdom into the yawning chasm of ignorance."
"1 in 300 US residents are terrorists, according to gubmint"
I'd like to know where on the document referred to it states that the number cited only includes US residents.
OT: Why does BB edit a user's comment without stating it has? Also, if there is a comments TOS, what is the URL? Danke.
Have any of the people who form the pool that the next president will drawn from come out clearly on record that they will dismantle this stupid list?
But what if the SUV of misinformation is on the road of ignorance, careening toward the brick wall of inevitability when, in the nick of time, the lug nuts of hubris come loose and the wheels of grinding routine turn and throw the vehicle clear of the rut of denial and into an open field of full disclosure?
Ah! But uglier to behold still is the rickshaw of complacency plunging headlong into the precipice of fascism with the blinkered occupants wailing at their punishment for not asking inconvenient questions.
Crap, wrong four freedoms I hyperlinked to there.
Four Freedoms of the European Union.
As long as it's not the BigWheel of fun scraping the curb of silly posts to avoid the pot holes of the internet filled with muddy analogies!
Shoot.
Roosevelt's Four Freedoms were sounding pretty good to me.
Oh well. Bring on the New World Order.
"You're now free to move about the country."
http://youtube.com/watch?v=kwxwH_nA1hk
don't let our stupidity become your reality
Beware the pogo stick of repetitive metaphors as it pumps the Moderator into a frenzy of justified editorial rage and sparks a spasm of delete key mosh-pit contortions. ... or something like that
Too bad FDR was literally a fascist; but that's a debate for another time.
The point I wish I hadn't fumbled in posing was to ask why you seem to consider Free Movement of labor and capital equivalent to some kind of police state. Aren't the walls called "border controls" delineating the size of our current civic prisons?
Hey I'm not convinced that your globalist one-world-government wet dream is a bad thing, I'm just wary of it.
Let's get rid of "border controls" (LOL) and national sovereignty while we're at it and let the NAU automate itself above the supreme court and outside the constitution and the bill of rights and let's trust that the new higher power is interested in protecting and guaranteeing freedoms other than movement of labor and capital.
What could go wrong?
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm wanted over on a Speed Racer Trailer talkback on AICN.
#27: OK, so maybe there are only 10,000 terrorists in the US (according to the watchlist), and the rest of the 900,000-odd names on the list are all overseas. But let me remind you that just 20 terrorists destroyed three large buildings and four aircraft, blew a hole in a heavily-defended military command center, and killed around 3,000 people. Just think what 10,000 could do!
no....no.....nope, nothing comes to mind.
http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoons/SherfJ/2008/SherfJ20080312_low.jpg
angusm, I was all set to name some of the 20 terrorist you speak of but you just wouldn't get it. sleep well at night good american.
Actually the chances are good that the watch-list is close to being a subset of all of the names of all of the people in the US. If that is true then you can say that about 1 in 300 US residents are on that watch list, since membership is just by name only and not according to any other factor (like address, age, race, or nationality).
If close to a million people were actually terrorists, the United States would be in trouble. this it a waste of government money
there are probably enough employees of the intelligence agencies to make that 1 in 300 seem realistic.
all i can do is shake my head, these mother fuckers have decided that they can redefine the label "terrorist" in any shoot-from-the-hip way that suits them at the moment.
at the moment, much of the terrorism in the united states is originating on pennsylvania avenue.
"forever a good choice", are you joking?
But when will I be able to check on the internets to see if any of my neighbors are terrorists like I can with sex offenders? It seems unsafe to for the government to hide that information if it knows.
Why stop there? Why not Rate My Terrorist?
I think the government's interpretation of the word "terrorist" is different from the standard definition. For them it might mean: people who are beyond fed up with the way they're misbehaving and are willing to do something about it... like speak up.
Am I terrifying or not dot com?
> "If we could actually get 1,000,000 people to
> show up on the National Mall to protest not the
> war but the use of torture and the violations
> of the 4th and 1st Amendments maybe we could
> actually change something in this country."
Actually, if we got 1,000,000 to protest, as you suggest, what we'd accomplish is increasing the number of people on the watch list from 700,000 to 1,700,000...
:)
I think Pimp My Terrorist might be more fun. And perhaps even useful… if he had enough bling on his suicide vest we’d be able to spot him in the airport easier.
if he had enough bling on his suicide vest
What part of 'shrapnel' are you unclear on?
big push everybody! Get on the snitch lines and report everyone you know! Get that list up to ten million! You can do it!
Is it illegal to tell y'all I'm on the list?
I am, as well as everyone with my very common name.
IT'S OVER 9000!!!!!!
@44: The 10,000 number is only marginally less ridiculous than the 1 in 300 number, but at least it is what the report says (and now the BB headline is accurate! Yay for reader feedback, and editorial sanity! Thanks Mark--sorry to be so damned self-righteous, but these things do matter.)
If there were 5,000 terrorists in the United States operating in cells of 50 people (very large) planning attacks that took 10 years to mature (very long), starting in 1993 (Bosnia was a major force for radicalisation), we would expect something like TEN terrorist attacks to take place in the United States every year, on a scale as large or larger what the Nineteen Nitwits perpetrated on 9/11.
So even without exaggeration the list is a travesty, an exercise in fear-mongering that flies in the face of the very ordinary fact of daily life that no one is being killed by terrorists in the United States, year after year after year.
Gee. Not long to go before resources will be better spent watching the people who aren't on the list.
How does one volunteer to get on the list? Do they have a website? I mean, what if you went bad later?
Two points. One, Using the term "Gubment" Goes to show just how ignorant the writer is and discredits him and any points he is trying to make.
Two, This list has names of people who have or are suspected of having ties to terrorism. If you remember about 6 short years ago 19 people who should have been kept a closer eye on flew 2 passenger airliners into the World Trade Center and 1 into the Pentagon killing thousands of DEFENSELESS Men, Women and Children and declaring war on Us and our way of life. We need lists like this and other tools to keep us safe and to keep people like some of the posters on here free to post their mindless poorly written and researched garbage.
I dare some of you to walk up to someone who actually is proud to serve their country, Or has lost a limb, or the parents and loved ones of someone who has gave up their life in the cause of liberty and freedom some of the verbal and written vomit that is written on this blog.
I guarantee you the results will not be pretty.
I dare you to
two points; your previous posts already say anything you might wish to say.
and; you a funny man
you know, with caricatures like that I'm really disappointed with the rest of you for not accusing me of sock-puppetry.
MBIRDSONG,
Why were there so many children in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th? Was it 'Take a Disadvantaged Orphan to Work Day'? I hadn't fully compassed the scope of the tragedy. Thanks for the info. You go, girl.
mbirdsong, does your bridge have hot and cold running billy goats? don't listen to the first two that come along; they are liars.
I routinely say plenty and worse of what was said on this thread every time I see my parents, one of whom is a vet, at least. So there. In fact my uncle is a vietnam vet against the war, or whatever they call it these days. good old American side of the family.
"This list has names of people who have or are suspected of having ties to terrorism." Congrats on the promotion, capt. obvious. But on what grounds are they suspected? what judiciary body oversees the investigation? does nearly a million people seem like about how many people you'd think were terrorists? Or maybe is this whole cast a wide net business just a massive waste of public resources? At a time when unemployment is skyrocketing? If the government wanted people to have free health care, the red states would scream bloody murder, but when it comes to terrorism, its just throw my money out the window, TSC.
Sadly the War on Terror, is the perfect Orwellian war, with a faceless enemy in war that will never be won. Because what is victory in such a war?
Guess we will have to build 100 more
Guantanamo Bays...
http://911review.org/Sept11Wiki/GuantanamoBay.shtml
http://911review.org/Sept11Wiki/Halliburton-CubaContract.shtml
I didnt realize so many people in the US were so stupid.
We (not me) elected GWB not once but twice.
(OK both elections had black box voting problems)
Anyway, you get the idea.
GWB and Co have made a KILLING on FEAR.
Blackwater, KBR, etc...
http://911review.org/Sept11Wiki/Pmcs.shtml
My room-mate is a sharpshooter and was offered $1000 a day to sit on a roof and shoot any arab he sees.
Rumsfeld LOST 2.3 TRILLION dollars
(announced on Sept 10 2001, so never made news)
Im sure that went into the "black budget"
Then, several billions were "LOST" when they were supposed to "hand out" monies to the people in Iraq.
Dick Cheney was in the ENERGY industry,
Geroge Bush was in the OIL industry
and oil and energy prices went through the roof under this ADMIN.
Not to mention there has been NO movement on alternative fuels, and the environment /global warming has been neglected.
Anyone see a problem here ?
It was in the interest of BushCo to scare the hell out of everyone,and it worked.
WE LET THEM dictate the rules to us, and we followed in footstep like good little citizens.
Our economy is now in the toilet for it,
except for the few rich people and oil/energy companies that benefited so much that they are swimming in cash.
We was robbed.
Brad
http://911review.org/inn.globalfreepress/TortureGate.html
http://911review.org/Sept11Wiki/Dyncorp.shtml
Oh, yes. And let's not forget that our own airforce which should have brought the planes down in the first place had their thumbs up their asses that morning. And I have sever doubts that a plane actually hit the pentagon.
My question is when are the following names going to be part of that list:
Gerald Ford
Richard Nixon
Jimmy Carter
Ronald Reagan
George H. Bush
Bill Clinton
George W. Bush
Dick Cheney
Rumsfeld
Rice
And all of the others that have supported and propped up and supported state sponsored terrorism in countries like:
Iran
Nicaragua
Cuba
El Salvador
Honduras
etc.........
small error above;
"Rumsfeld LOST 2.3 TRILLION dollars
(announced on Sept 10 2001, so never made news)
Im sure that went into the "black budget"
Then, several billions were "LOST" when they were supposed to "hand out" monies to the people in Iraq."
as I understand it, America had a surplus Jan 2001 of over US$5,000,000,000,000.00
As of now you have a Deficit over US$3,000,000,000,000.00.
Which means he lost over eight trillion dollars since 2001. "He" or somebody driving.
Because OVER EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS has been spent making everything so wonderful, you can understand now why you have those little problems in your life.
Now, heads down, back to work, you have a lot of catching up to do. (If you want to sell any of your children I know an Indian organ dealer)
small error above;
actually, thats not an error.
Rumsfeld did lose 2.3 trillion (or the DoD did)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5624554252926849071
Bush SPENT the rest on Iraq contractors like Blackwater
http://911review.org/Reports/Black_Water.html
http://911review.org/brad.com/911contractors/CIA_contractors_isreali.html
http://911review.org/brad.com/911contractors/Blackwater_katrina.html
http://911review.org/brad.com/911contractors/Gary-Bauer.html
http://911review.org/Reports/10_Censored-News.html
Also, remember the DEBT and Deficit are different,
but check this out...
National Debt by President
http://www.911review.org/Media/National_Debt.html
heres the U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCK
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
ahhh! 911review! whoever chose that font for a nine trillion plus figure has a sense of humour!
And Cubey; lighten up
Pouncing? Oh, you mean politely responsive. Gotcha.
As to the Department of Fatherland Security; there is a reason for that name.I call them as I see them.
If you prefer to be ignored,I can accommodate you in matters of you addressing me. If I see you assailing others or the simple truth- that is a different matter.
Takuan, I'm afraid I've orphaned your responses.