Effort to Create Terror Watch List Is Falling Behind, Report Finds

[R. A. Hettinga]

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB109658864511433243,00.html>

The Wall Street Journal


 October 1, 2004

 PAGE ONE


Effort to Create Terror Watch List
 Is Falling Behind, Report Finds

By ROBERT BLOCK and GARY FIELDS
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 1, 2004; Page A1


A government report concludes that efforts to protect U.S. borders and
better identify terrorist suspects by compiling a single consolidated watch
list -- from more than a dozen currently in use by federal agencies -- have
badly foundered.

The inspector general of the Homeland Security Department, in the sometimes
scathing report, cites poor cooperation among many agencies and says his
own agency failed "to play a lead role" in oversight. The report has been
delivered to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and congressional
leaders.


Compiling a viable, unified list of terrorist suspects was mandated by
Congress and ordered by President Bush after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Such a list is considered by law-enforcement agents as the most basic tool
in their arsenal and vital for protecting the country.

But now dozens of agencies, from the Federal Aviation Administration to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, continue to use different lists that
sometimes contain outdated or incorrect information and even contradict
each other. That can hamper the sharing of vital data and identifying of
suspects -- and make it easier for terrorists to slip through cracks in the
system, officials say.

"The watch list is the poster child for information sharing for all our
intelligence and government agencies," said Daniel B. Prieto, research
director for the Homeland Security Partnership Initiative at the Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University. "It has been the one project
that is the most straightforward; the most defined, the most politically
accepted idea, supported by every investigative commission since 9/11. If
they can't get this one right, then shame on them." Mr. Prieto is a former
Democratic congressional staffer who monitored the watch-list issue.

An edited version of the inspector general's report is to be publicly
released on Sunday. A copy was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The findings come amid an intense debate about improving intelligence in
the wake of the 9/11 Commission's damning findings about government
failures before and after the Sept. 11 attacks. Congress is wrestling over
the creation of a new intelligence czar to better coordinate government
counterterrorism efforts. Intelligence changes also have become a campaign
issue, with the Bush administration asserting it has dramatically improved
information-sharing among law-enforcement agencies.

In the first presidential debate last night, Sen. John Kerry said the
president had failed to support police, firefighters and other programs,
saying, "This president thought it was more important to give the
wealthiest people in America a tax cut rather than invest in homeland
security. Those aren't my values. I believe in protecting America first."

REPORT EXCERPTS Below is an excerpt of the draft report to be issued by the
U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General on
challenges in consolidating terrorist watch list information.

Results in Brief
DHS is not playing a lead role in consolidating terrorist watch list
information. Instead, these consolidation activities are generally
administered by the entities that were responsible for collecting and
disseminating terrorist information prior to DHS's formation. DHS officials
said that the new department lacked the resources and infrastructure to
assume leadership for the consolidation. While this contention has merit,
DHS can still play a more robust role than at present by overseeing and
coordinating watch list consolidation activities across agency lines. Such
oversight would help DHS fulfill the role required by the Homeland Security
Act and better ensure that the past ad hoc approach to managing watch list
consolidation is not continued.

Stronger DHS leadership and oversight would also help improve current watch
list consolidation efforts. Although some progress toward streamlined
processes and enhanced interagency information sharing has been made, the
consolidation is hampered by a number of issues that have not been
coordinated effectively among interagency participants. Specifically, in
the absence of central leadership and oversight for the watch list
consolidation, planning, budgeting, staffing, and requirements definition
continue to be dealt with on an ad hoc basis, posing a risk to successful
accomplishment of the goal. A number of additional challenges, such as
identifying links between violent criminals and terrorism, privacy, and
duplicative federal activities related to watch list programs, could be
pursued in the context of a centrally coordinated approach to watch list
management.


In response, the president said his administration had tripled spending on
homeland security to $30 billion, worked with Congress to create the
Homeland Security Department and added protection and guards to the
nation's borders. "We're doing our duty to provide the funding," he said.
In reference to American military action overseas, he added, "But the best
way to protect this homeland is to stay on the offense." (See a related
article3.)

The inspector general's report notes that arguments over who is in charge
of consolidating a terrorist database have dogged the creation of the watch
list almost from the start.

"While the requirement to consolidate the multiple watch lists was clear,"
it says, "the approach to accomplish it has not been so. Responsibility for
consolidating multiple databases of watch lists has shifted among various
federal organizations..."

It further notes, "The manner through which the watch list consolidation
has unfolded has not helped the nation break from its pattern of ad hoc
approaches to counterterrorism."

Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin says the law creating Homeland Security
in 2002 gave the agency prime authority in the matter, and that subsequent
presidential decrees, including one creating a Terrorist Screening Center
under the FBI's purview, supplement, rather than supplant, the agency's
authority.

But a department spokesman rejects that conclusion, saying that the
Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation have the primary
responsibility for creating the watch list, not Homeland Security.

"It's the FBI that is charged with the lead role, not us," said Homeland
Security spokesman Brian Roherkasse.

The FBI declined to comment.

The report also states that a number of organizations involved in the
watch-list consolidation were "conducting a number of data mining
activities without central oversight" to make sure they were not violating
any policies or laws governing personal privacy. Data mining, or the
analysis of large amounts of commercial and other data to extract new kinds
of information useful to law enforcement, is very controversial and opposed
by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mr. Ervin, a Texas Republican who is known for his unfailing politeness,
came to Homeland Security from the State Department, where he served the
same role after following President Bush to Washington in 2001. Mr. Ervin
also worked in the White House from 1989 to 1991 under President George
H.W. Bush.

Mr. Ervin has issued several reports criticizing various efforts at
Homeland Security. Last week, he released one on Transportation Security
Administration screeners that found they did a poor job finding guns,
knives and potential bombs smuggled through security checkpoints by covert
testing from July to November 2003.

A White House spokesman said the president appointed Mr. Ervin and
appreciates his service.

Law-enforcement agencies have long considered the creation of automated
information or "watch lists" of potential or known terrorists and criminals
as a vital tool to help protect the country. Names on the list are checked
against the names of foreign nationals attempting to enter or already
present in the U.S.

The government's need for a unified, accurate and meaningful terrorist list
first surfaced after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Investigators learned that two of the bombers, Sheik Rahman and Ali
Mohammed, were on an FBI watch list but still got visas because the State
Department and the old Immigration and Naturalization Service didn't have
access to FBI data.

After Sept. 11, a single watch list was considered vital to keeping
terrorists from gaining access to the U.S. as well as to coordinate the
fight against al Qaeda. But in April 2003, the investigative arm of
Congress, the General Accounting Office, now known as the General
Accountability Office, found that efforts to create such a list were going
nowhere and said that the lack of a single master list was constraining
efforts to protect and control U.S. borders.

Part of the problem has been confusion over whose job it is to take the
lead. In his 2003 State of the Union speech, President Bush called for the
creation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. The effort was meant
to unite the heads of the FBI, Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence
Agency and the Department of Defense in developing a single entity for
merging, analyzing and disseminating terrorist-threat information. The
Threat Center, which answers to the director of the CIA, opened on May 1,
2003, two months after the Department of Homeland Security opened its doors.

Less than five months later, on Sept. 16, 2003, Mr. Bush signed a directive
calling for the creation of another body, the TSC, to take the work of the
Threat Center and other government departments with terrorist information
and produce a unified database that could be accessed and shared by all
law-enforcement officials in the nation, from border guards in Arizona to
detectives in New York City.

Mr. Ridge, Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-CIA director George Tenet
and Attorney General John Ashcroft signed a memorandum of understanding
that the TSC would be run by the FBI and use the State Department's
terrorist watch list as the backbone of a new database that would integrate
all other existing data. TSC operatives would supposedly weed out
duplications and obsolete data and remove people who in the past had been
wrongly identified as terrorists or who had shared the same name as
suspects.

The TSC also was to work with new technologies to include identifying
features such as fingerprints, distinguishing scars and birthmarks, as well
as credit-card accounts and other data, to distinguish real suspects from
others.

The inspector general's report states that there has been some progress in
the effort, noting that as of March 12, 2004, the database contains more
than 100,000 names. It also says that the TSC has brought together
representatives from the FBI, State Department, Homeland Security, Secret
Service, Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection to help in
consolidating the information into a form useful to share with law
enforcement.

However, the report finds there also have been problems in creating a
technological system that meets the competing requirements of the different
agencies contributing information. The head of the terrorist screening
center, Donna Bucella, reported to Congress earlier this year that she was
having problems getting some agencies, particularly at the Department of
Defense, to provide the screening center with its terrorist information.
The reason, in part, was that they were not satisfied with the security of
the screening center's computer system.

An FBI official familiar with the continuing problems over the Terrorist
Screening Center and the consolidation of a terror watch list said there
continues to be compatibility problems with the various databases the FBI
is trying bring together. Some issues revolve around various computer
systems being unable to communicate electronically. Other problems arise
because of different criteria for placing someone on the list in the first
place.

The report comes on the heels of several high-profile snafus caused by
proliferating watch lists. British singer Yusuf Islam, formerly known as
Cat Stevens, recently was stopped from traveling in the U.S. because his
name was on one list -- but not the Transport Security Administration's
official "No-Fly List." Similarly, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, Mass.) and Rep. Don
Young (R., Alaska) have said they at times have been mistaken for
terrorists at airline counters because of namesakes on the watch list.


-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
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