A young couple went into a home fitness store to buy a treadmill. After finding one they liked, they applied for financing. Everything seemed fine until the bank representative told them — in front of other customers — that they would have to wait 72 hours for an extra identity check “because of Saddam Hussein.” The reason? The husband shared the same last name as the infamous dictator, as do countless other Muslim Americans.
Federal government policy encourages incidents like this. Part of the unfortunate legacy of Sept. 11, 2001, is the excessive expansion of “terrorist watch lists.” These large and growing government databases have complicated the lives of untold numbers of innocent people, simply because some part of their name is similar to others who have landed on a list. The lists themselves are often riddled with inaccuracies and are of dubious value to national security.
Simply stated, these are 21st Century government blacklists that secretly catalog individuals for treatment as suspects, providing no opportunity to challenge the claim and stigmatizing thousands of people who have no connection to crime or terror. They add more hay to the stack, instead of making it easier to find the needle.
The federal government maintains numerous watch lists to find or monitor people or groups. The lists can include everything from details of confirmed fugitives to second-hand reports of people with tenuous connections to crime or terrorism.
It is unclear how the government puts people or groups on its watch lists, who keeps them or generally how to get a name removed. What we do know — through news accounts and public records requests — is that these watch lists are multiplying, accumulating more records on hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people.
The incident at the home fitness store involved a little-known list of the Office of Foreign Asset Controls in the U.S. Treasury Department. It was revealed in a report by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area last March. The list includes about 6,000 names of people and businesses that allegedly “have ties” to criminal or terrorist groups. Banks, lenders and other companies are forbidden from doing business with persons on the list, on penalty of years in prison and millions of dollars in fines.
Trouble is, many more than 6,000 people carry those names or names that are very similar. Businesses, eager to avoid legal trouble, are aggressively matching names to the Treasury Department list during credit checks, often declining to do business even if a person’s name is only partially the same. As a result, countless numbers of people with common names like Muhammad or Sanchez are denied or delayed access to rental cars, mortgages, credit, insurance and other everyday services.
Government watch lists are imprecise, indiscriminate tools, the equivalent of miles of floating gill nets. Even someone as well-known as U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy has been delayed at the airport, because his name is similar to someone else’s on the “No Fly” list.
Once snagged in a government watch list, it is nearly impossible to remove your name from it. For example, the Transportation Security Administra-tion keeps a list of people who are not allowed to board commercial airplanes. But thousands of people who have no connection to terrorism or crime are regularly stopped for additional ID checks at the airport because their names are similar to names on the “No Fly” list.
Such individuals can submit identification to prove that they are not the persons on the “No Fly” list, but that simply adds their names to another list that airlines use to cross-reference. The end result is still a delay at the airport, the inability to self-check at the counter, humiliation and no way to rectify the problem.
So what can we do about watch lists?
The first step is to shed light on the government’s actions. The public knows very little about what lists exist, what information they hold and how that information is used. Congress should use its powers of oversight to inventory and review the legitimacy and value of the various watch lists, and then limit the watch lists to those that have a specific, reasonable and narrowly tailored purpose.
Second, once Congress has determined which watch lists have real value, it must assure that the methods for maintaining the lists respect due process and privacy. There must be procedures for innocent people to get their names removed.
Third, government and businesses need to be held accountable when they misuse watch lists, and the people who run or use these lists need to be properly trained and screened for the job.
Ultimately, government needs to move away from its reliance on watch lists. Watch lists don’t keep people safe — at heart, a watch list is an electronic tool, imperfect, without common sense, experience or good judgment, as the results have shown. Our national resources would be better invested in training law enforcement and security officers, and in developing better intelligence about real terrorist groups.
As a nation, we should reject the spirit of these watch lists, which ask us to accept losses of freedom for a perception of security. It is a false bargain, and when we trade away freedom, we seldom get it back.
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Kathleen Taylor is the executive director of the ACLU of Washington.
