Sunday, March 25, 2007
Are you on the list?
If you have had problems traveling, being required to prove that you are really you, then the answer is probably yes.
Called TIDE, for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, the list is a storehouse for data about individuals that the intelligence community believes might harm the United States. It is the wellspring for watch lists distributed to airlines, law enforcement, border posts and U.S. consulates, created to close one of the key intelligence gaps revealed after Sept. 11, 2001: the failure of federal agencies to share what they knew about al-Qaeda operatives.A lot of people have the same or similar names. We have previously posted the problems of Catherine Stevens, wife of Sen Ted Stevens R-AK, who has been repeatedly confused with Cat Stevens the black male singer and muslim convert.
But in addressing one problem, TIDE has spawned others. Ballooning from fewer than 100,000 files in 2003 to about 435,000, the growing database threatens to overwhelm the people who manage it. "The single biggest worry that I have is long-term quality control," said Russ Travers, in charge of TIDE at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean.
TIDE is a vacuum cleaner for both proven and unproven information, and its managers disclaim responsibility for how other agencies use the data. "What's the alternative?" Travers said. "I work under the assumption that we're never going to have perfect information -- fingerprints, DNA -- on 6 billion people across the planet. . . . If someone actually has a better idea, I'm all ears."All ears, what a quaint way of putting it.The problem lies as much in what is done with what comes out as much as what goes in. It is raw data and the TIDE folks don't filter it and they give it directly to a lot of people, like airlines, who also do not and are not trained to filter it. And so thousands of innocent people undergo everything from inconvenience to 6 months in a Syrian or Egyptian prison. That is not security, It is, however, a source of pride to the Bushoviks.
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