“A significant number of ‘dead’ and ‘reportedly dead’ KSTs [known or suspected terrorists] cannot be placed on the No Fly List, because of insufficient biographic information needed to deny boarding to them,” The Intercept quoted the Office of Intelligence and Analysis as saying.
Another expert, Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberty Union’s National Security Project, outlined that not only dead suspects get wrongfully included in the lists; they also contain the names of people who are alive and sometimes innocent. She pointed out that detecting suspects using a 'no-fly list' usually leads to the “most draconian consequences” for unjustly convicted individuals.
“There is no meaningful way to challenge wrongful inclusion and correct government error,” she said.
The other obstacle is that many of the watch lists compiled by different agencies appear to partly overlap, which leads the US authorities to make more and more mistakes when searching for terrorists, the media outlet noted. For instance, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), State Department and FBI all have separate databases containing intelligence on suspected terrorists.
What's more, the DHS’s document reads that those agencies also have different approaches to dealing with the term 'death'. In practice, this leads to various possibilities for the interpretation of different lists. For example, the paper said that about 20 percent of those 'confirmed dead' in NCTC’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list are marked as 'remain watchlisted' in the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database. When it comes to 'reportedly dead' terrorists, the figures are almost the same – roughly 20 percent of them are being searched for via the no-fly list.
Mike German, a former FBI agent, claimed that leaving names of dead suspects in the databases demonstrates that the system has failed; effectiveness has been exchanged for bureaucracy.
"The harm is that when the list is over a million names, or approaching a million names, it’s no longer a useful document," he said; he compared those databases to an alarm that rings constantly without a real purpose.
According to official data, some 30 percent of those suspected were added to various 'terror lists' based on outdated information. In fact, almost 50 percent of the people in the FBI’s database aren’t associated with real terror groups, The Intercept reported.
But US officials claim there is no problem in keeping the names of all of the 'terrorists' after they've been killed. As the assessment reads, "procedures require that all known missing, unexpired travel documents belonging to these individuals be maintained for screening purposes" to check whether other criminals could use the dead suspects’ papers.
However, fresh WikiLeaks publications have exposed that some agencies’ employees are concerned with the situation. One of them wrote in a hacked e-mail that the number of people on the list of 1.8 million is too big.
“That just seems excessive – it’s 7% of the IZ [Iraqi] population!!”
The final problem is: authorities can’t agree on whether social media may be used to confirm people’s deaths. Although the latest laws suggest that such sources can be used for those purposes, the amendments have yet to be implemented. That means the lists will keep growing and the problem will remain unresolved in the near future.
