Ordinary Customers Flagged as Terrorists By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post Staff Writer

Private businesses such as rental and mortgage companies and car dealers are checking the names of customers against a list of suspected terrorists and drug traffickers made publicly available by the Treasury Department, sometimes denying services to ordinary people whose names are similar to those on the list.

The Office of Foreign Asset Control’s list of “specially designated nationals” has long been used by banks and other financial institutions to block financial transactions of drug dealers and other criminals. But an executive order issued by President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has expanded the list and its consequences in unforeseen ways. Businesses have used it to screen applicants for home and car loans, apartments and even exercise equipment, according to interviews and a report by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area to be issued today.

“The way in which the list is being used goes far beyond contexts in which it has a link to national security,” said Shirin Sinnar, the report’s author. “The government is effectively conscripting private businesses into the war on terrorism but doing so without making sure that businesses don’t trample on individual rights.”

Terror Database Has Quadrupled In Four Years, By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post Staff Writer

Each day, thousands of pieces of intelligence information from around the world — field reports, captured documents, news from foreign allies and sometimes idle gossip — arrive in a computer-filled office in McLean, where analysts feed them into the nation’s central list of terrorists and terrorism suspects.

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.

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. …

TIDE has also created concerns about secrecy, errors and privacy. The list marks the first time foreigners and U.S. citizens are combined in an intelligence database. The bar for inclusion is low, and once someone is on the list, it is virtually impossible to get off it. At any stage, the process can lead to “horror stories” of mixed-up names and unconfirmed information, Travers acknowledged.

The watch lists fed by TIDE, used to monitor everyone entering the country or having even a casual encounter with federal, state and local law enforcement, have a higher bar. But they have become a source of irritation — and potentially more serious consequences — for many U.S. citizens and visitors.

In 2004 and 2005, misidentifications accounted for about half of the tens of thousands of times a traveler’s name triggered a watch-list hit, the Government Accountability Office reported in September. …

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said last year that his wife had been delayed repeatedly while airlines queried whether Catherine Stevens was the watch-listed Cat Stevens. The listing referred to the Britain-based pop singer who converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf Islam. The reason Islam is not allowed to fly to the United States is secret. [mjh: As long as Ted Stevens is suffering, I’m OK with this.] …

TIDE is a vacuum cleaner for both proven and unproven information, and its managers disclaim responsibility for how other agencies use the data. …

Every night at 10, TIDE dumps an unclassified version of that day’s harvest — names, dates of birth, countries of origin and passport information — into a database belonging to the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center. TIDE’s most sensitive information is not included. The FBI adds data about U.S. suspects with no international ties for a combined daily total of 1,000 to 1,500 new names.

I didn’t see anything about Gore’s testimony in today’s paper. (I didn’t watch TV news, so I don’t know what was shown on TV.) You can see Web-based video of various parts. In particular, see the first link below for Inhofe making an ass of himself and Boxer making a point he probably can’t really absorb. mjh

PS: Am I the only person disturbed by our society’s obsession with titles-for-life. Al Gore is NOT Senator Gore NOR Vice President Gore. He is former-Senator Gore or former-Vice President Gore or, hey, how about this, “Al” (I can live with Mr. Gore, if we need to be highfalutin’).

Think Progress » Boxer Slams Down Inhofe’s Global Warming Filibuster: ‘You Don’t Make The Rules Anymore’
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/03/21/gore-boxer-inhofe/

Think Progress » Gore: ‘If The Crib’s On Fire, You Don’t Speculate That The Baby Is Flame-Retardant’

Mocking global warming deniers, Gore said, “The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, well I read a science fiction novel that tells me it’s not a problem. If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame-retardant. You take action. The planet has a fever.”

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/03/21/gore-barton/ [highlights]

Al Gore to Congress: “Today, the Honorable Al Gore testified before Congress saying, “I promise you a day will come when our children and grandchildren will look back and they’ll ask one of two questions. Either they will ask, ‘What in God’s name were they doing? Didn’t they see the evidence? … Or, they’ll ask another question. They may look back and they’ll say, ‘How did they find the uncommon moral courage to rise above politics and redeem the promise of American democracy?’”

http://www.speaker.gov/blog/?p=153 [three clips plus link to transcript]

Al’s Journal : Al’s Testimony Before the House of Representatives
http://blog.algore.com/2007/03/als_testimony_before_the_house.html [36 minute opening statement]

Bush Implores Nation, Congress To Show ‘Courage and Resolve’, By Michael A. Fletcher, Washington Post Staff Writer

President Bush asked skeptical Americans for additional patience as the Iraq war entered its fifth year yesterday, saying that the United States can be victorious, but “only if we have the courage and resolve to see it through.”

Poll Shows Dramatic Decline in How Iraqis View Lives, Future, By Cameron W. Barr and Jon Cohen, Washington Post Staff Writers

More than six in 10 Iraqis now say that their lives are going badly — double the percentage who said so in late 2005 — and about half say that increasing U.S. forces in the country will make the security situation worse, according to a poll of more than 2,200 Iraqis conducted for ABC News and other media organizations.

The survey, released Monday, shows that Iraqis’ assessments of the quality of their lives and the future of the country have plunged in comparison with similar polling done in November 2005 and February 2004.

Asked to compare their lives today with conditions before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the proportion of Iraqis who say things are better now has slipped below half for the first time. Forty-two percent say their lives have improved, down from 51 percent in 2005 and 56 percent in 2004. Thirty-six percent now say things in their lives are worse today, up from 29 percent in the 2005 poll, which was taken during a period of relative optimism ahead of parliamentary elections. Twenty-two percent say their lives are about the same. …

In November 2005, 27 percent of Baghdad residents polled said their lives were going badly; in the new survey, that percentage rose to 78. …

In the more comprehensive ABC News poll, conducted in partnership with the German television network ARD, the BBC and USA Today, Iraqis were asked whether the country was involved in a civil war; 42 percent said it was. Of the 56 percent who said the country was not in a state of civil war, more than four in 10 said such a conflict was likely.

The first executive order Duhbya signed in 2001 was to lock up presidential records in perpetuity. Six years later, the House has some spine again. TRY to remember next election that Heather Wilson voted in support of Duhbya’s absolute power. (Even Steve Pearce voted for the public.)mjh

PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACCESS: Voting 333 for and 93 against, the House
on March 14 passed a bill (HR 1255) nullifying a 2001 executive order
by President Bush impeding public and historians’ access to presidential
records. Bush’s order empowers future and past presidents and vice
presidents to deny or strictly limit access to their papers. This bill
would reinvigorate a post-Watergate law [1978] making most White House
documents publicly accessible without undue delay. …

No member spoke against the bill.

A yes vote was to send the bill to the Senate. ”
http://www.rollcallvotes.com/cgi-bin/house_newest.pl?+5+NM+

Frequent Errors In FBI’s Secret Records Requests, By John Solomon and Barton Gellman, Washington Post Staff Writers

A Justice Department investigation has found pervasive errors in the FBI’s use of its power to secretly demand telephone, e-mail and financial records in national security cases, officials with access to the report said yesterday.

The inspector general’s audit found 22 possible breaches of internal FBI and Justice Department regulations — some of which were potential violations of law — in a sampling of 293 “national security letters.” The letters were used by the FBI to obtain the personal records of U.S. residents or visitors between 2003 and 2005. The FBI identified 26 potential violations in other cases. …

The use of national security letters has grown exponentially since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In 2005 alone, the audit found, the FBI issued more than 19,000 such letters, amounting to 47,000 separate requests for information.

Report Details Missteps in Data Collection, “By R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post Staff Writer

Over a three-year period ending in 2005, the FBI collected intimate information about the lives of a population roughly the size of Bethesda’s — 52,000 — and stored it in an intelligence database accessible to about 12,000 federal, state and local law enforcement authorities and to certain foreign governments.

The FBI did so without systematically retaining evidence that its data collection was legal, without ensuring that all the data it obtained matched its needs or requests, without correctly tallying and reporting its efforts to Congress, and without ferreting out all of its abuses and reporting them to an intelligence oversight board. …

“We believe,” the inspector general’s office said in a summary of whether and how often the tool might have jeopardized the privacy of U.S. residents, “that a significant number of NSL-related violations are not being identified or reported by the FBI.” …

Congress significantly lowered the threshold for the government to obtain such information after the 2001 terrorism attacks, producing what the FBI itself reported as at least a fivefold increase in annual requests. Its tally cited 39,000 requests in 2003, 56,000 in 2004 and 47,000 in 2005 — involving a total of 24,937 “U.S. persons” (including citizens and green-card holders) and 27,262 foreigners in the United States. In 2004, nine letters alone requested telephone-subscriber information on 11,100 phone numbers.

The inspector general’s report discloses, however, that these numbers understated the FBI’s use of national security letters to collect data. After checking 77 investigative case files at four FBI field offices, investigators found that those offices had “significantly” underreported the number of requests they had made and that, in this small subset alone, the real number was 22 percent higher. …

The tens of thousands of data-collection requests have produced few criminal charges directly related to terrorism or espionage, according to the inspector general’s report. About half of the FBI’s field offices did not refer any of those targeted by such requests to prosecutors, the report said, and the most common charges cited by others were fraud, immigration violations and money laundering.

Firings Had Genesis in White House, By Dan Eggen and John Solomon, Washington Post Staff Writers

The White House suggested two years ago that the Justice Department fire all 93 U.S. attorneys, a proposal that eventually resulted in the dismissals of eight prosecutors last year, according to e-mails and internal documents that the administration will provide to Congress today.

The dismissals took place after President Bush told Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in October that he had received complaints that some prosecutors had not energetically pursued voter-fraud investigations, according to a White House spokeswoman. …

Administration officials have portrayed the firings as a routine personnel matter, designed primarily to rid the department of a handful of poor performers.

But the documents and interviews indicate that the idea for the firings originated at least two years ago, when then-White House counsel Harriet E. Miers suggested to Sampson in February 2005 that all prosecutors be dismissed and replaced. [mjh: wasn’t Miers a Bush nominee for the Supreme Court?] …

Sampson also strongly urged bypassing Congress in naming replacements, using a little-known power slipped into the renewal of the USA Patriot Act in March 2006 that allows the attorney general to name interim replacements without Senate confirmation. [mjh: the Patriot Act is Bush’s great legacy.]