Airport watch list now reviewed often

Sen. Ted Kennedy can relax.

Terrorists, not so much.

The Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) now will automatically review nearly 500,000 names on its watch list that are frequently matched during airport screenings and other law-enforcement encounters with the general public and remove those names that don’t belong to actual suspects.

The Democratic senator from Massachusetts along with several other lawmakers have complained for years that their names were erroneously on the list, causing frequent flyer disruptions at screening stations.

Under new rules called the Terrorist Encounter Review Process (TERP), records of frequently encountered individuals will be reviewed, even if no formal redress requests are filed.

“The terrorist watch list has become a very effective counterterrorism tool and the new TERP program will help ensure we have the best information to appropriately handle known or suspected terrorists while reducing adverse effects on persons misidentified as watch-list subjects,” said Leonard Boyle, director of the Terrorist Screening Center.

Since last year, the Homeland Security Department has received nearly 24,000 requests to be removed from the terrorist watch list now estimated to contain 450,000 names — 5 percent or 22,500 are thought to be in the United States.

Some individuals use aliases or fake passports that can generate multiple records, and officials think it creates twice the number of actual persons on the watch list.

Mr. Kennedy grilled homeland security officials during a 2004 hearing about the list’s inaccuracies and asked that if airport screeners “have that kind of difficulty with a member of Congress, how in the world are average Americans, who are getting caught up in this thing, … going to be treated fairly and not have their rights abused?”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Kennedy did not return a call for comment.

“Although there have been high-profile examples of screening delays, not all of these involve an actual watch-list encounter and many watch-list encounters actually go unnoticed by the individual involved,” said a TSC official who asked not to be identified.

“The purpose of this program is to add another layer of data quality review with a particular emphasis on negative or inconclusive encounters, using the data we have to try to further reduce the number of misidentifications during watch-list encounters,” the official said.

The process also will add information to names of known terrorists with common sounding names, to reduce the risk of duplicative matches.

Glenn A. Fine, Justice Department inspector general, reported last fall that the TSC watch list contained some incomplete or obsolete information and recommended that inaccurate names be removed.

“Even a single omission of a terrorist identity or an inaccuracy in the identifying information contained in a watch-list record can have enormous consequences,” Mr. Fine said told the House Homeland Security Committee on Nov. 8.

Previously, the Government Accountability Office said some terrorists had boarded international flights bound for the U.S. because the government was not using its watch list effectively.

The Terrorist Screening Center was created in 2003 to consolidate domestic and foreign suspected terrorist watch-list information. Records are updated daily and shared with federal and local law-enforcement officials.

• Jerry Seper contributed to this report.