Senior Associate Editor Sam Moore pointed me to an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) claim that the US terrorist watch list now exceeds 900,000 if it has continued to grow at a rate of about 20,000 names per month as it has since its start. The ACLU has launched a new watch list "counter" showing the number of new names supposedly added each day to the list, as well as a number of well-known people who have been put on the list.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said in the past that records or names don't correlate one to one to actual people, but won't say how many people are on the list. Even cutting the number of records by 75% still leaves a couple hundred thousand folks on this list, and getting off after getting on is not easy.
It would be interesting to see how many foreign student pilots on this list. The reason I ask is that on this evening's ABC World News, there was a special report that claims that thousands of foreign citizens have been able to illegally enroll and obtain pilot licenses from U.S. flight schools. One former Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspector found that in 2005 alone there were over 8,000 foreign students "in the FAA database who got their pilot licenses without ever being approved by the Transportation Security Administration," as required by law.
The DHS in response to the report claims that "it conducts security threat assessments 'on all non-U.S. citizens seeking flight training,' " and that "We have a high degree of confidence that our layered security measures, both seen and unseen, have raised the level of security in our aviation sector."
If you say so.
