The FBI's Watch List slides Headlong into Ridicule

A 20 year old student from Sydney who was to attend US Summer camp as a rock-climbing instructor at Camp America in Pennsylvania, has had a visa application denied because there is an Elizabeth Smith on the FBI watch list. Ms Smith - who does not have a criminal record - faces being substantially out of pocket because her plane ticket can't be refunded. Her high school friend, Caitlan Statos, will now be traveling alone to the camp. Another Elizabeth Smith from Queensland has also been denied a visa....and has been trying for over 2.5 months to have the decision reversed. Ms Smith said she was frustrated that the US consulate in Sydney NSW would not explain why she had been barred. A spokesperson for the Sydney consulate was "dependent upon Washington to proceed with the visa". The FBI's watch list - the National Name Check Program - uses a computer with more than 200,000 names of people considered to be a danger to the US. It includes terrorist suspects, but also anyone who has been the subject of an FBI investigation, even as a witness or victim, the deputy assistant director of the FBI, Robert Garrity, said in testimony to Congress. Not only does the computer search names and birth dates to see if they get a "hit", it also searches for different permutations of a name, as well as different phonetic spellings. More than 30,000 airline passengers have asked just one agency _ the Transportation Security Administration _ to have their names cleared from their "no fly" lists, according to an October 2006 Government Accountability Office report. When questions arose about tens of thousands of names between December 2003 and January 2006, the names were sent back to the agencies that put them on the lists, the GAO said. Half of those were found to be misidentified, the report found. In December 2003, disparate agencies with counterterrorism responsibilities consolidated dozens of watch lists of known or suspected terrorists into the new Terrorist Screening Center run by the FBI. J. Edgar would be so proud of his Bureau's new civil rights suppression protocols.