FBI - Encounters With Terrorist Watch List Suspects Not Being Reported

June 4, 2008

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State and local police officers fail to notify federal authorities of encounters with possible terror suspects appearing on a federal watch list up to 10 times a day, according to a senior FBI official.

Fortunately, it does not appear that any terrorist acts have occurred in the U.S. as a result.

The rate of failure represents missed opportunities to verify possible matches to suspects on the government’s terrorist watch list or to remove individuals from the list whose names had been added by mistake, Leonard Boyle, director of the bureau’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), said in an interview.

Police are asked to contact the center when routine computerized background checks on individuals who may have violated traffic rules or been involved in a domestic disturbance trigger electronic alerts from the TSC.

The alerts indicate possible matches to individuals on the government’s watch list of an estimated 400,000 people. Police notifications to the center result in the identification of 40 to 50 verified suspects each day.

Of those, Boyle said, a handful result in arrests.

Regular audits of the system reveal that officers do not respond to the alerts 8 to 10 times daily. Federal authorities are not automatically contacted. As a result, Boyle said, they are forced to reconstruct the encounters through interviews and local police reports.

The government does not track the rate at which valid watch-list suspects are identified when the initial contacts go unreported, but Boyle said it is fairly common for the unreported encounters to result later in positive identifications of watch-list suspects.

Boyle said a basic “unfamiliarity with the notification system and an unfamiliarity with the benefits of reporting” the contacts have been the most common explanations for not acting on the alerts.

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