>yesterday evening I was flipping channels looking for something while waiting for the Olympics coverage to start.
>When I got to CNBC I saw the guy who broke the "warrantless listening" NSA story, so I stopped and watched.
>There was another guy on with him on the Tim Russert show, and this guy had scary tales to tell.
>
>First, I must say that here in Canada we (supposedly) have laws against what kind of information governments can collect/keep on citizens and how long they may keep 'special' of that stuff (i.e. under investigation for something).
>This guy said that the CIA and FBI are big customers of Choice Point, Lexus-Nexus, the credit 'bureaus', etc.
>
>This has got to be dangerous if true. If nothing else one can easily see the CIA or the FBI being approached by (or approaching) these information sellers to say what additional information they'd be interested in buying. Gotta be an awfully handy way to circumvent laws preventing your own collection of specific information.
>
>Big Brother is here.

The U.S. terrorist watch list contains 325,000 names. Due to alternate spellings etc, it is estimated that there are about 200,000 distinct individuals on the list. Either the U.S. has a much larger problem with terrorists than even they let on, or there are a lot of people on that list who shouldn't be.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the size of the NCTC list and other terrorism-related databases underscores the severity of the "false positive" problem, in which innocent people -- including members of Congress -- have been stopped for questioning or halted from flying because their names are wrongly included or are similar to suspects' names.

"One of the seemingly unsolvable problems is what do you do when someone is wrongly put on this watch list," Rotenberg said. "If there are that many people on the list, a lot of them probably shouldn't be there. But how are they ever going to get off?"

Washington Post Article