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WALL STREET JOURNAL November 19, 2002
PAGE ONE
Post-Sept. 11 Watch List Acquires Life of Its Own
FBI Listed People Wanted for Questioning, But Out-of-Date Versions Dog the Innocent
By ANN DAVIS Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
LAS VEGAS -- When a patron at the New York-New York casino plugged his frequent-player card into a slot machine one day this summer, something strange happened: An alert warned the casino's surveillance officials that an associate of a suspected terrorist might be on the grounds.
How did a casino's computer make such a connection? Shortly after Sept. 11, the FBI had entrusted a quickly developed watch list to scores of corporations around the country.
Departing from its usual practice of closely guarding such lists, the FBI circulated the names of hundreds of people it wanted to question. Counterterrorism officials gave the list to car-rental companies. Then FBI field agents and other officials circulated it to big banks, travel-reservations systems, firms that collect consumer data, as well as casino operators such as MGM Mirage, the owner of New York-New York. Additional recipients included businesses thought vulnerable to terrorist intrusion, including truckers, chemical companies and power-plant operators. It was the largest intelligence-sharing experiment the bureau has ever undertaken with the private sector.
A year later, the list has taken on a life of its own, with multiplying -- and error-filled -- versions being passed around like bootleg music. Some companies fed a version of the list into their own databases and now use it to screen job applicants and customers. A water-utilities trade association used the list "in lieu of" standard background checks, says the New Jersey group's executive director.
The list included many people the FBI didn't suspect but just wanted to talk to. Yet a version on SeguRed.com (www.segured.com4), a South American security-oriented Web site that got a copy from a Venezuelan bank's security officer, is headed: "list of suspected terrorists sent by the FBI to financial institutions." (The site's editor says he may change the heading.) Meanwhile, a supermarket trade group used a version of the list to try to check whether terrorists were raising funds through known shoplifting rings. The trade group won't disclose results.
The FBI credits the effort, dubbed Project Lookout, with helping it rapidly find some people with relevant information in the crisis atmosphere right after the terror attacks. MGM Mirage says it has tipped off the FBI at least six times since beginning to track hotel and casino guests against the list.
The FBI and other investigative agencies -- which were criticized after Sept. 11 for not sharing their information enough -- are exploring new ways to do so, including mining corporate data to find suspects or spot suspicious activity. The Pentagon is developing technology it can use to sweep up personal data from commercial transactions around the world. "Information sharing" has become a buzzword. But one significant step in this direction, Project Lookout, is in many ways a study in how not to share intelligence.
The watch list shared with companies -- one part of the FBI's massive counterterrorism database -- quickly became obsolete as the bureau worked its way through the names. The FBI's counterterrorism division quietly stopped updating the list more than a year ago. But it never informed most of the companies that had received a copy. FBI headquarters doesn't know who is still using the list because officials never kept track of who got it.
"We have now lost control of that list,'' says Art Cummings, head of the strategic analysis and warning section of the FBI's counterterrorism division. "We shouldn't have had those problems."
The bureau tried to cut off distribution after less than six weeks, partly from worry that suspects could too easily find out they had been tagged. Another concern has been misidentification, especially as multipart Middle Eastern names are degraded by typos when faxed and are fed into new databases.
Then there's the problem of getting off the list. At first the FBI frequently removed names of people it had cleared. But issuing updated lists, which the FBI once did as often as four times a day, didn't fix the older ones already in circulation. Three brothers in Texas named Atta -- long since exonerated, and no relation to the alleged lead hijacker -- are still trying to chase their names off copies of the list posted on Internet sites in at least five countries.
People who've asked the FBI for help getting off the bootleg lists say they've been told the bureau can't do anything to correct outdated lists still floating around. The FBI's Mr. Cummings says that "the most we can control is our official dissemination of that list." Once it left the law- enforcement community, "we have no jurisdiction to say, 'If you disseminate this further, we will prosecute you.' "
Despite the problems, Mr. Cummings and other proponents of information-sharing say the process should be improved, not abandoned. Software companies are rushing to help, trying to make information-sharing easier and more effective.
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