Last week Rep. Jackson-Lee (D,TX) introduced HR 4240, the No
Fly for Foreign Fighters Act. The bill would require the GAO to conduct a study
of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB)
Report to Congress
The bill requires the GAO to report to Congress within 180
days of passage of the bill. The report would address how well the FBI had
corrected previously identified problems with the TSDB. It would also address
how {§2(b)}:
• Information is being integrated
into the TSDB from all relevant sources across the government in a timely
manner;
• Agencies are able to comply with
increased demands for information to improve the TSDB;
• The TSDB, and relevant subsets of
the TSDB, are accessible to agencies, authorities, and other entities, as
appropriate; and
• The TSDB is capable of enabling users to identify
known or suspected terrorists in the most timely and comprehensive manner
possible.
Moving Forward
Ms. Jackson-Lee is the Ranking Member of the Crime,
Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee,
the Committee to which this bill was referred for consideration. The two
cosponsors of the bill {Rep. Conyers (D,MI), and Rep. Ratcliffe (R,TX)} are
also members of that Committee with Conyers being the Ranking Member. This
means that there is probably enough political pull to have the measure
considered in Committee.
Since this bill only requires a report to Congress and not
any real action or expenditure of funds, there is unlikely to be any major
opposition to this bill. And considering the increasing interest in the
potential for terrorist attacks in this country, there is every incentive to
ensure that the TSDB is an effective tool to help prevent such attacks.
Commentary
This bill does not require the report to address what is
probably the biggest drawback to the TSDB; the fact that this is essentially a
name based database. Since names are not unique identifiers of people and most
people use a number of variations of their own names in day to day life, there
exists a very real (and demonstrated) problem of misidentifying people as
having possible terrorist ties when what they have is a similar name to someone
that has possible terrorist ties.
While this is an inconvenience (perhaps substantial
inconvenience) to someone that is prohibited from boarding an aircraft it can
mean a loss of livelihood if the misidentified person is denied a
Transportation Workers Identification Credential (TWIC) or flagged during a
CFATS personnel surety program check.
Since people are not filling out applications to be placed
on the TSDB and providing finger prints and background information in the
process it is inevitable and probably unavoidable that misidentification will
take place. What needs to be understood by policy makers (who may want to
expand the use of the TSDB into constitutionally protected areas like weapon
sales) is the prevalence of these ‘false positives’, what is being done to
reduce them, and what redress measures are available when they do occur. All of
this should be included in this report if Congress is to derive any legislative
benefit from the report.
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