According to the U.S. National Counter-Terrorism Center, there are 9,000 US citizens and legal residents on the US Government’s Terrorist Watch List. However, internal documents recently leaked from a Department of Homeland Security Intelligence Fusion Center suggest that the actual number is likely closer to 20,000 people.

January 23, 2013

SIX DAYS AGO, a group of Anons calling themselves “Team Berserk” compromised a government affiliated server, accessing a cache of FBI and DHS intelligence bulletins and other documents classified “Law Enforcement Sensitive.” In a colorful communique featuring ASCII art pirate ships, renderings of the FBI as the tentacled Kraken, and lulz cannons firing remote exploits at government systems, the attackers took credit for hacking a Department of Homeland Security Intelligence Fusion Center and successfully exfiltrating the document cache, some of which they claim is not yet included in the initial file dump made available online. Yesterday, the attackers published an additional intelligence bulletin stolen from the Kansas Fusion Center, in which DHS warns its employees about the previous week’s attack by Team Berserk, but assures them that the Kansas Fusion Center itself was not compromised. The Department of Homeland Security maintains that they believe the attackers obtained the documents from “an unidentified partner who receives our law enforcement products and then saved them on a local computer network.” The hackers with Team Berserk claim to have ongoing access to multiple DHS Fusion Centers.

The cover page of a “Crossroads Report” from the DHS document leak.

The documents exposed in the leak include a series of “Crossroad Reports” from DHS Intelligence Centers in Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma throughout 2013. These documents detail day-to-day reports from state and local police departments, including reports of traffic stops involving individuals “on the Terrorist Watchlist.” The reports appear to describe ordinary traffic violations. The examples below are typical of the data set:

A subject on the Terrorist Watchlist was stopped by the Kansas Highway Patrol for a Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Inspection. The subject was questioned and released. 28-Feb-2013, Alma, KS. The Saint Louis County Police Department stopped a subject on the Terrorist Watchlist for speeding. The subject was questioned and released. 17-Jan-2013, St. Louis, MO. A Columbia Police Officer stopped a subject on the Terrorist Watchlist for driving without headlights when required. The subject was questioned and released with a verbal warning. 20-Jan-2013, Columbia, MO. The Jefferson City Police Department stopped a subject on the Terrorist Watchlist for improper display of a license plate. The subject was questioned and released with a warning. 17-Feb-2013, Jefferson City, MO.

What’s disturbing about these reports is how frequently they seem to show local law enforcement running into individuals listed on the “Terrorist Watch List” in the course of their day to day work, while pulling people over for speeding, having an expired registration, failing to signal, etc. The reports show law enforcement encountering people on the watch list as frequently as seven to twelve times a month in Colorado and Kansas. Given that these are not targeted investigations, but merely incidental encounters, and given that traffic stops operate as a semi-random sampling of the population, this newly leaked data set raises serious questions about just how large the US terrorist watch list has become.

A 2012 report by the U.S. National Counter-Terrorism Center, which manages the database of people placed on the watch list, claimed that there were then 875,000 unique names on the list, 9,000 of whom are Americans. The ACLU estimates that the total number is now likely over one million names. Data released by the FBI in 2009 shows that, during a twelve month period covered by their report, the US intelligence community suggested that 1,600 new names a day qualified for the list based on “reasonable suspicion.” The report does not state what percentage of those names were actually retained and added to the watch list. Individuals placed on the terrorist watch list are never informed of their status and are precluded from challenging their placement. The lack of transparency or any appeal process whatsoever is especially troubling in light of a 2007 DOJ audit of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which found that 38% of the records they reviewed contained inaccuracies.

People placed on the terrorist watch list are often subjected to searches at the border, have their electronic devices confiscated, are frequently interrogated for hours, and are sometimes prohibited from flying. In 2011, a FOIA request by the ACLU revealed that “just in the 18-month period beginning October 1, 2008, more than 6,600 people — roughly half of whom were American citizens — were subjected to electronic device searches at the border by DHS, all without a search warrant.”1 Filmmakers, journalists, practical cryptographers, activists, academics, and students have all been subjected to arbitrary detention, interrogation, search, and seizure on the basis of their inclusion on the list.

In light of the lack of accurate information about the size of the vast and growing US terrorist watch list, these newly obtained DHS “Crossroads Reports” are an intriguing and troubling resource. Each report covers one month of incidental encounter reports between law enforcement and individuals on the watch list, and includes all such reports for Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. The reports themselves appear to be compiled and disseminated by the Kansas Intelligence Fusion Center. The first page of each document helpfully reminds readers that, “this report contains information that may be exempt from public release under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Kansas Records Act (KORA).” A typical page in one of these documents looks like this:

Since the documents cover January through November of 2013, it is easy enough to aggregate and compare the number of individuals on the terrorist watch list who were incidentally encountered in the course of routine police work over the course of that year:

Colorado: 61

Kansas: 48

Missouri: 46

Nebraska: 16

Oklahoma: 28

Since these numbers only represent the people on the terrorist watch list who were unlucky enough to be pulled over for speeding, a broken tail light, or some other incidental infraction, it is safe to assume that the number of people on the watch list in each of these states is substantially greater than the numbers listed above. In fact, using statistics gathered on the incidence of traffic stops compared to the respective population sizes of each of the above states, it is possible to derive the approximate number of people on the terrorist watch list in each state. From there, it should be trivial to project that number to the total number of Americans on the terrorist watch list nationwide with reasonable accuracy.

The state of Illinois helpfully keeps complete records of all traffic stops conducted in their state each year. Since no other state keeps such state-wide records, we will use the ratio of Illinois traffic stops to the total population of Illinois as our extrapolative metric and presume that the Illinois sample is representative. So, since there were 2,450,348 traffic stops in Illinois in 2007 (the last year they kept such records), and since the population of Illinois in 2007 was 12,852,530 people, we can safely assume that on average, for any sufficiently large sample of US drivers, roughly 19% will get pulled over each year, since:

2,450,348 / 12,852,530 = .19

If we want to calculate the number of people living in Colorado who are on the US terrorist watch list, we then simply take the total population of Colorado in 2013 and multiply it by .19 to compute the total number of Colorado residents who were pulled over for a traffic stop that year:

(5,268,367) * (.19) = 1,000,990

So, about one million people in Colorado were probably pulled over in 2013. Now, looking at the DHS Crossroads Reports, we can see that 61 people on the terrorist watch list were pulled over in 2013. To compute the approximate number of people in Colorado who are on the watch list, we can plug the appropriate values into the following basic equation:

[(Estimated Number of Residents Subject to Traffic Stop) / (State Population)] * [(Number of Individuals Encountered During Traffic Stop Who Are On The Terrorist Watch List) / (n)]

-where n is the approximate number of people on the terrorist watch list in Colorado

When we solve for n we get 321. Approximately three hundred and twenty one people are likely on the US terrorist watch list in Colorado. If we do the same calculations for each of the other states listed in the DHS reports, we get the following results:

Approximate Number Of People On The Terrorist Watch List By State:

Colorado: 321

Kansas: 253

Missouri: 242

Nebraska: 84

Oklahoma: 147

From here, we can project these numbers to approximate the total number of US residents on the terrorist watch list. It’s simply a question of summing the respective population totals and watch list totals for each state, and then projecting this ratio against the total population of the United States in 2013:

Combined Population of Sample State Populations: 19,925,579

Combined Estimated Number of People on Terror Watch List: 1047

Population of the United States in 2013: 317,520,000

Estimated Number of Americans on The Terror Watch List = [(1047) / (19925579)] * [(n) / (317520000)]

Estimated Number of Americans on The Terror Watch List = 16,684

Here is a complete proof of work for those who like spreadsheets: