Sign up to receive SPP updates:
RSS feed.  |
ABOUT THE SPP | BACKGROUNDERS | MEDIA | VIDEO/AUDIO |
SPP resources SPP Summit - New Orleans SPP Summit - Montebello Teach-in |
March 3, 2008 The U.S. terrorist watch list has grown by 400,000 names since this past June, according to the American Civil Liberties Union and reported on blogs across America, February 28. According to a Wired blog entry, the ACLU used Government Accountability Office [GAO] data to determine that the list, which is run out of the Terrorist Screening Center, is growing by about 20,000 names per month. “Most of the positive matches on the list came from police routinely checking persons, such as speeding motorists,” claims Wired. “Persons on the list are coded with varying suspected threat levels, so simply being on the watch list doesn’t mean one will be arrested when, say, a person on the list is pulled over for speeding. In fact, being on list isn’t even enough to ensure that a person is denied a visa or entry into the country, according to the [GAO] report.” Also, subsequent to printing the initial report, a Terrorist Screening Center spokesman, Chad Kolton, contacted Wired to say that “the list is useful, contains actually more like 300,000 people due to aliases and that only some 5 per cent – approximately 15,000, are U.S. persons.” Still, the question remains as to how useful the U.S. terrorist watch list – which includes those on the “no-fly” list currently used by Canadian airlines to stop some people from boarding – can be when it is pushing 1 million names. There is also the question how the growing database will affect Canadians – specifically privacy concerns – as Canada and the U.S. harmonize security systems through the Security and Prosperity Partnership. Somali households destroyed So what does this have to do with a recent U.S. missile attack in Somalia? If the Bush administration need only state the presence of “known terrorists” to justify the destruction of two houses in a foreign country, how is Canada in a position to determine how the U.S. responds to the presence, real or perceived, of “known terrorists” north of its borders? As Justice O’Connor wrote in the final report on the deportation of Maher Arar, Canada cannot control how the U.S. uses information we send them on suspected criminals, which is why we should not be pursuing closer intelligence-sharing agreements with the Bush administration or any other foreign government that ignores evidence-based policing and the rule of law and relies, instead, on so-called “strategic strikes” against its enemies, even when those enemies live in another sovereign territory.
|
|||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
 |
NACC
Workers
Water
Energy
Military
Safety & regulations
Transportation corridors
