U.S. Terror Database Contains 325,000 Names

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) keeps a government database of reputed international terror suspects and associates that contains information on about 325,000 people, a number that is more than four times the amount of names originally listed when the database was created in 2003, the Washington Post reports.

That number is a huge increase from what was previously reported by the NCTC, according to The Post.

NCTC officials say the actual number of people listed in the database is probably closer to 200,000, because of the fact that many suspects or associates are listed under multiple names or aliases, The Post reports.

The list, assembled from data gleaned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Security Agency (NSA), among others, contains information on a very small percentage of American citizens, an administration official told The Post.  “The vast majority are non-U.S. persons and do not live in the U.S.,” the official said.

Though the NSA did supply much of the information in the database, it’s unclear how much of that data was garnered from its controversial domestic spying program.

Privacy activists and civil liberties groups alike are concerned with the size of the database; namely, Timothy Sparapani, legislative counsel for privacy rights at the American Civil Liberties Union, who called the numbers “shocking but, unfortunately, not surprising.”

The NCTC database was first created in 2003, and it started out with some 75,000 names, The Post reports.

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