Leonard Boyle, the director of the FBI-led multiagency Terrorist Screening Center that maintains the watch list, told United Press International, "We are averaging 50-plus positive encounters per day" -- referring to occasions when the individual coming into contact with officials is positively identified as the person on the watch list.

Boyle said "the majority" of those contacts -- referred to by the center as "encounters" -- are either at U.S. borders as people attempting to enter or outside the country altogether, for example when they are boarding an airliner headed for the United States. He declined to give more specific figures.

Encounters inside the country vary but are typically traffic stops or other routine interactions with local police, or when travelers find themselves on the "no fly" or "selectee" lists -- subsets of the terrorist watch list administered by the airlines and the U.S. Transportation Security Administration.

In many instances, "nothing is going to happen to the person" as a result of an encounter inside the country, said Boyle. "In fact, the person may not even know that he is on the watch list or that anyone is paying him special attention as a result of the encounter."

The consolidated watch list of what the government calls "known or appropriately suspected terrorists" was first established at the recommendation of the Sept. 11 Commission. Several of the 19 hijackers who attacked the United States on that day in 2001 had been identified by the CIA as possible al-Qaida operatives, but there was no coordinated effort to keep them -- or other suspected terrorists -- out of the country.

The master list maintained by the center, known as the Terrorist Screening Data Base, has burgeoned to almost a million names since it was established, but officials say multiple records are sometimes needed because suspected terrorists use false or alternate identities, and the million records in the system represent some 400,000 individuals. Terrorist Screening Center officials told a recent congressional hearing that only 3 percent, or 12,000, of those were U.S. citizens or legal residents.

In 2006, according to figures given then by Boyle's predecessor, the center was logging an average of 35 positive encounters a day, roughly seven of them inside the country, so the new figures represent a rise of about a third in the overall numbers.

"In my tenure (since March last year) that number (of encounters) has crept up gradually," said Boyle, adding, "Some of those are repeat occurrences -- there are people who are watch-listed who have been encountered a number of times."

Critics of the watch list, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, say the system has become "bloated" with "junk" information and that the growing number of names is depriving those listed of due process and inconveniencing anyone with the same or similar names.

"The more names that are put on the list, the more stops you are going to have and the more people's lives are going to be disrupted without any benefit to security," said Mike German, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent who now works with the ACLU.

German added that the numbers of encounters showed the weakness of the watch-list system, and questioned why the authorities weren't doing more to investigate and then clear or indict people whose names were on the list.

"We know that there are not 50 arrests of terrorists every day," he said. "Why are theses names on the list? �� If there aren't arrests and prosecutions, what's the point? �� Is this just innocent people being deprived of their right to due process and to travel?

"We have created a system that has built into it a massive numberof false alarms," said German, "and that is ultimately going to damage our security."

He called the watch list "a counterproductive strategy for finding a very small number of people," adding, "The resources invested in this system that goes off 50 times a day would be better spent investigating bad guys."

Boyle declined to say how many arrests or indictments there were as a result of encounters but said that was not the best way to measure the system's success, which was about allowing agencies to share intelligence and "connect the dots on terrorist associations and activities."

As an example of that kind of success, he cited a traffic stop last year during which "a police officer in a major metropolitan area used the watch list to identify three subjects of separate FBI terrorism investigations in the same car. Their association had previously been unknown," Boyle told UPI.

Joanne Ferreira, a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said that anyone involved in terrorism would be inadmissible to the United States under federal law. She said the agency turned away an average of more than 840 people seeking admission to the country every day, but did not provide a breakdown of the reasons.

German said there was no effective way for anyone to challenge their inclusion on the list, adding it "unquestionably impacts innocent people."

"That's students wanting to come to the U.S. to study, professors coming here to teach, all sorts of people looking to come -- as most of our ancestors did -- to a country where they can better themselves," said German.

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