Lawmakers and officials said James Robinson was just one of tens of thousands of Americans who are repeatedly inconvenienced at airports and border crossings because their name, or one like it, appears on the list, which has burgeoned to contain a million records since it was set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Robinson and his mother Denise flew from their California home at their own expense to testify at the hearing of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation Security and Infrastructure Protection, according to Chairwoman Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas.

"Regretfully, James' story is among many about which we have heard recently," said Jackson-Lee.

Since a new redress system was set up in February 2007 by the Department of Homeland Security, more than 41,000 people have complained about watchlist hassles, and that number is growing by 3,600 a month, according to official figures.

But officials acknowledge that those who complain are just the tip of an iceberg of frustrated fliers and missed flights that have helped make the watchlist fodder for late-night comedians.

"Thousands of passengers are inconvenienced every day," acknowledged Edmund "Kip" Hawley, chief of the Transportation Security Administration, the agency within Homeland Security that administers the "No-Fly" and "Selectee" lists.

Greg Wellen, of the TSA's Office of Transportation Threat Assessment and Credentialing, told the hearing that the two lists -- which respectively deny those on them the right to board airliners or specify that they are subject to additional screening -- are both subsets of the U.S. master watchlist, the Terrorist Screening Database.

Critics say that the list is bloated with inaccurate data, and the American Civil Liberties Union called Tuesday for it to be scrapped.

Rick Koppel of the Terrorist Screening Center, which administers the TSDB master list, said that while there were "approximately" a million records in the database, multiple records were sometimes needed because suspected terrorists might use false or alternate identities. The million records in the system represented 400,000 individuals, he said, only 3 percent, or 12,000, of who were U.S. citizens or legal residents.

Not all of those 12,000 were actually in the United States, Terrorist Screening Center spokesman Chad Kolton told UPI later. "And the watchlist was created to help keep it that way."

Moreover, officials said that not everyone on the TSDB master list would appear on the No-Fly or Selectee lists, which only bore the names of those considered a threat to aviation.

"There are significantly fewer than 50,000 individuals on the No-Fly and Selectee lists, and only a small percentage of those are in the United States," said Wellen. Officials declined to elaborate on the exact proportion in the United States.

Nonetheless, critics maintain that there is too much bad or poorly sourced information used in compiling the lists.

"The security watchlists on which the system is based are riddled with inaccurate and obsolete data," Lillie Coney of the Electronic Privacy Information Center told the hearing.

But officials say that most difficulties the public encounters are the result of so-called false positives -- when someone who has the same or similar name to a suspected terrorist is mistaken for them.

"The problem we face is not an 'overgrown' watchlist with too many names or names that don't matter," said Wellen. "The real issue is how to match actual passenger names against those very important names that are on the Terrorist Screening Center watchlist.

"TSA does not control how airlines match the names," he added. "That is a business decision that each airline must make."

But the air carriers say that inadequate guidance from the TSA left them floundering and uncertain how to match names -- or what to tell passengers when they got a match.

"The carriers were required to use their best judgment in designing those systems �� but without government guidance or standards," said John Meenan of the Air Transport Association of America.

Meenan added that "due to the economics of the airline industry," carriers found themselves relying on "legacy information systems" -- outdated computer software -- that "while reliable, are cumbersome and expensive to modify."

According to the Government Accountability Office, problems were compounded because the TSA also expected air carriers to conduct "similar-name matching" -- i.e. to find a way to match variations on a name -- but without specifying how many or what type of such variations should be compared. "Consequently, in interviews with 14 air carriers, we found inconsistent approaches to conducting similar-name matching," the GAO's Cathleen Berrick told the hearing. Some carriers compared more name variations than others, she said, while some did not use similar-name matching at all.

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