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Post-9/11 Dragnet Turns Up Surprises

The FBI and U.S. military reported that hundreds of insurgents and alleged terrorists detained in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa have criminal records in the United States.

The results of the fingerprinting programme suggests that enemies of the United States gathered intelligence by sending operatives to live in the country. An FBI team sent to Afghanistan in December 2001, discovered that one out of every 100 captured al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters were already in the database for domestic arrests. Many of those identified through fingerprinting came to the United States using an educational visa.

Civil libertarians are concerned that the fingerprinting database and terrorist watch lists infringe on the privacy of innocent citizens. There have been several high-profile cases of people being incorrectly accused of involvement in terrorism because of an error in the database. Federal investigators are working on new ways to evaluate data in order to cut down on false matches.