A former FBI official criticized a proposal to ban gun sales to individuals named on federal terror watch lists, saying that the lists are too “bloated” to be effective in their current form.
“I’m afraid that the terrorist watch lists have been fraught with problems from the very beginning, and particularly, the lack of due process makes it impossible for the public to judge whether these are effective methodologies,” Michael German, a former FBI special agent who is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice said Tuesday afternoon.
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., broached that subject with German during a hearing on whether federal government decisions “to de-emphasize Radical Islam in combating terrorism” had undermined U.S. counterterrorism efforts. German generally supported the Obama administration’s policies in that regard, but he stopped short of backing the watch list gun ban that President Obama and congressional Democrats have endorsed in recent weeks.
“Clearly, we’ve seen cases where people like [Boston Marathon bomber] Tamerlane Tsarnaev were on the watch list, but because the watch list is so bloated, it creates so many false alarms that that dulls the response,” German explained to Coons. “So, in fact, nobody responded to those alarms when the system worked as it was effective. So, I would hope that we could see clarity and due process brought to the watch list to make it better.”
Those critiques of the watch list underpin his broader complaint about current counterterrorism strategies. “The problem is not that there has been too little talk of ‘radical Islam,’ but too much,” he said in his prepared testimony. “The government today relies on casting a net as widely as possible, using mass surveillance and ‘see something, say something’ tip lines to accumulate vast stores of data, with the hope that suspects can be identified or cleared through investigation and analysis. The sheer volume of information collected makes the task enormously difficult, as suspicion is cast on thousands of people, but the application of flawed predictive models all but assures failure.”
