Master US terrorist list has almost 1 million names, including young kids

US database of terrorist suspects contains nearly one million identities, including the names of young children of ‘suspected terrorists” and individuals already cleared of having links to terrorism.

The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list, known as TIDE, emerged as the US government’s attempt after the September 11, 2001 terror incidents “to consolidate a hodgepodge of watch lists and ensure that every law enforcement agency would be alerted when it came into contact with a possible terrorist,” The Los Angeles Times reports Friday.

TIDE, according to the report, includes 875,000 records, “and critics say it is so all-encompassing that its value has been diminished.”

A single “credible tip” raising “reasonable suspicions” is enough to add someone to the list, the report adds citing US officials, noting that the database even includes the identities of small children of “terrorist suspects” and those that have been cleared of suspicion of being tied to assumed terror subjects.

“TIDE,” the report then emphasizes, “is not a watch list – it is a highly classified intelligence database, a master list that feeds information at various secrecy levels to agencies that maintain their own watch lists.”

The biggest customer of TIDE is the domestic American intelligence agency, the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), “which runs the Terrorist Screening Database, also known as the consolidated watch list, which has hundreds of thousands of names,” according to the report.

The FBI’s database in turn feeds the “selectee list,” which contains the name of suspects that are “pulled aside for searches at airports,” and “he self-explanatory no-fly list of just a few thousand members.”

The FBI’s list further feeds the State Department’s “watch list,” designed to “ensure that suspected terrorists don’t get US visas.”

The report goes on to argue that the database is “so large” and the records can be “so vague that there often is little a law enforcement agency is willing or able to do in response to a TIDE match.”

The Times report offered the details about TIDE in connection with failure of US agents in timely detecting possible terror ties of one of Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, before the incident, after his name was entered into the database following a tip by ‘Russian intelligence service’ that he “had become an Islamic radical looking to join underground groups.”