clipped from: www.wired.com They may never know it, but U.S. air travelers and others set off silent terrorist warning alarms nearly 20,000 times in 2006 when their names matched against the government's centralized terrorist watch list, according to a statistic buried in a Department of Justice document.
It's not clear from the report whether those numbers include individuals whose names only coincidently match one of those on list, such as when Sen. Ted Kennedy was confused with a former IRA terrorist also named Kennedy.
The watch list has been hounded by these mismatches, which have included small children, former presidential candidates, and Americans with common names such as David Nelson.
The list now reportedly includes more than 500,000 names, according to a similar document reported on by ABC News in June. (The Justice Department has since removed that document from its website.)