Terror Suspects Lists Yields Few Arrests
Washington Post | Divining rods and tiger stones...

Forget the civil liberties question for a moment. Assuming the system is worthwhile, has anyone stopped to think about how staggeringly inefficient it is?

I mean, the number of false positives (97.5%) alone suggest that the list is not producing actionable intelligence in any meaningful quantity. Admittedly, I'm sure many of the people against whom no action has been taken are 'sinister,' as the bureaucrat suggests. That alone isn't enough to justify the waste, however. Even assuming that another 10% (2,000) will eventually be in a position where we can take action, the number of false positives we're wasting our time on is too large.

Perhaps limited defense and intelligence resources would be better spent on a system that didn't become horribly clogged with people we're not going to do anything about?

Of course, as the logic goes, anyone on the list must somehow be a threat to national security. Otherwise, how would the have gotten on the list? So, definitionally, the list cannot produce a false positive because everyone on their is ultimately a candidate for enforcement action in the mind of some paranoid cube-rat at DHS. This sort of inane circular logic shouldn't be allowed to pass without criticism.

Or, god forbid, we could end up wasting taxpayer dollars...