US: American counterterrorism authorities have identified 325,000 people as terrorist suspects or their helpers, more than four times the number for 2003, according to a report in yesterday's Washington Post.
The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) put the names together from reports supplied by the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies. Some of the names listed are aliases, so the actual number of suspects may be closer to 200,000, almost all of whom are non-Americans.
Names from the NCTC list are provided to the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center which, in turn, provides names for watch-lists used at US airports.
Each name is assigned one of 25 codes such as "Member of a Foreign Terrorist Organisation," "Hijacker" or "Has Engaged in Terrorism". Suspects are divided into "Individuals who are considered armed and dangerous and those who are not."
An NCTC official declined to tell the paper if the NSA's controversial surveillance of communications between US citizens and foreigners had yielded names for the list.
"Our database includes names of known and suspected international terrorists provided by all intelligence community organisations, including NSA," the official said.
Timothy Sparapani, a privacy rights counsellor at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the size of the list was shocking but not surprising. "We have lists that are having baby lists at this point - they're spawning faster than rabbits. If we have over 300,000 known-terrorists who want to do this country harm, we've got a much bigger problem than deciding which names go on which list." he said.
Civil liberties advocates fear that appearing on the list could lead to a person being denied a US visa, barred entry, put on the no-fly list or targeted for prosecutions, without any means of clearing themself.
The size of the list increases the possibility of mistakes being made - so innocent people are targeted because they share a name with a terrorist suspect.
News of the dramatic expansion of the terrorist suspect list comes as Senate Republicans are backing away from holding an inquiry into President George W Bush's decision to authorise the NSA to spy on Americans without a warrant. The Senate intelligence committee is due to vote today on an inquiry, but Democrats acknowledged support for the step was evaporating.
A number of Republicans who originally supported an inquiry appear to have been persuaded a Senate investigation is unnecessary by White House briefings during the past few days.
Ohio Republican Mike DeWine has circulated a proposal to give the president authority to conduct surveillance without a warrant.
Arlen Specter, Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said last week he was drafting legislation that would require Mr Bush to submit the surveillance programme to a secret federal court for legal review.