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Advocacy Blog
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Judge Rules that Treasury Must Release Some Documents on Watch List
The U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California ruled that the Treasury Department must release to the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR) of the San Francisco Bay Area documents detailing complaints from people who claim they were wrongly placed on a terrorist watch list. The lawsuit challenges Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), seeking further information about how Treasury manages its list of 6,000 suspected or known terrorists and others, called the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list.
The LCCR press release states that increasingly "private companies, including banks, mortgage companies, car dealerships, health insurers, landlords and employers, screen consumers' names against the OFAC list. Few people in the United States are actually on the list, but sharing a first, last or even middle name with someone on the list can trigger a 'false positive' match. Consumers discover the OFAC alert when they are told that they cannot make a purchase, open an account, or do business because their name appears on a terror list. On March 28, 2007, Treasury Department Secretary Paulson testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee that the Treasury Department had received 90,000 calls over a one-year period regarding the OFAC list and that the Treasury Department was 'concerned' about the serious hardship on ordinary Americans wrongly flagged as terrorists or drug traffickers."
The lawsuit began when LCCR filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in August 2005 that requested OFAC information on the SDN list dating from 2000. Without receiving any documents from Treasury, LCCR filed a lawsuit in May 2007.
The recent decision ordered Treasury to release certain records, such as public emails, letters, and petitions that requested names to be removed from the list. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the judge "refused to order the department to provide a breakdown of phone calls made to the agency's public hot line - more than 90,000 in a recent one-year period, according to congressional testimony - or to describe the nature of the inquiries and how they were handled. She also declined to require information on how the department verifies the accuracy of the list and handles complaints, saying officials had found no such documents."
Posted by Amanda Adams
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