Erris's Journal: FBI Terrorist Watch List shown to have Half a Million Names

ABC News and others are reporting privacy, civil liberty and practicality concerns as an FBI terrorist watch list continues out of control growth. The size of the list seems to have been accidently revealed:

the number of names on its terrorist watch list is classified. A portion of the FBI's unclassified 2008 budget request posted to the Department of Justice Web site, however, refers to "the entire watch list of 509,000 names," which is utilized by its Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force.

The big list combines a previously unknown number of domestic suspects with 465,000 suspects with "links to foreign organizations". So there are a minimum of 44,000 US Citizen on the list, or roughly two in ten thousand. New York City would have more than a thousand suspects.