While the most interesting portions of the report are redacted, the IG did reveal that as of March 2004 the TSC only has a little more than half of the employees it says it needs (84 employees for 160 slots). Moreover, many of those aren't permanent employees; instead they are assignees from other organizations who largely aren't happy working at the TSC.

I don't want to write a full article here so take a moment to check out these:

Here's John Mintz of the Washington Post's take.

Note the interesting quote from Zelikow in Richard Rainey's piece for the Los Angeles Times.

"A lot of the different watch-list systems that are set up by different agencies really need overarching architecture," said Philip Zelikow, the Sept. 11 panel's executive director. We need "a system of systems to do a better job of getting a government-wide approach" to identifying terrorist suspects."

Rainey also does a great job of framing the IG report in terms of the debate over the 9/11 recommendations.

But isn't this all just inside baseball?

Hardly.

The TSC is intended to be the centerpiece of a number of frontline anti-terrorism initiatives.

• By last count, the list is already 120,000 names long. That's equivalent to a list of every person who lives in Topeka, Kansas.
• State Department officials are supposed to use it to help them decide whether to issue visas.
• Customs and Border Patrol already is one of the main users of the TSC (exact percentage is blacked out in report).
• Secure Flight will use the list to vet every domestic airline passenger.
• Every police car in the country will eventually have access to the list, which will be consulted every time a person is detained or even ticketed.

Getting this watchlist right is going to be incredibly difficult, both from a technical standpoint and from an intelligence standpoint.

It's not supposed to literally be a central list of all known information. It's intended to be a system of pointers. The pointers will have only unclassified information.

How much information actually accompanies the majority of names on the list? Age? Description? Middle name? How good is our intelligence?

How does one get off the list if it is just a list of lists?

How will the TSC's office in Washington D.C. be able to tell the difference between Senator Ted Kennedy and the Edward Kennedy on the list, when the elder statesman tries to check in at an airport in Philadelphia?

These aren't inside baseball or paranoid questions.

In fact, Ervin made it very clear in his report and in his comments to other reporters that the TSC's data practices raise serious concerns about privacy and data-mining.

To wit:

One concern is the lack of a privacy policy...

A second concern is that citizens’ privacy rights may be violated due to methods that airlines use to identify terrorists and threats to civil aviation...

Third, a number of organizations involved in watch list consolidation were conducting data mining activities without central oversight to ensure that they complied with Homeland Security Act provisions regarding privacy.

Those concerns are then followed by two-and-a-half pages of redaction.

I'm reasonably certain those pages are about the technical difficulty of integrating the various watchlists.

What does it all mean though?

If you get bored over the weekend, maybe take two hours, think hard about that Zelikow quote in light of the Lieberman-Collins-McCain 9-11 legislation and go re-read the Markle Foundation Task Force reports.

Think about what is the difference between a system of pointers and a system of systems, and what Zeilkow is talking about when he says "overarching architecture."

At least, that's what I'm going to be thinking about.