Terror List Enjoys Fast Growth

In Justin Rood's piece on the quickly expanding FBI Terror Watch List he makes the following statement,

Privacy and civil liberties advocates say the list is growing uncontrollably, threatening its usefulness in the war on terror.

And later ACLU senior legislative counsel Tim Sparapani says,

If we have 509,000 names on that list, the watch list is virtually useless. You'll be capturing innocent individuals with no connection to crime or terror.

Ultimately, the reason for maintaining a list like this is not to catch terrorists or prevent terrorism. Instead, it is to be maintained and expanded simply for the sake of feeding the bureaucracy that controls the list with an ever growing budget and to prove the point that government is able to exert an ever increasing measure of power over its citizens.

The continued existence of the list is similar in form to Andrew Sullivan's insistence that the point of government torture is not to extract information from terrorists but rather, simply, to torture.