On Wednesday (Oct. 24) the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee held a hearing titled, "Watching the Watch List: Building an Effective Terrorist Screening System." The hearing focused on the rapidly growing size of the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) watch list, the centralized watch list that brings together all of the government lists of potential terrorists into one master list. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report was released to coincide with the hearing, finding that in May 2007 the list has grown to include 755,000 names and has increased to an estimated size of 860,000 today. How can a list of this size even be functional? As Committee Chair Senator Lieberman (D-CT) said in his opening statement, "Some of the concerns stem from the sheer size of the watch list. . . . But if many of these names are mistakenly there, the credibility of the terrorism watch list and its usefulness will be compromised." In May the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) issued a report criticizing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for not using the TSC watch list to check nonprofit tax filings for possible matches to suspected terrorists. This becomes even more problematic with recent news. Check out these two blogs covering the troubling watch list and its massive size; from the ACLU and Wired.