FBI Checked Las Vegas Hotel Lists in Terror Alert

The FBI demanded Las Vegas hotels turn over their guest lists leading up to New Year's Eve to check against a U.S. master list of suspected terrorists, a law enforcement official said on Sunday.

The demand for "patron information" went to all major hotels in the Nevada casino and entertainment city, said the official who declined to be named.

Las Vegas was one of six or seven cities mentioned in intelligence reports as potential targets for a terrorist attack during the holiday period, Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn said on New Year's Eve.

Why does this worry me? It's simple enough: the FBI has moved from taking its list of terrorists out to possible terrorist contact points and asking about the names on it... to demanding the complete customer lists and doing the search themselves. Once the FBI has that information, they can use it for whatever they want. If they use it to catch terrorists, that's a good thing. If they use it for other purposes, that's not such a good thing.

But the fact that they made this demand, and the manner in which they made it, is striking. It implies:

1. They don't have specific information about who might have been in Las Vegas.
2. They don't have specific information about where he or she might have stayed.
3. They don't have speciifc information about his or her appearance.

So by my criteria, this little expedition is just fishing. They don't know who, what, or where -- at least not within any acceptable level of precision. In fact, I'm willing to bet they had just two pieces of information: "Las Vegas" and the approximate time of some allegedly-planned attack. And in response to this they want to trawl through the customer lists of every hotel in Vegas.