According to Diachenko, the dataset came from the Terrorist Screening Center(TSC), an FBI-led federal collective responsible for maintaining the thousands of records in the government’s no-fly list—a subset of the FBI’s much, much largerterrorist watchlist. The TSC includes “select international partners,” according to the FBI. Diachenko says the IP address linked to the leaked database was based in Bahrain.
In a nutshell, the no-fly list is exactly what it sounds like: a list of people who are branded by the federal government as potential terrorist threats and barred from boarding any planes heading into, out of, or within the U.S. as a result.
This appears to be the list—or a portion of the list—that Diachenko stumbled onto in his initial research. While he couldn’t say for sure whether the entire list was exposed in the leak, he was able to find about 1.9 million records detailing individuals’ no-fly statuses, full names, citizenship, genders, passport numbers, and more.
“I do not know how much of the full TSC Watchlist it stored,” he wrote, “but it seems plausible that the entire list was exposed.”