Spies Among Us: Despite a troubled history, police across the nation are keeping

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" DitziSis " <mk2967

Fri, 12 May 2006 03:35:40 -0700 (PDT)

[DitzisDumpster] GESTAPOlice -- Bush's Plan for

" Federalization " of Local Law Enforcement

 

 

 

 

" The national plan now being pushed by Washington calls for every law

enforcement agency to develop a [domestic] intelligence capability.

Experts estimate that well over 100 police departments, from big-city

operations to small county sheriffs' offices, have now established

intelligence units of one kind or another. Hundreds of private

detectives are also working alongside federal agents on FBI-run Task

Forces, and over 6,000 state and local cops now have federal security

clearances, allowing them to see classified intelligence reports. "

 

 

 

Spies Among Us: Despite a troubled history, police across the nation

are keeping tabs on ordinary Americans

 

 

By David E. Kaplan

US News & World Report, May 8, 2006

 

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060508/8homeland_7.htm

 

 

In the Atlanta suburbs of DeKalb County, local officials wasted no

time after the 9/11 attacks. The second-most-populous county in

Georgia, the area is home to the Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention, the FBI's regional headquarters, and other potential

terrorist targets. Within weeks of the attacks, officials there

boasted that they had set up the nation's first local department of

homeland security. Dozens of other communities followed, and, like

them, DeKalb County put in for--and got--a series of generous federal

counterterrorism grants. The county received nearly $12 million from

Washington, using it to set up, among other things, a police

intelligence unit.

 

The outfit stumbled in 2002, when two of its agents were assigned to

follow around the county executive. Their job: to determine whether he

was being tailed--not by al Qaeda but by a district attorney

investigator looking into alleged misspending. A year later, one of

its plainclothes agents was seen photographing a handful of vegan

activists handing out antimeat leaflets in front of a HoneyBaked Ham

store. Police arrested two of the vegans and demanded that they turn

over notes, on which they'd written the license-plate number of an

undercover car, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which

is now suing the county. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial

neatly summed up the incident: " So now we know: Glazed hams are safe

in DeKalb County. "

 

Glazed hams aren't the only items that America's local cops are

protecting from dubious threats. U.S. News has identified nearly a

dozen cases in which city and county police, in the name of homeland

security, have surveilled or harassed animal-rights and antiwar

protesters, union activists, and even library patrons surfing the Web.

Unlike with Washington's warrantless domestic surveillance program,

little attention has been focused on the role of state and local

authorities in the war on terrorism. A U.S.News inquiry found that

federal officials have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into

once discredited state and local police intelligence operations.

Millions more have gone into building up regional law enforcement

databases to unprecedented levels. In dozens of interviews, officials

across the nation have stressed that the enhanced intelligence work is

vital to the nation's security, but even its biggest boosters worry

about a lack of training and standards. " This is going to be the

challenge, " says Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, " to ensure

that while getting bin Laden we don't transgress over the law. We've

been burned so badly in the past--we can't do that again. "

Rap sheets. Chief Bratton is referring to the infamous city " Red

Squads " that targeted civil rights and antiwar groups in the 1960s and

1970s (Page 48). Veteran police officers say no one in law enforcement

wants a return to the bad old days of domestic spying. But civil

liberties watchdogs warn that with so many cops looking for

terrorists, real and imagined, abuses may be inevitable.

 

" The restrictions on police spying are being removed, " says attorney

Richard Gutman, who led a 1974 class action lawsuit against the

Chicago police that obtained hundreds of thousands of pages of

intelligence files. " And I don't think you can rely on the police to

regulate themselves. "

 

Good or bad, intelligence gathering by local police departments is

back. Interviews with police officers, homeland security officials,

and privacy experts reveal a transformation among state and local law

enforcement.

 

Among the changes:

 

Since 9/11, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have

poured over a half-billion dollars into building up local and state

police intelligence operations. The funding has helped create more

than 100 police intelligence units reaching into nearly every state.

To qualify for federal homeland security grants, states were told to

assemble lists of " potential threat elements " -- individuals or groups

suspected of possible terrorist activity. In response, state

authorities have come up with thousands of loosely defined targets,

ranging from genuine terrorists to biker gangs and environmentalists.

 

Guidelines for protecting privacy and civil liberties have lagged far

behind the federal money. After four years of doling out homeland

security grants to police departments, federal officials released

guidelines for the conduct of local intelligence operations only last

year; the standards are voluntary and are being implemented slowly.

 

The resurgence of police intelligence operations is being accompanied

by a revolution in law enforcement computing. Rap sheets, intelligence

reports, and public records are rapidly being pooled into huge,

networked computer databases. Much of this is a boon to crime

fighting, but privacy advocates say the systems are wide open to abuse.

 

Behind the windfall in federal funding is broad agreement in

Washington on two areas: first, that local cops are America's front

line of defense against terrorism; and second, that the law

enforcement and intelligence communities must do a far better job of

sharing information with state and local police. As a report by the

International Association of Chiefs of Police stressed: " All terrorism

is local. " Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was arrested by a

state trooper after a traffic stop. And last year, local police in

Torrance, Calif., thwarted what the FBI says could have been America's

worst incident since 9/11--planned attacks on military sites and

synagogues in and around Los Angeles by homegrown jihadists.

The numbers tell the story: There are over 700,000 local, state, and

tribal police officers in the United States, compared with only 12,000

FBI agents. But getting the right information to all those eyes and

ears hasn't gone especially well. The government's failure at

" connecting the dots, " as the 9/11 commission put it, was key to the

success of al Qaeda's fateful hijackings in 2001. Three of the

hijackers, including ringleader Mohamed Atta, were pulled over in

traffic stops before the attacks, yet local cops had no inkling they

might be on terrorist watch lists. A National Criminal Intelligence

Sharing Plan, released by the Justice Department in 2003, found no

shortage of problems in sharing information among local law

enforcement: a lack of trust and communication; lack of funding for a

national intelligence network; lack of database connectivity; a

shortage of intelligence analysts, software, and training; and a lack

of standards and policies.

 

The flood of post-9/11 funding and attention, however, has started

making a difference, officials say. Indeed, it has catalyzed reforms

already underway in state and local law enforcement, giving a boost to

what reformers call intelligence-led policing--a kind of 21st-century

crime fighting driven by computer databases, intelligence gathering,

and analysis. " This is a new paradigm, a new philosophy of policing, "

says the LAPD's Bratton, who previously served as chief of the New

York Police Department. In that job, Bratton says, he spent 5 percent

of his time on counterterrorism; today, in Los Angeles, he spends 50

percent. The key to counterterrorism work, Bratton adds, is intelligence.

 

The change is " huge, absolutely huge, " says Michigan State

University's David Carter, the author of Law Enforcement Intelligence.

" Intelligence used to be a dirty word. But it's a more thoughtful

process now. " During the 1980s and 1990s, intelligence units were

largely confined to large police departments targeting drug smugglers

and organized crime, but the national plan now being pushed by

Washington calls for every law enforcement agency to develop some

intelligence capability. Experts estimate that well over 100 police

departments, from big-city operations to small county sheriffs'

offices, have now established intelligence units of one kind or

another. Hundreds of local detectives are also working with federal

agents on FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which have nearly

tripled from 34 before 9/11 to 100 today. And over 6,000 state and

local cops now have federal security clearances, allowing them to see

classified intelligence reports.

 

" The front line. " Some police departments have grown as sophisticated

as those of the feds. The LAPD has some 80 cops working

counterterrorism, while other big units now exist in Atlanta, Chicago,

and Las Vegas. Then there's the NYPD, which is in a class by

itself--with a thousand officers assigned to homeland security. The

Big Apple's intelligence chief is a former head of CIA covert

operations; its counterterrorism chief is an ex-State Department

counterterrorism coordinator. The NYPD has officers based in a

half-dozen countries, and its counterterrorism agents visit some 200

businesses a week to check on suspicious activity.

 

Many of the nation's new intelligence units are dubbed " fusion

centers. " Run by state or local law enforcement, these regional hubs

pool information from multiple jurisdictions. From a mere handful

before 9/11, fusion centers now exist in 31 states, with a dozen more

to follow. Some focus exclusively on terrorism; others track all

manner of criminal activity. Federal officials hope to eventually see

70 fusion centers nationwide, providing a coast-to-coast intelligence

blanket. This vision was noted by President Bush in a 2003 speech:

" All across our country we'll be able to tie our terrorist information

to local information banks so that the front line of defeating terror

becomes activated and real, and those are the local law enforcement

officials. "

 

Intelligence centers are among the hottest trends in law enforcement.

Last year, Massachusetts opened its Commonwealth Fusion Center, which

boasts 18 analysts and 23 field-intelligence officers. The state of

California is spending $15 million on a string of four centers this

year, and north Texas and New Jersey are each setting up six. The

best, officials say, are focused broadly and are improving their

ability to counter sophisticated crimes that include not only

terrorism but fraud, racketeering, and computer hacking. The federal

Department of Homeland Security, which has bankrolled start-ups of

many of the centers, has big plans for the emerging network. Jack

Tomarchio, the agency's new deputy director of intelligence, told a

law enforcement conference in March of plans to embed up to three DHS

agents and intelligence analysts at every site. " The states want a

very close synergistic relationship with the feds, " he explained to

U.S. News. " Nobody wants to play by the old rules. The old rules

basically gave us 9/11. "

 

" Reasonable suspicion. " The problem, skeptics say, is that no one is

quite sure what the new rules are. " Hardly anyone knows what a fusion

center should do, " says Paul Wormeli of the Integrated Justice

Information Systems Institute, a Justice Department-backed training

and technology center. " Some states have responded by putting 10 state

troopers in a room to look at databases. That's a ridiculous

approach. " Another law enforcement veteran, deeply involved with the

fusion centers, expressed similar frustration. " The money has been

moved without guidance or structure, technical assistance, or

training, " says the official, who is not authorized to speak publicly.

There are now guidelines, he adds, " but they're not binding on

anyone. " In the past year, the Justice Department has issued standards

for local police on fusion centers and privacy issues, but they are

only advisory. Most federal funding for the centers now comes from the

Department of Homeland Security, but DHS also requires no intelligence

standards from its grantees.

 

At the state level, regulations on police spying vary widely, but a

general rule of thumb comes from the Justice Department's internal

guidelines that forbid intelligence gathering on individuals unless

there is a " reasonable suspicion " of criminal activity. Since the

reforms of the 1970s, the FBI says its agents have followed this

standard; Justice Department regulations require local police who

receive federal funding to do the same in maintaining any intelligence

files. But there is considerable leeway at the local level, and since

2001, judges have watered down police spying limits in Chicago and New

York. The federal regs, moreover, have not stopped a parade of

questionable cases.

 

Suspicion of spying is so rife among antiwar activists, who have

loudly protested White House policy on Iraq, that some begin meetings

by welcoming undercover cops who might be present. " People know and

believe their activities are being monitored, " says Leslie Cagan,

national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, the country's

largest antiwar coalition. There is some evidence to back this up.

Documents and videotapes obtained from lawsuits against the NYPD

reveal that its undercover officers have joined antiwar and even

bicycle-rider rallies. In at least one case, an apparent undercover

officer incited a crowd by faking his arrest. In Fresno, Calif.,

activists learned in 2003 that their group, Peace Fresno, had been

infiltrated by a local sheriff's deputy--piecing it together after the

man died in a car crash and his obituary appeared in the paper.

 

The California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, a $7 million fusion

center run by the state Department of Justice, also ran into trouble

in 2003 when it warned of potential violence at an antiwar protest at

the port of Oakland. Mike Van Winkle, then a spokesman for the center,

explained his concern to the Oakland Tribune: " You can make an easy

kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war

where the cause that's being fought against is international

terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost

argue that a protest against [the war] is a terrorist act. " Officials

quickly distanced themselves from the statement. The center's staff

had confused political protest with terrorism, announced California's

attorney general, who oversees the office.

 

" Absurd " threats. But this expansive view of homeland security has at

times also extended to union activists and even library Web surfers.

In February 2006 near Washington, D.C., two Montgomery County, Md.,

homeland security agents walked into a suburban Bethesda library and

forcefully warned patrons that viewing Internet pornography was

illegal. (It is not.) A county official later called the incident

" regrettable " and said those officers had been reassigned. Similarly,

in 2004, two plainclothes Contra Costa County sheriff's deputies

monitored a protest by striking Safeway workers in nearby San

Francisco, identifying themselves to union leaders as homeland

security agents.

 

Further blurring the lines over what constitutes " homeland security "

has been a push by Washington for states to identify possible

terrorists. In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security began

requiring states to draft strategic plans that included figures on how

many " potential threat elements " existed in their backyards. The

definition of suspected terrorists was fairly loose--PTEs were groups

or individuals who might use force or violence " to intimidate or

coerce " for a goal " possibly political or social in nature. " In

response, some states came up with alarming numbers. Most of the

reports are not available publicly, but U.S. News obtained nine state

homeland security plans and found that local officials have identified

thousands of " potential " terrorists. There are striking disparities,

as well. South Carolina, for example, found 68 PTEs, but neighboring

North Carolina uncovered 506. Vermont and New Hampshire found none at

all. Most impressive was Texas, where in 2004 investigators identified

2,052 potential threat elements. One top veteran of the FBI's

counterterrorism force calls the Texas number " absurd. " Included among

the threats cited by the states, sources say, are biker gangs, militia

groups, and " save the whales " environmentalists.

 

" The PTE methodology was flawed, " says a federal intelligence official

familiar with the process, " and it's no longer being used. "

Nonetheless, these " threat elements " have, in some cases, become the

basis for intelligence gathering by local and state police. Concern

over the process prompted the ACLU in New Jersey to sue the state,

demanding that eight towns turn over documents on PTEs identified by

local police.

 

Another source of alarm for civil liberties watchdogs is the explosion

in police computing power. Spurred by a 2004 White House directive

ordering better information sharing, the Justice Department has poured

tens of millions of dollars into expanding and tying together law

enforcement databases and networks. In many respects, the changes are

long overdue, yanking police into the 21st century and letting them

use the tools that bankers, private investigators, and journalists

routinely employ. From TV shows like 24 and CSI, Americans are

accustomed to scenes of police accessing the most arcane data with a

few keyboard clicks. The reality couldn't be more different. Law

enforcement was slow to get on the technology bandwagon, and its

information systems have developed into a patchwork of networks and

databases that cannot talk to one another--even within the same

county. Rap sheets, prison records, and court files are often all on

different systems. This means that days or even weeks can pass before

court-issued warrants show up on police wanted lists--leaving

criminals out on the streets.

 

States and cities began linking up their systems in the 1990s, but

since 9/11 their progress has been dramatic. At least 38 states are

working on some 200 projects tying together their criminal justice

records. Concerned over disjointed police networks around its key

bases, the Navy's Criminal Investigative Service is funding projects

in Norfolk, Va., and four other port cities, creating huge " data

warehouses " stocked with crime files from dozens of law enforcement

agencies. The FBI is also running pilot database centers in the St.

Louis and Seattle areas in which the bureau makes its case files

available to police. To local cops who have long complained about the

FBI's lack of sharing, the development is downright revolutionary. " It

made people nervous as hell, including me, " says the FBI's Thomas

Bush, who oversaw the initial program and now runs the FBI's Criminal

Justice Information Services Division. " The technical aspect is easy,

but you need to have the trust of the community and the security to

safeguard the system. "

 

The benefits of all this are undeniable. Armed with the latest

information, police will be better able to catch crooks and spot

criminal trends. But in this digital age, with so much data available

about individual Americans, the lines between what is acceptable

investigation and what is intrusive spying can quickly grow unclear.

Consider the case of Matrix. Backed by $12 million in federal funds,

at its peak in 2004 the Matrix system tapped into law enforcement

agencies from a dozen states. Using " data mining " technology, its

search engine ripped through billions of public records and matched

them with police files, creating instant dossiers. In the days after

9/11, Matrix researchers searched out individuals with what they

called " high terrorist factor " scores, providing federal and state

authorities a list of 120,000 " suspects. "

 

Law enforcement officials loved the system and made nearly 2 million

queries to it. But what alarmed privacy advocates was the mixing of

public data with police files, profiling techniques that smacked of

fishing expeditions, and the fact that all these sensitive data were

housed in a private corporation. Hounded by bad publicity and

concerned that Matrix might be breaking privacy laws, states began

pulling out of the system. Then, early last year, the Justice

Department quietly cut off funding.

 

Matrix no longer exists, but similar projects are underway across the

country, including one run by the California Department of Justice.

Having learned from Matrix's mistakes, users are employing what tech

specialists call " distributed computing. " Instead of creating a

single, vast database, they rapidly access information from sites in

different states, often with a single query. The effect is essentially

the same. " If people knew what we were looking at, they'd throw a

fit, " says a database trainer at one prominent police department.

Hacker's discovery. Another concern is the quality--and security--of

all that information. In Minnesota, the state-run Multiple

Jurisdiction Network Organization ran into controversy after linking

together nearly 200 law enforcement agencies and over 8 million

records. State Rep. Mary Liz Holberg, a Republican who oversees

privacy issues, found much to be alarmed about when a local hacker

contacted her after breaking into the system. The hacker had yanked

out files on Holberg herself, showing she was classified as a

" suspect " based on a neighbor's old complaint about where she parked

her car. " We had a real mess in Minnesota, " Holberg later wrote.

" There was no effective policy for individuals to review the data in

the system, let alone correct inaccuracies. " In late 2003, state

officials shut down the system amid concerns that it violated privacy

laws in its handling of records on juvenile offenders and gun permits.

Such problems threaten to grow as law enforcement expands its reach

with increased intelligence and computing power. The key to avoiding

trouble, say experts, is ensuring that concerns over privacy and civil

liberties are dealt with head-on. In a recent advisory aimed at police

intelligence units, the Department of Justice stressed that success in

safeguarding civil liberties " depends on appointing a high-level

member of your agency to champion the initiative. " But that message

apparently hasn't gotten through, judging from the response at a

conference sponsored by the Justice Department a few weeks back on

information sharing. Among the crowd of some 200 local and state

officials were intelligence officers, database managers, and chiefs of

police. When a speaker asked who in the audience was working with

privacy officials, not a single hand went up.

 

As Washington doles out millions of dollars for police intelligence,

its reliance on voluntary guidelines may backfire, warn critics, who

worry that abuses could wreck the important work that needs to be

done. " We're still diddling around, " says police technology expert

Wormeli. " We're not setting clear policy on what we put in our

databases. Should a patrol officer in Tallahassee be able to look at

my credit report? Most people would say, 'Hell, no.' " Current

regulations on criminal intelligence, he adds, were written before the

computer age. " They were great in their day, but they need to be

updated and expanded. "

 

Civil liberties watchdogs like attorney Gutman, meanwhile, want to

know how efforts to stop al Qaeda have ended up targeting animal

rights advocates, labor leaders, and antiwar protesters. " You've got

all this money and all this equipment--you're going to find someone to

use it on, " he warns. " If there aren't any external checks, there's

going to be an inevitable drift toward abuses. " But boosters of

intelligence-led policing say that today's cops are too smart to

repeat mistakes of the old Red Squads. " We're trying to develop

policies to build trust and relationships, not spy, " says Illinois

State Police Deputy Director Kenneth Bouche. " We've learned a better

way to do it. " Perhaps. But for now, at least, the jury on this case

is still out.

 

With Monica M. Ekman and Angie C. Marek

 

 

" To be nobody-but-myself in a world which is doing its best, night and

day, to make me everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle

which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting. " -e.e.

cummings-

 

 

 

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on

the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We

know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that

we know about living.

-- General Omar Bradley

 

* * * * W A R N I N G * * * *

As the result of the abuse of power as manifested by George W. Bush

and with the collusion of and others - this email may be subject

to collection and/or other wire tapping/internet illegalities

currently being conducted by the National Security Agency and others.

And, to any agent(s) reading this, I would suggest it is never too

late to change careers and would refer you to:

http://prorev.com/spookletter.htm

 

* * * * *