Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Newsvine
Facebook
Google
Yahoo
TechnoratiACLU Highlights Risk of 'Fusion Centers'
On the heels of the Maryland State Police spying scandal, the ACLU is ringing the alarms over "fusion centers."
These are the state-by-state groupings of various law enforcement agencies working together at all levels, from local police to the FBI, NSA, and CIA, ostensibly to share terrorism threat information. But, as we saw in the Maryland case, they may sometimes just be sharing information about lawful, peaceful First Amendment-protected speech.
There is "mission creep from watching out for terrorism to watching out for peace activists," said Caroline Frederickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, in a press conference July 29. She called the fusion centers an incipient "domestic intelligence apparatus." And she warned that the kind of spying that occurred in Maryland was "very dangerous to our democracy."
In December 2007, the ACLU published a report "What's Wrong with Fusion Centers?"
It noted that there are more than 40 fusion centers already created. And it cited several problems with them, including the participation of military personnel in law enforcement, as well as "private sector participation." "Fusion centers are incorporating private-sector corporations into the intelligence process, breaking down the arm's length relationship that protects the privacy of innocent Americans who are employees or customers of these companies."
On July 29, the ACLU issued an update to that report.
The fusion centers represent an attempt to create a "total surveillance society," the update says.
It notes that the LAPD fed into its fusion center an array of ""suspicious activity reports" that included such innocuous activities as "taking notes" or "drawing diagrams" or "using binoculars." (Since one out of six Americans is a birdwatcher, this last item could really swell the files.)
The "suspicious activity" criteria of the LAPD "gives law enforcement officers justification to harass practically anyone they choose, to collect personal information, and to pass such information along to the intelligence community," the update says.
Frighteningly, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has called the LAPD program "a national model."
The Director of National Intelligence urges state and local law enforcement to "report non-criminal suspicious activities," the update says. According to the standards of the Director of National Intelligence, these activities are defined as "observed behavior that may be indicative of intelligence gathering or pre-operational planning related to terrorism, criminal, or other illicit intention."
The ACLU notes that "other illicit intention" is not defined, and that fusion centers are fed intelligence before "reasonable suspicion" is established.
Fusion centers also engage in data mining, as they rely not only on FBI and CIA records. They also often "have subscriptions with private data brokers such as Accurint, ChoicePoint, Lexis-Nexus, and LocatePlus, a database containing cell phone numbers and unpublished telephone records," the ACLU notes, referring to a Washington Post article from April 2.
The ACLU calls fusion centers "out-of-control data-gathering monsters."
While the government is gathering more and more information about us citizens, it's trying to shield itself from telling us what it's doing. "There appears to be an effort by the federal government to coerce states into exempting their fusion centers from state open government laws," the ACLU notes. "For those living in Virginia, it's already too late: The Virginia General Assembly passed a law in April 2008 exempting the state's fusion center from the Freedom of Information Act."
As I noted in "The New Snoops: Terrorism Liaison Officers, Some from the Private Sector" with "Fusion Center Guidelines" that flat-out recommend that "fusion centers and their leadership encourage appropriate policymakers to legislate the protection of private sector data provided to fusion centers."
The ACLU is absolutely right: Congress must investigate these fusion centers and exercise appropriate oversight before law enforcement agencies and their private sector partners violate the rights of more Americans and usher us all into the total surveillance society.
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.
Copyright 2008 The Progressive Magazine
17 Comments so far
Show AllIt's 1939 all over again.
Time to organize your White Rose cells, please.
I warned in 1964 that if we the good guys don't take control of technology the bad guys will.
Looks like I got that one right. Sad.
This is right out of Kurt Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus. Total Korporate Kontrol.
Note how fusion centers squarely inject the CIA and the NSA into domestic law enforcement on American soil, away from those agencies' historic missions to gather intelligence only overseas. So much for the lessons of Watergate.....
Bill from Saginaw
I'm kind of hoping some atmospheric shift occurs that disables a lot of the communication technology. Is that too sci-fi? I mean if Krakatoa went off and the atmosphere carried a lot of volcanic debris could it impede all their little satellite surveillance based operations? Put them in the dark, provide a cloaking device?
"Congress must investigate these fusion centers and exercise appropriate oversight before law enforcement agencies and their private sector partners violate the rights of more Americans and usher us all into the total surveillance society."
Yeah, right; just like they did with FISA.
When I was a boy we really had a real constitution back then.
Really! The kids will never believe us.
Of course they will be watched from the moment they are born till the day they die, while we weren't.
We were born a free people... the kids will be born watched and ... get used to it growing up.
Whence once we were free... we used to even feel that way... we felt we were a free people with constitutional protections...
...the kids will feel... watched... and probably by then, afraid to even ask... watched by whom.
Somethings up and it don't look good.....
Several years ago I started following the Maryland State Police and Cumberland city cop cars all over the place. Every time I saw a cop car, I did my best to turn around and follow it. I followed State Troopers into Chinese restaurants and sat at the table next to them. I followed fire trucks and cop cars with their sirens blaring at midnight. If the cops had someone pulled over and had the guy out of his vehicle, frisking him, I'd park and watch.
After two weeks of this, two State Troopers showed up at my front door, one in uniform and the other in plain clothes. They "had reports that you have been conducting a surveillance operation against our officers. There are laws against stalking in this state" and so on.
Screw these arrogant jerks. We even have a Fusion Center right over at ABL Mountain in a new office complex situated right beside the Alliant Tech depleted uranium munitions plant and the Naval Sea Command cruise missile factory.
Maybe I'll start surveilling them again, but this time with binoculars and a notebook. They are currently in the process of creating a brand new, county-wide police bureau under the direction of Homeland Security. Honestly, sometimes I'm convinced that Allegany County here in western Maryland has served as a huge police-state fascist trial experiment to be tinkered with and perfected before being exported elsewhere.
I always THOUGHT there was something hinky about that Mahavishnu Orchestra!
Using the analogy of the those random check points along the highways, with this many people PAID to find something, they have an incentive to do so. Therefore any offbeat activity can qualify as suspicious. I carry a journal and often stop to write things down. I've had idiots ask me what I am doing. The worst is when I am obviously concentrating on what I'm writing and someone feels that's a good time to interrupt me. The same kind of CONSTANT interruption to any true contemplative process abounds... the ubiquitous TVS on at airports, same thing at banks, white noise at malls (sometimes set as subliminal advertising combined with elevator music), peoples' conversations or cell phones on city streets, etc. QUIET is almost a lost horizon!
It's scarry to know that those of us who have always marched to our own drummers now can be targeted for innocent (not to those with something to hide, those who fear individuals capable of thinking for themselves) acts... but all those paid policing forces like rabid hunters, will need to return with trophies, if not actual "kills." The hunter-gatherer society in its next incarnation, a debasement of all things spiritual... for MARS rules the homeland surveillance state.
"Oh yes. Now we all have a price on our heads."
That puts you in the same category as George Washington. Be proud!
In a democracy, power is supposed to rest with and derive from the people. To function in a democracy, citizens must gather and collect information. That of course includes exactly the sorts of acts listed in this article like 'note taking' or 'using binoculars'.
Of course, officials who dont' want to be accountable to the people hate this. Now they appear to be making any citizen oversight of the government a 'suspicious' act.
Seems like concerned patriotic citizens should be doing a lot of information gathering, observing, and note-taking as to what these thouroughly anti-American 'fusion centers' are doing.
Don't hold your breath waiting for the Dems in Congress to do anything though.
I have done some previous reading on this. I even downloaded a Fusion Center handbook. Beyond the military, feds and private corporations, try colleges and universities, teachers, professors, mailmen, private delivery like Fedex, your electric meter reader, your cable provider who might need access to inside your house, down to your neighbor.
Need I say more?
Oh yes. Now we all have a price on our heads.
And you thought SkyNet was scary...
Big Brother conservatives.
right out of 1984, in a tacky sense
a million plus beds are now ready to go in the fema prisons
be the first one on your block to be interned
hey its better than being renditioned to kyrgystan and dropped in boiling oil