The fusion centers were supposed to be a vehicle whereby information would be disseminated closer to the people who need it most: the state and local law enforcement and emergency personnel who will be the first to respond to a natural disaster or terrorist attack.

But, according to a new report (PDF) from the Congressional Research Service and obtained by the Federation of American Scientists, “little ‘true fusion,’ or analysis of disparate data sources, identification of intelligence gaps, and pro-active collection of intelligence against those gaps which could contribute to prevention is occurring.”

The report is also worth reading for its extensive background on intelligence fusion centers and the role of intelligence in modern law enforcement.

Time

“Some homeland security observers suggest that the rush to establish and enhance state fusion centers is a post-9/11 reaction and that over time some of the centers may dissolve,” the report says. Were the fusion centers created too quickly so that the government could look like it was doing something?

Over time, fusion centers could be consolidated, especially if there isn’t another terrorist attack or major natural disaster for them to work on, if the centers are duplicating each other’s work, or if the risks to given geographic areas change.

Funding

“If the United States is not the target of a successful terrorist attack, homeland security funding, arguably, may decrease,” the report warns.

“It is unclear how fusion centers would fare in such a situation.” Some fusion centers could close entirely, while others might continue operating, albeit with reduced staffing and capacity.

As it stands, the fusion centers have received a total of $380 million in start-up funding, but many of them have no further federal funding allocated to them, the report says.

Civil Liberties

“Arguments against fusion centers often center around the idea that such centers are essentially pre-emptive law enforcement — that intelligence gathered in the absence of a criminal predicate is unlawfully gathered intelligence.”

The farther away from a criminal investigation law enforcement gets, the higher the risk of a civil liberties violation. This is a difficult balancing act. A group of U.S. citizens speaking freely and associating with one another might be entirely innocent of criminal or terrorist intent, or they could be plotting the next attack. How can government preserve the rights of the former while stopping the latter from carrying out their plans?

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “We’re setting up essentially a domestic intelligence agency, and we’re doing it without having a full debate about the risks to privacy and civil liberties.” Furthermore, the ACLU is also concerned with having DHS perform a coordinating role at the federal level with respect to these centers. “We are granting extraordinary powers to one agency, without adequate transparency or safeguards, that hasn’t shown Congress that it’s ready for the job.” — Fusion Centers: Issues and Options for Congress (PDF)

Underlying Philosophy

“Is the country any safer or more prepared with fusion centers or have we created a false sense of security?” asks the report.

As the report notes, “numerous fusion center officials claim that although their center receives a substantial amount of information from federal agencies, they never seem to get the ‘right information’ or receive it in an efficient manner.”

The fusion centers are further hampered by the way they are structured, according to the CRS. They have little private sector input, they encounter difficulties with classification of information, and in many cases they have limited access to relevant state information databases.

That access is uneven. The report said that one state center had access to only 30 percent of the pertinent databases, while officials at a different state’s center said they would soon obtain access to 92 percent of such databases. — Government Computer News

In addition, state and local law enforcement agencies are using the fusion centers for garden variety criminal intelligence, as opposed to counterterrorism.

“First, leadership at several fusion centers interviewed for this report noted they believed the country was moving towards an all-crimes and/or all-hazards model and they felt they needed to move with the changing tide.”

The report further noted that “most police departments and public sector agencies are more concerned with issues such as gangs, narcotics, and street crime, which are more relevant to their communities.” And, broadening their focus allowed the fusion centers to obtain more money.

Worst of all, the fusion centers don’t seem to have been effective at either their broad, all-crimes, all-hazards mission, or at the narrow counterterrorism mission.

“It is unclear if a single fusion center has successfully adopted a truly proactive prevention approach to information analysis and sharing,’ the report said. “No state and its local jurisdictions appear to have fully adopted the intelligence cycle.”

Undercover officers of the Federal Protective Service subscribed to the mailing lists and monitored Web sites of peaceful anti-war groups, and contributed information about those groups’ activities to a military intelligence database, according to Pentagon documents released Tuesday.

NBC News revealed in December 2005 that the Threat and Local Observation Notice database, used by the military to track potential terrorist threats to military installations, contained data on peaceful protesters and anti-war groups. The Pentagon subsequently announced that after a review, the data had been cleaned out of the database and intelligence personnel retrained.

“I don’t want it, we shouldn’t have had it, not interested in it,’ said Daniel J. Baur, the acting director of the counterintelligence field activity unit, which runs the Talon program at the Defense Department. “I don’t want to deal with it.’

Mr. Baur said that those operating the database had misinterpreted their mandate and that what was intended as an antiterrorist database became, in some respects, a catch-all for leads on possible disruptions and threats against military installations in the United States, including protests against the military presence in Iraq.

“I don’t think the policy was as clear as it could have been,’ he said. Once the problem was discovered, he said, “we fixed it,’ and more than 180 entries in the database related to war protests were deleted from the system last year. Out of 13,000 entries in the database, many of them uncorroborated leads on possible terrorist threats, several thousand others were also purged because he said they had “no continuing relevance.’ — New York Times

Each of the documents, (PDF) released Tuesday to the American Civil Liberties Union pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request, show that the leads on anti-war protests originated with undercover FPS agents, whose names were redacted from the documents at the request of FPS’s parent agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

One such document details an anti-war protest of a Sacramento, Calif., military entrance processing station planned by Veterans for Peace on Veterans Day in 2004, a day the center was closed. VFP specifically rejects any type of violent protest, according to its Web site. There were “no known vandalism or incidents as a result of the protest,’ the document notes.

Another document notes that VFP “is a peaceful organization, but there is potential future protest[s] could become violent,’ an accusation that VFP executive director Michael McPhearson calls “appalling.’

“The federal government should not be wasting valuable resources gathering files on peaceful protesters who disagree with the Bush administration’s policies,’ McPhearson said.

Another document details peaceful protests by the War Resisters League in New York City in 2005, noting that it “advocates Gandhian nonviolence,’ “will not use physical violence or verbal abuse toward any person’ and “will not damage any property.’

Several other documents detail peaceful protests at military recruiting stations by the American Friends Service Committee, National Front for Peace and Justice, and other groups.

Dave Ridley protests Nov. 13 in Concord, N.H.

FPS, originally created in 1971 as part of the General Services Administration to protect federal buildings, was moved under the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. It routinely monitors anyone it deems a potential threat to federal assets, such as Dave Ridley and the New Hampshire Underground.

An FPS officer cited Ridley for distributing handbills at an Internal Revenue Service office in Nashua, N.H., in September, after he wrote about the experience in the Keene Free Press, an alternative newspaper published in Keene, N.H. Ridley had entered the IRS office holding a sign saying “Is it right to work 4 IRS?’ and handed out flyers urging IRS agents to quit their “immoral’ jobs.

Last week he and 16 other people protested at the federal building in Concord just prior to his November 13 court appearance.

“The feds admitted in court that they read this website,’ said Kat Kanning, publisher of the Keene Free Press and owner of the New Hampshire Underground Web site. Members of the site advocate smaller government and individual liberty and regularly hold peaceful protests throughout the state.

Federal prosecutors don’t actually bring terrorism charges if they can find any lesser charges which will result in a deportation and preserve national security secrets, officials said.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the News 21 Program of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. According to a statement on its Web site, it aims to transform journalism in the 21st century by “preparing future media leaders to be analytic thinkers, clear writers and communicators, armed with an in-depth understanding of the context and complexity of issues facing the modern world.’ And it’s starting to unleash a new breed of journalists on the world.

Two of them turned in this story to the Washington Post, which the editor promptly buried in the back pages.

The Social Security Administration is “literally the Fort Knox of identity information in the United States,’ said James Huse, the agency’s inspector general from 1998 to 2004. “That’s a pretty impressive investigative tool that no other agency possesses.’

From just after Sept. 11 through 2005, Social Security officials sent prosecutors 456 referrals that were classified as terrorism-related, according to statistics compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The review shows that 91 percent of those referrals led to prosecutions. . . .

Still, few if any suspects in Social Security cases are ever linked publicly to alleged terrorist activity. Most cases referred to prosecutors in the months after Sept. 11 involved document fraud by Latino immigrants working at airports. . . .

“Prosecution of terrorism-related targets on [immigration and document fraud] charges is often an effective method — and sometimes the only available method — of deterring and disrupting potential terrorist planning and support activities without compromising national security information,’ Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty wrote in a Justice Department white paper in June. . . .

The Internal Revenue code normally prohibits Social Security from releasing information in the wage and earnings database, even to law enforcement agencies. But IRS and Social Security officials are permitted to waive that rule in “life-threatening situations.’ A 30-day waiver was granted immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks and was extended four times by the IRS through early 2002, [Jonathan] Lasher [deputy chief counsel to the Social Security Administration's inspector general] said. — Washington Post

That explains how stealing Corn Flakes became a federal terrorism investigation.

Of course, it didn’t help that post-9/11 Justice Department rules allowed for almost anything to be classified as a terrorism-related investigation, as well as fudging the numbers in other ways.

So now, federal agents can turn anything into a terrorism investigation through some bureaucratic sleight-of-hand, get Social Security records which would otherwise be off-limits, and use whatever they find against you. And don’t think you have nothing to hide because you’re innocent. A screwed up computer record, and they are all over the place, would be enough for a predawn paramilitary raid at your house and a one-way trip to the nearest federal prison.

Have a nice day, tovarishch.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation brought a lawsuit January 31 against AT&T alleging that the company unlawfully cooperated with the National Security Agency in implementing what President George W. Bush calls the terrorist surveillance program, a program to capture international telephone calls of suspected terrorists and their associates where one end of the call is in the United States.

The Department of Justice on Thursday asked for a stay in the case, as well as the other cases which had been consolidated with it, asking the district court to halt entirely while the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals considers the case.

“The government’s proposed stay would not be in the interests of justice in this very important case about ongoing illegal spying on millions of ordinary Americans,’ said EFF media relations coordinator Rebecca Jeschke. “Many elements of our suit can and should go forward while the 9th Circuit considers the state secrets issues.’

The Department of Justice asserted that litigating the case would reveal national security secrets, causing exceptionally grave damage to the national security, and moved to dismiss the case. In July, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker denied the government’s motion to dismiss, ruling that “because the very subject matter of this litigation has been so publicly aired . . . dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.’

The government appealed that decision, and the the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed Wednesday to hear the appeal. The appeals court did not give an indication as to when it might rule on the appeal.

“We are looking forward to defending Walker’s decision to deny the motions to dismiss before the appeals court,’ said EFF staff attorney Kurt Opsahl.

After the motion to dismiss was denied, 17 other lawsuits against various telephone companies were consolidated with the EFF’s case. Judge Walker will hold a case management conference Nov. 17 for these cases, Opsahl said.

In a separate case, a federal judge in Michigan ruled that the NSA terrorist surveillance program was unconstitutional. The government is being allowed to continue the program while it pursues an appeal.

While I’d like to comment individually at all of the sites which have picked up the story, that would unfortunately be far too time-consuming. Even linking to them all would take too long at this point. So please consider this your response.

First, a bit of background: At the 2006 OSS.net IOP conference, organized by former intelligence officer Robert David Steele, sources said that Google was in bed with U.S. intelligence agencies. Anthony Kimery at HSToday broke the story in January. HSToday, a site rarely used as a source for several reasons: it requires a subscription, it didn’t (but now does) have RSS feeds, and carefully targets itself to government agencies, otherwise staying under the radar. It was almost a month before I even knew the story existed.

Even so, it’s worth registering to read the extensive background information HSToday has put together on Google’s association with the U.S. intelligence community (IC). Google, it seems, has been involved with the Central Intelligence Agency almost since its beginning. Here’s a small sample:

In June 1999, the then up-start Google received a $25 million round of equity funding led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the latter of which the CIA’s In-Q-Tel had developed a close relationship with to advance “priority” technologies of value to the IC. A number of Sequoia-bankrolled start-ups have contracted with the Department of Defense, especially after 9/11 when Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme met with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to discuss the application of emerging technologies to warfighting and intelligence collection. — HSToday

This is not, as Jason Battelle wrote, “in the Tin-Foil Hat category.” John, we missed it because some sites which may contain important information restrict their content to subscribers. We’ve relied too much on freely available information, and forgotten to look for information which isn’t so freely available. I’m sure Robert Steele would appreciate the irony.

Another question has been raised as to whether Steele is a reliable source. Apparently this story got big when Steele appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s radio show last week and talked about Google’s involvement with the intelligence community. Steele comes from an intelligence background in Marine Corps intelligence and the CIA. He created OSS.net to draw attention to the fact that U.S. intelligence relies too much on a Cold War siege mentality while most of the intelligence it really needs can be found from open sources. As for his reliability, I was privileged to hear him speak at a conference earlier this year, and I was quite surprised at his breadth and depth of knowledge about intelligence. I had spot-checked a few facts he’d given there, and found them to be true.

More to the point, I have no reason to doubt the veracity of Steele’s claim, nor the anonymous sources originally cited by HSToday.

When I originally published the story here, it got very little notice, primarily because at the time Homeland Stupidity was quite obscure. It’s much, much larger now, ranking today at 219th among the millions of blogs Technorati has indexed. And I plan to crack the top 100 within the next few months. It’s also since gained several other writers and is now indexed in Google News, bringing much more exposure.

Google, for its part, refuses to comment on national security matters. This story, and Google’s refusal to comment, simply provide more ammunition for Google’s critics. One of them even provides an alternative, called Scroogle, which promises to sanitize your searches so that you can’t be tracked, run by Daniel Brandt, who has been criticizing Google for years regarding its privacy and data retention policies.

“People averse to the risk of exposing their online activities to government surveillance should take Google’s studious silence as confirmation,” writes Cato Institute director of information policy studies Jim Harper.

Good advice.

While people are going through my old archives, here’s a related one you’ll want to read. How to really stay anonymous online: Using Tor is not enough.

IT contractors and intelligence officials familiar with the arrangement confirmed to HSToday.us that Google had been providing assistance to the intelligence community, but would not say under what authority that assistance had been requested or provided.

The intelligence community appears to be interested in data mining Google’s vast store of information on each user who uses Google’s services. Google collects data on each user’s search queries, which web sites users visited after making a query, and through its Google Analytics service, can also track users on cooperating web sites. It’s not clear what level of access to or how much of this information has been made available to intelligence agencies.

The contractor, who spoke on a not-for-attribution basis, said that at least one US intelligence agency he declined to identify is working to “leverage Google’s [user] data monitoring” capability as part of an effort by the IC to glean from this data information of “national security intelligence interest” in the war on terror. . . .

One of the sources did say, however, that the CIA’s Office of Research and Development “has been giving them additional money and guidance and requirements.”

Last November, the CIA – through In-Q-Tel [CIA venture capital company] – issued notices to sell $2.2 million worth of Google stock.

Robert David Steele, intelligence veteran and CEO of OSS.Net, Inc. which sponsored last week’s event, told HSToday.us Tuesday evening that “Google is being actively hypocritical and deceptive in playing up its refusal to help the Department of Justice when all along it has been taking money and direction for elements of the US Intelligence Community, including the Office of Research and Development at the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel, and in all probability, both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command.”

Steele added, “I have no doubt that Google, in its arrogance, decided it could make a deal with the devil and not get caught.” — HSToday.us

If you are extremely concerned about the possibility that your private browsing information is going to wind up in the hands of U.S. intelligence agencies, you can throw a spanner in the works by blocking cookies from the following domains: google.com, googlesyndication.com, google-analytics.com, and your country-specific Google domain (e.g. google.co.uk). If you actually use Google services, such as Google Mail, then this obviously will prevent you from using those services.

Even with cookies blocked, a limited amount of user tracking is possible, so unless you really are a terrorist, it probably isn’t worth the trouble. I still have all of my Google Cookies. Then again, I already know they’re watching me…