Public Accountability for Fusion Centers

Amidst widespread concerns about the far-reaching surveillance capacities of intelligence fusion centers, citizens groups are moving forward with demands for public oversight and privacy protections.

The Department of Homeland Security pushed and funded the establishment of 72 “information-sharing, collection, and analysis” centers around the country. Unfortunately, officials erected this risky surveillance apparatus without adequate civil liberties guidelines in place. Mechanisms for privacy protection and oversight have been developed hodgepodge. As a result, the Michigan state fusion center has a privacy oversight board that has never met because the Governor appointed only 4 of 15 sitting members. And in Massachusetts, the Commonwealth Fusion Center lacks any privacy board whatsoever.

Civil libertarians across the political spectrum have raised concerns about the intrusive powers of fusion centers. The seminal 2005 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, What’s Wrong With Fusion Centers, rang the alarm in a resounding manner. Political Research Associates posted a compelling 2003 article by Michelle Kinnucan (a Veteran for Peace and co-coordinator of the Ann Arbor Bill of Rights Defense Committee), on the early efforts of the Global Intelligence Working Group to fundamentally restructure federal/state/local intelligence sharing “along a continuum of all types of law enforcement agencies.”

Public concern about law enforcement access, collection, and sharing of Americans’ personal data and political activities is slowly but surely making its way into state legislatures and city council halls. Here are a few recent initiatives:

Massachusetts: Senate Bill 931

In Massachusetts, the ACLU is organizing support for Senate Bill 931 to shine a light on “intelligence” operations in the Commonwealth. Sponsored by State Senator Harriette L. Chandler, this “Act Regarding the Commonwealth Fusion Center and Other Intelligence Data Cencers,” aims to prevent surveillance abuses and ensure that intelligence operations do not violate privacy and First Amendment rights. Although the fusion center collect and compiles intimate personal information from an array of public and private electronic sources, it operates with virtually no independent oversight, no regular compliance audits, and without quality controls. The Massachusetts State Police, who command the center that houses representatives from DHS, FBI, and the National Guard, implicitly asks the public to trust them to abide by voluntary guidelines on criminal intelligence.

Rather than take their word for it, this legislation offers the accountability and oversight necessary in a system that relies on checks and balances. Senate Bill 931 will prohibit law enforcement from collecting information about individuals’ political and religious views, associations, or activities, unless it relates directly to a criminal investigation based on reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct. It will also establish an office of data protection and privacy oversight for all intelligence data centers, with a commissioner who is provided with full access and subpoena power in order to enable the office to investigate and analyze intelligence data center operations and make regular public reports. In addition, the bill will require basic privacy and quality controls on the data, and assure that an individual can access, review, and correct materials pertaining to him or her that the government has in its records, in order to ensure data accuracy and reliability.

The ACLU asks supporters of this initiative to write or call State Senator James Timilty, Chair of the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security. The Massachusetts Chapter of the ACLU has also assembled a brief fact sheet on fusion center abuses that can be useful for organizing.

Cambridge City Council

In February 2009, the Cambridge City Council passed an order requiring city law enforcement agencies to notify their elected leaders of the nature of the information being shared with the state fusion center. Under federal guidelines concerning fusion center operation, criminal intelligence files may be maintained only when there is reasonable suspicion that an individual committed or is about to commit a criminal act. However, the Department of Homeland Security has encouraged local police to report “suspicious activities” to fusion centers that include non-criminal, innocuous behaviors. This order by Cambridge lawmakers is a worthy effort to shed sunlight on the specific kinds of information being exchange by police and fusion centers. It reads:

WHEREAS: As part of the Department of Homeland Security & Emergency Response, the Commonwealth Fusion Center in Maynard, Massachusetts, collects and analyzes information from all available sources to produce and disseminate actionable intelligence to stakeholders for strategic and tactical decision-making in order to disrupt domestic and international terrorism; and

WHEREAS: This Fusion Center was the first of its kind created under the leadership of Governor Romney - without the approval of the State Legislature; and

WHEREAS: There are now 66 of these centers around the country; and

WHEREAS: The goal of the Fusion Center is to collect data from a variety of sources for example, – traffic departments, libraries, for the purposes of analysis and identification of potential threats; and

WHEREAS: The City of Cambridge may have contributed, either voluntarily or by request, information to the Fusion Center; now therefore be it

ORDERED: That the City Manager is hereby requested to inform the Council as to what City Departments contribute, or have contributed, whether voluntarily or otherwise, information to the Fusion Center, and the nature of that information; and be it further

ORDERED: That the City Manager be and hereby is requested to provide information regarding the circumstances under which the Fusion Center would receive data from Cambridge City Departments or third party entities.

Austin, Texas: Getting In on the Ground Floor

On October 26, 2009, two civil liberties groups went before the Austin Human Rights Commission to present recommendations for public oversight of the new Austin Regional Intelligence Center.

Bask in August 2009, the Austin City Council approved a resolution for the use of Homeland Security grants to turn an existing Department of Public Safety building into the new Austin Regional Intelligence Center, at a cost of up to $200,000. Residents spoke out against the new fusion center wearing masks to emphasize the risk that the police department will collect and monitor information beyond criminal activity.

Speakers from the ACLU of Texas emphasized how difficult it can be to backtrack and create policies after the center is in full operation. Matt Simpson insisted on public dissemination of a final privacy policy as well as the memorandums of understanding between various agencies involved. The lack of transparency on such policies and agreements does not bode well for privacy concerns. Chuck Young, founder of Texans for Accountable Government, was struck by the redaction of information in the privacy policy and the lack of disclosure of memorandums of understanding with information providers. The ACLU has demanded a removal policy that eliminates personally identifiable information that is not criminal, such as witness names, from databases. He also stated that the anti-discrimination clause of the policy should be strengthened in light of the prejudicial information sent in a bulletin issued by the North Central Texas Fusion Center in February 2009. That bulletin told law enforcement officials to report the activities of lobbying groups, Muslim civil rights organizations, and anti-war protestors.

David Carter, the Austin Police Department’s Chief of Staff, agreed to create a sub-committee of the Public Safety Commission, which oversees the Department of Public Safety. The sub-committee will be made up of community members and members of civil liberties groups. Certainly, more citizen vigilance of this kind will be needed to ensure public control of law enforcement surveillance and intelligence-gathering activities.

Making "28 CFR Part 23" Law in Texas

Another approach concerning oversight is to give the federal guideline concerning criminal intelligence databases the force of law at the state level. Fusion centers largely sprung into existence without legislative action or debate. Any future legislative action on fusion centers may, however, provide opportunities to add critical privacy protections.

For example, in Texas, lawmakers proposed a bill requiring the Texas Fusion Center to produce an annual report assessing the threat posed statewide by criminal street gangs* (S.B. 379). Representative Ryan Guillen added an amendment providing that “any information received by the center under this section, that is stored, combined with other information, analyzed, or disseminated is subject to the rules governing criminal intelligence in 28 C.F.R. Part 23.” This amendment brought the new bill into conformity with other provisions regarding the gang-related intelligence, but it demonstrates that any new laws concerning fusion centers should include these protections.

The above-listed reforms are just a small sample of what can be done to shine light on fusion center operations before large-scale abuses occur. These local efforts can help build momentum for national reform, which is ultimately what is needed. In truth, an entire new legal regime is needed to address data-based surveillance and guarantee the privacy that most U.S. citizens expect.

* In fact, many fusion centers prioritize traditional crime-fighting and anti-gang measures, rather than counter-terrorism. According to Christopher Pyle, “advocates of fusion centers are trying to diversify their operations before Americans realize that there aren’t that many terrorists to justify the enormous scale of the fusion center network, and before legislators discover that the centers are virtually useless in the war on terrorism.” Pyle is a Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College, who in the 1970s disclosed the military's surveillance of civilian political activity.

This regulation (28 CFR Part 23) was part of a series of law enforcement reforms initiated in the 1970s to curb widespread abuses of police investigative authorities for political purposes, particularly by police intelligence units. Encouraging the collection of information not reasonably linked to criminal activity while weakening the regulations governing intelligence systems will likely lead to similar abuses.

Activists Sue Denver Over Civil Liberties Violations

Since the successful street demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999, police and federal agencies have relied on aggressive and unconstitutional tactics to disperse, disrupt, and dissuade popular protest.  Last week, the ACLU of Colorado, and attorneys from the NLG People's Law Project, filed suit on behalf of bystanders, activists, and legal observers to hold Denver accountable for an arbitrary roundup during the 2008 DNC. 

In downtown Denver on August 25, 2008 police clearly tried to derail planned demonstrations by arresting activists before they could parade near politicians' corporate-sponsored soiree's and cocktail parties.  The problem is that the U.S. Constitution doesn't permit law enforcement to simply roundup people willy nilly based upon fears of the ruckus that they might commit.  In addition, the Fourth Amendment requires something called "individualized suspicion" based upon specific articulable facts before state agents can detain people, let alone arrest them.  On August 25, the Denver police arrested on-lookers and passersby, as well as alleged protesters. Cecil Bethea, age 80, was arrested while he was trying to catch a bus on the block which had been cordoned off by police.  Police never issued an order for people to disperse.  None of these individuals was found guilty of breaking the law, though police did manage to disrupt and quell dissent that evening.

In recent times, when the government declares a National Security Special Event, tremendous resources are mobilized to silence the voice of opposition.  Protest pens or cages are used to keep citizen activists from reaching their intended audience.  Repressive tactics and special rules used to make it harder to speak out have been well documented by several enlightening texts, such as:

• Policing Dissent by Luis A. Ferndandez (2008)
• Punishing Protest by Heidi Boghosian (2007)
• Give Me Liberty by Naomi Wolf (2008)

The Denver police ring on 15th Street encircled infiltrators as well as onlookers.  Law enforcement officers in plainclothes tried to provoke a confrontation with uniformed officers to create a diversion and facilitate their removal from the circle.  The true identity of those officers was not discovered until court proceedings.  This litigation will, no doubt, shed more light on the high levels of coordination and surveillance (from the local intelligence fusion center) that informed the government's actions on August 25.  

On the streets of Denver last summer, police were on high alert for anything that protesters could use as a weapon, or as a means of self defense.  Police in Minneapolis-St.Paul seized a U-haul truck full of traffic barricades because some protestors planned to use them as shields in a sit-down.  Today, my thoughts go to the right-leaning protestors who have shown up at public events adorned with sidearms or assault rifles.  And I wonder, would that have been allowed in the streets of Denver or St. Paul?  Would social justice activists be allowed to parade with firearms when the G-20 comes to Pittsburgh in September?  For moral and practical reasons, environmentalists and economic justice activists are not going to sport sidearms as they block traffic or drop banners.  

While the Right is busy flaunting their Second Amendment rights, it seems the Left is still fighting for their First.

Napolitano Embraces Her Inner Cheney

Last week, Janet Napolitano reaffirmed America's unfocused approach to domestic intelligence and counterterrorism in her July 29, 2009 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.  The Secretary of Homeland Security embraced the word "terror," a word missing from her February address to Congress, as the Right was quick to point out.

Is this a sign of the Right's tightening grip on the Obama administration in national security? Napolitano called for "new thinking" and a broader societal response to the threat posed by terrorism, but she merely echoed old Bush policies that increase the chances for misguided investigations that waste resources and chill free expression.  Her vision of mobilizing a massive bureaucracy against a vast multitude of supposed threats, including "radicals" and immigrants is chilling.

Americans continue to be targeted in terror attacks. Just two weeks ago, American hotels were the target of bombings in Jakarta that killed eight people and injured six Americans. Six Americans were among the 164 people killed in the attacks in Mumbai in November of 2008. Three Americans were among the 54 killed in the attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad in September of 2008.

Are foreign attacks now part of the Homeland Security mandate? Caroline Fredrickson of the ACLU once quoted Frederick the Great's warning that "those who seek to defend everything defend nothing." Rather than identify a concise intelligence need to be served, Napolitano painted an exceptionally broad picture of homeland security:

What are the implications for this network world for the Department of Homeland Security? It means that we must continue to take an all-hazards approach to preparedness, meaning we prepare for natural disasters as well as terrorist attacks. We need to comprehend and anticipate an expanding range of threats.

The threat of a nuclear or radiological device is of grave concern, and reducing that threat is a key administration priority. But we must be equally prepared for biological or chemical threats, which are capacities al Qaeda has sought for years.

We've seen greater use of IEDs and suicide bombers in terrorist attacks around the world. And given our responsibilities for enforcing our immigration laws and protecting our ports of entry, we are also keenly aware that illegal immigration is not only a matter of sovereignty but could pose a national security threat as well. The reality that potential terrorists could use a variety of ways to enter the country illegally -- fake documents, visa overstays and even border tunnels -- make this so.

Napolitano acknowledged an "increased presence" of homegrown extremism and called for increased cooperation on local, state and federal levels to thwart any potential attacks. IEDs, cyber attacks, the swine flu, drug cartel violence, tsunamis and hurricanes.  There is nothing that Homeland Security will not try to protect you from.

Now, President Obama has been very forceful about seeing the threat of terrorism in all of its complexity and in bringing all of our resources, not just the federal government, to bear against violent extremism.

Asked whether homegrown terror risks have become a bigger threat than those overseas, Napolitano demurred. "I don't know that you can rank them one or two," she said. "Both exist; they both must be dealt with. They are both things that we are concerned about and they're both things that we want Americans to be prepared about."

The federal government has built an enormous bureaucracy -- DHS itself employees 225,000 people in 22 separate agencies -- to carry out this broad mission.(1) DHS is using "fusion centers," information-sharing, and agency integration to leverage "force multipliers" to tap into the 718,000 state and local police officers employed in America.

As Arizona governor, I took a lead role in creating our state's first law enforcement fusion center. Now, in a typical fusion center, an FBI agent might be sitting next to a state highway patrol officer; who might be sitting next to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agent; who might be next to an agent from the DEA or from the tribal police. They don't merely share space. They share databases and techniques. They share ideas and experiences. They break down barriers and build networks.

This ensures that local law enforcement has better information necessary to protect our people, our neighborhoods, our infrastructure. Fusion centers are and will be a critical part of our nation's homeland security capabilities. I intend to make them a top priority for this department to support them, build them, improve them and work with them.

We've now moved three dozen intelligence analysts out to the field. In other words, as we build the fusion centers, we need to move analytic capacity from the Beltway to the country. So let's -- how this is used. And I'll take it out of the terrorism context for just a moment. That if a law enforcement agency reports an increase in drug seizures of a particular type, that is a data point. That's a piece of intelligence. But a whole range of agencies working together in a particular fusion center can analyze that trend to understand what it means, how it will affect particular neighborhoods, and whether it foretells something even larger on the horizon.

In addition to the 70 current fusion center sites, the department will be collaborating with the Department of Justice and the FBI in more than 100 joint terrorism task forces across the country as well. So you see how we're creating the network -- individuals, private sector, now among fusion centers and the law enforcement community.

The quality of information being fed into fusion centers is itself suspect, and Napolitano's words give little comfort to civil liberties watchdogs. Napolitano said,

Now DHS monitors and shares information about potential homegrown threats as well. These can be individuals, radicals -- radicalized by events abroad, or lone-wolf attacks.

This statement is a call for open hunting on political dissent.  Remarkably, the Associated Press did not report it in stories about the speech.  It is also curious how neither Fox News nor the Tea Party crowd jumped on Napolitano for making this statement, considering the uproar surrounding the Spring 2009 Homeland Security reports about rightwing extremism. Presumably, "radicals" are not deserving of the same free speech protections.

Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates explain how the focus on "radicals" threatens civil liberties:

The First Amendment protects the free flow of ideas -- even those that we find reprehensible. The proper role for law enforcement is to pursue crime, not police the boundaries of "radical" dissent. There is a clear government role for officials and politician who are not directly involved in criminal investigations to decry dualism, scapegoating, demonisation and conspiracism -- the tools of fear. And those of us who promot human rights and civil society also must play a role; and we need to use precise language that exposes the dynamics of societal oppression. We should not ask law enforcement agencies to step into this sphere of civil society unless there is evidence of criminal intent or action.(2)

Mike German, a former FBI special agent, reacted to Napolitano's comments in the Washington Independent, noting: "It’s too easy to pollute the information bloodstream of the fusion centers. That’s what we’ve seen out of the fusion centers: erroneous, misleading information," said German. "There’s a lack of accountability" at the centers that enables poor intelligence to "pollute the entire system that local, state and federal law enforcement is relying on. If that system becomes polluted it’s no longer effective," and the chances for civil liberties abuses are "greatly expanded."

Napolitano also endorsed citizen reporting of ill-defined "suspicious" non-criminal behavior. She said Americans can always be on the lookout for unusual occurrences, like "someone taking photographs of a piece of critical infrastructure" or an unattended package left on a platform, and to report them to authorities. "Those are the kinds of very simple things that can be done," she said. "Now we're not asking people to spy on their neighbors or do any of that sort of thing. There's a balance to be struck, but it's a careful balance and it's one that in the end, I think will make us safer." Later on Fox News, Napolitano explained that photographing critical infrastructure (windmills, power lines, power plants, ports, bridges) could be suspicious. Statements like this have led to police harassment of Arab-Americans on vacation, professional photographers, and activists, but no terrorists.

After the speech, Mallika Dutt of human rights group Breakthrough asked Napolitano:

We've got a broken immigration system, yet DHS has expanded 287(g). Secure Communities is doing anything but making people secure. Racial profiling continues to be a very big problem in this country. And in your remarks around protecting against terrorism, we didn't hear very much about protections against racial profiling or the restoration of due process and fairness into systems that actually protect individual citizens, permanent residents and other people who live in the United States.

Napolitano did not address the 287(g) program, due process, or racial profiling, but did take the opportunity to defend "Secure Communities," saying:

Secure communities, what that is, is a way to have the immigration database right in prisons and the like and to train correction officers on how to use them properly, so that as people finish their sentences, the deportation process, the removal process, can be done smoothly.

I started this, when I was the governor of Arizona, out of the Arizona prison system. And it's a very effective way, as a force multiplier, to really make sure that those types of immigrants that have already broken our criminal laws, and these are criminal laws in addition to immigration laws, go into the removal process. You may disagree with that as an enforcement strategy. I think it's the right way to target, a strong enforcement strategy.

During his inaugural speech, Obama rejected the "false choice" between safety and liberty.  His executive appointees appear reluctant to reinforce the latter.

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1. At a time when mass transit agencies across the country are facing cuts in service due to strained budgets, $78 million in Homeland Security money will add 240 more transit police offices to this mix in 2009.


2. Chip Berlet, "Violence and Public Policy," submitted for publication to the journal Criminology & Public Policy (2009).

Army Civilian Employee Spied on Peace Activists

The discovery this month that anarchist "John Jacob," an activist in anti-militarist organizing in the Pacific Northwest, is really civilian Army intelligence analyst John Towery II, shows that those concerned about civil liberties must remain vigilant in the Obama era. The gathering of domestic intelligence by Army agents highlights real dangers for civil liberties.

Portland Indymedia reports that Towery, based out of the Fort Lewis Force Protection Fusion Cell, infiltrated the Washington state group Port Militarization Resistance from September 2007 through July 21, 2009 -- the day that activists exposed him at an Olympia, Washington City Council meeting. According to National Lawyers Guild human rights lawyer Larry Hildes, activists suspected the presence of a government mole after court documents showed that Olympia Police ordered pre-emptive arrests at a demonstration based upon information received from Army employees attending the group's meetings.

Port Militarization Resistance is an organization that uses public education, lobbying, and nonviolent civil disobedience to end the community's participation in the United States' occupation of Iraq by stopping the military's use of the civilian Port of Olympia. Activists also organize at the Port of Tacoma, Washington, to oppose shipments of military equipment to Iraq and Afghanistan.

"John Jacob" administered the email listserv for Port Military Resistance. Mr. Towery attended meetings of the group and reported on its activities to the Fort Lewis Force Protection Fusion Cell. The Fusion Cell coordinates local, state, and federal law enforcement, as well as military police and intelligence analysts. The Fusion Center's dynamic increases the potential for information covertly gathered by the Army to be shared over a variety of intelligence networks, and even with private industry.

By actually administering this group's listserv, the Army's agent did not simply gain access to public meetings. He gained access to private correspondences, membership lists, email addresses, and internal discussions. This "intelligence" was clearly shared with other agencies attached to the base Fusion Cell. Further, it was used to sanction members of the organization with pre-emptive arrests during at least one political action. Indymedia reports,

By his own admission, John Towery spent the past two years spying on anarchists, Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans, SDSers and anti-war activists in Tacoma, Olympia and the Pacific Northwest. He admitted that he reported to an intelligence network that included county sheriffs from Pierce, Thurston and other WA counties, municipal police agencies from Tacoma, Olympia, Seattle and elsewhere, WA State Police, the US Army, FBI, Homeland Security, Joint Terrorism Task Force, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency among other agencies.

This episode is reminiscent of Department of Defense domestic surveillance programs of the 1960s -- which were halted after congressional investigations into civil liberties abuses.  In February 1970, the ACLU filed a class action suit seeking an end to extensive political surveillance program that the Army developed during the 1960s and the destruction of the spy files. In Laird v. Tatum, the District of Columbia Circuit ordered discovery and proof as to the nature and scope of the Army's domestic intelligence system and its effect on dissent, but the Supreme Court ultimately reversed them. In Laird, the Circuit court opinion stated,

It is highly important for the safety of the country that to the extent consonant with the performance of the military's mission a separation of sensitive information and military power be maintained, as a separation of match and powder. . . . [T]o permit the military to exercise a totally unrestricted investigative function in regard to civilians, divorced from the normal restrictions of legal process and the courts, and necessarily coupling sensitive information with military power, could create a dangerous situation in the Republic.(1)

In ruling with the Army, the Supreme Court's majority said that the existence of intelligence files did not make out a claim of "specific present objective harm or the threat of specific future harm" because the Army had merely been gathering public information.(2)  Today's case in Olympia surely goes further (as did most of the COINTELPRO programs of the '60s).  In today's age of government-mandated information sharing, the threat of harm from the collection and dissemination of this information is great.

According to Constitutional scholar Seth Kreimer, in any bureaucracy, "you manage what you measure."(3) A list of political opponents prefigures the danger of political purges. The accumulation of blacklists of potential agitators is well adapted to the use of extralegal mechanisms to suppress dissenters through low visibility retaliation like selective prosecution or ISA audits. Kreimer quotes Justice Jackson's observation,

I cannot say that our country could have no central police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot be totalitarian without a centralized national police . . . [A national police] will have enough on enough people, even if it does not elect to prosecute them, so that it will fin no opposition to its policies.(4)

In the push to generate "intelligence fusion" and information sharing among all levels of law enforcement, government officials have neglected to limit agencies' ability to amass information about political activities of citizens.  

The function of political surveillance is to suppress any challenges to the hegemony of the multinational/governmental elite.  In Port Olympia, armed forces who claim to fight for democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan are using repressive surveillance to directly hinder democratic action at home.

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1. Tatum v. Laird, 444 F.2d 947, 958 (D.C. Cir. 1971), rev'd 408 U.S. 1 (1971).

2. Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. 1, 14 (1971).

3. Seth Kreimer, "Watching the Watchers: Surveillance, Transparency, and Political Freedom in the War on Terror," 7 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 133 (2004).

4. Robert H. Jackson, The Supreme Court in the American System of Government 70-71 (1955).

Can Extreme Surveillance Keep Us Safe?

Eridiana Rodriguez vanished during her shift cleaning the office building at 2 Rector Street in Lower Manhattan's Financial District on Tuesday night, July 7. After four days, one hundred police scoured the building and discovered the body of this mother of three the following Saturday, bound with tape and stuffed into an air duct on the 12th floor, which was under construction and had restricted access.

Liberty Beat's guest contributor, Amanda Masters Ehrenberg, who works in this heavily-monitored NYC district, reflects on the meaning of surveillance and the overwhelming presence of armed guards in her city. Amanda originally posted these comments to the listserv of the National Police Accountability Project, a project of the National Lawyers Guild, as she is a member of the New York City Policing Roundtable.

Police surveillance around the office where I now work is intense.

We're by the WTC site and the stock exchange and every day there are huge police vehicles, officers strapping large rifles convening along the streets, some streets closed to cars, and what appear to be cameras atop intersections, etc. I grew up on military bases but have never been around so much visible weaponry so consistently, and its quite a depressing little walk from the subway stop.

Walking to the building today looking up at cameras and passing the usual officers, I could not help but think about about the brazen murder of Eridania Rodriguez, a worker in the building next door to us at 2 Rector Street.

Media describes the building as a place where "cameras cover every exit. Guards staff the lobby 24 hours a day. Visitors are photographed before they are allowed in. The streets outside are patrolled by a high concentration of police officers. Nearly every block in Lower Manhattan is covered by security video."

Are we really to believe that this extreme surveillance protects us from terrorists when actually it doesn't even protect us from regular old violent crime?

Ostensibly, the murderer entered and exited this building, rode the elevator, and traveled a hallway with her corpse to heft her into the vent, and no one saw it, no one recorded it. It happened at a spot we are supposed to presume to be about as secure as we've got in NYC. I don't hear anyone in the media making the link between the futility of all these cameras and surveillance and the idea that the cost to our liberty (and psyches) turning wall street into a virtually militarized zone may not be worth it.

Connecticut State Police Keep Tabs on Greens

Connecticut state troopers' surveillance of Green Party activists serves as the latest warning of whether we should allow government to conduct political intelligence and engage in "preventive" policing. A May 31, 2009 article in the Hartford Courant describes how political intelligence likely led to the pre-emptive arrest of the Greens' campaign director at a public event for merely photographing the incumbent Governor.

When Green Party gubernatorial campaign director Ken Krayeske was arrested by Hartford Police at a parade on January 3, 2007, he did not know that the state police Central Criminal Intelligence Unit had identified him as a "potential threat" to incumbent Governor M. Jodi Rell. Krayeske was arrested and held for twelve hours - long enough to miss the parade, and miss the opportunity to make political speech. Krayeske sued the city for his wrongful arrest, requesting that municipal police be ordered not to compile or maintain lists of political activists. According to recent disclosures, it was the state police who kept an eye on Krayeske and other Greens due to past "disruptive behavior" and Krayeske's 2004 conviction for civil disobedience at the Groton submarine base.

State police apparently conducted a surveillance operation to watch Green Party supporters outsite a gubernatorial debate at Channel 30 on October 18, 2006. The criminal intelligence unit's surveillance "was a police operation above and beyond the normal protection provided to Rell by her regular state police security detail," according to the Courant.

What did Krayeske and the Greens do to warrant such attention? Police say that Rell displayed "disruptive behavior" toward Rell at an Apple Festival on October 14, 2006 where he shouted at her for refusing to debate Green candidate Thornton. Police also fault Krayeske's internet blog wherein he wrote about a possible protest at the January 3rd inaugural ball, noting that he felt "no need to make nice." Wow, if only the Obama detractors were so kind in their writings. Since when did "no need to make nice" amount to threatening language?

Such behavior "merited monitoring him as one who might break the law." What happens when police label and target individuals as "one who might break the law"? Apparently, other officers take notice. So when Krayeske stood on a median to snap photos of Rell at a parade, a state police officer noticed him, recognized him, and said a pleasant "Good Morning." The state police officer saw no reason to arrest Mr. Krayeske and continued along the street. But Hartford Police ushered Mr. Krayeske away and arrested him. Prosecutors dismissed the charges.

Sounds like law enforcement in the Constitution State need a lesson in free speech.

FBI Secret Surveillance and Secret Policies

If history is any guide, lax oversight and secrecy are a recipe for abusive political intelligence gathering by the FBI. Pervasive official secrecy continues to threaten our national values under the Obama administration, in spite of a declared willingness to increase transparency. In a recent article by the new director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Shahid Buttar discusses the struggle to shed sunlight on electronic surveillance and the FBI's official policies on domestic spying.

The FBI is deterring oversight and public scrutiny of its Domestic Investigative Operational Guidelines (DIOGs) issued last December.  Even though the FBI briefed Congressional leaders on these guidelines, they remain unknown to the world and Congress hasn't had the opportunity to conduct full oversight.  Congress faced the same roadblocks in trying to oversee and amend the Justice Department's "Mukasey Guidelines" on domestic investigations issued last fall.  Now, the FBI is dragging its feet on public demands to see the DIOGs, which are internal policies that interpret those guidelines.

Congressional oversight is key to ensuring public debate and subjecting domestic intelligence to the rule of law. Through its People's Campaign for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee is also collecting signatures to demand accountability for torture - another area in which the Rule of Law should be paramount.