[Infowarrior] - Localities Operate Intelligence Centers To Pool Terror Data

[Richard Forno]

Localities Operate Intelligence Centers To Pool Terror Data
'Fusion' Facilities Raise Privacy Worries As Wide Range of Information Is
Collected
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/30/AR2006123000
238_pf.html

By Mary Beth Sheridan and Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 31, 2006; A03

Frustrated by poor federal cooperation, U.S. states and cities are building
their own network of intelligence centers led by police to help detect and
disrupt terrorist plots.

The new "fusion centers" are now operating in 37 states, including Virginia
and Maryland, and another covers the Washington area, according to the
Department of Homeland Security. The centers, which have received $380
million in federal support since the 2001 terrorist attacks, pool and
analyze information from local, state and federal law enforcement officials.

The emerging "network of networks" marks a new era of opportunity for law
enforcement, according to U.S. officials and homeland security experts.
Police are hungry for federal intelligence in an age of homegrown terrorism
and more sophisticated crime. For their part, federal law enforcement
officials could benefit from a potential army of tipsters -- the 700,000
local and state police officers across the country, as well as private
security guards and others being courted by the centers.

But the emerging model of "intelligence-led policing" faces risks on all
sides. The centers are popping up with little federal leadership and
training, raising fears of overzealousness such as that associated with
police "red squads" that spied on civil rights and peace activists decades
ago. The centers also face practical obstacles that could limit their
effectiveness, including a shortage of money, skilled analysts, and proven
relationships with the FBI and Homeland Security.

Still, the centers are emerging as a key element in a sometimes chaotic new
domestic intelligence infrastructure, which also includes homeland security
units in local police forces and 103 FBI-led terrorism task forces, triple
the number that existed before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Fusion centers are becoming "part of the landscape for local government,"
said the incoming D.C. police chief, Cathy Lanier. But she warned that
police are navigating a new patchwork of state and federal privacy laws that
govern the sharing, collection and storage of information. "We're in a very
precarious position right now," she said. "If we lose community support,
that is going to be a big deal for local law enforcement."

Traditionally, police had little to do with counterterrorism. But after the
2001 attacks, it became obvious that al-Qaeda members had been preparing not
only in far-off Afghan training camps but also in places such as a Gold's
Gym in Greenbelt and flight schools in Florida. An unwitting Maryland state
trooper stopped one of the future hijackers for speeding on Interstate 95.

"Police officers, deputies and troopers . . . they're going to be the ones
that encounter a lot of these [suspicious] things on the road," said
Virginia State Police Sgt. Lee Miller, who oversees the state's year-old
fusion center in Richmond. "What we're trying to do is provide them the
information they need to identify these different things."

The fusion centers range from small conference facilities to high-tech nerve
centers with expensive communications networks. Some do investigations,
while others focus on information-sharing -- passing tips to the FBI and
scanning federal intelligence for developments of interest to local
departments. Some have explored the use of controversial data-mining
software in keeping with their respective state laws.

Maryland's three-year-old fusion center outside Baltimore offers a glimpse
of the new intelligence world. Hidden behind a bolted door with no nameplate
in a quiet office park, the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center houses
members of 23 local, state and federal agencies.

Harvey Eisenberg, an assistant U.S. attorney who helps oversee the center,
said police and other government employees are being trained to phone its
24-hour "watch section" when they spot suspicious activity. Calls to the
terrorism hotline advertised on the Capital Beltway (800-492-TIPS) are also
answered by officers in the watch section.

"You need to educate cops, firefighters, health officials, transportation
officials, sanitation workers, to understand the nature of the threat,"
Eisenberg said. "And not to become super-spies. . . . Constitutionally, they
see something, they can report it."

Officials say an incident on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in 2004 shows the
center's effectiveness. State transportation police stopped an SUV after a
veiled passenger was seen videotaping the bridge in a suspicious manner. The
officers called the fusion center, which discovered that the driver was an
unindicted co-conspirator in a Chicago case involving Hamas, a
U.S.-designated terrorist group.

Eisenberg contacted a prosecutor in Chicago, who quickly obtained an arrest
warrant for the driver as a material witness in the Hamas case.

"The 9/11 commission's major criticism was that people didn't talk to each
other," said Dennis R. Schrader, Maryland's director of homeland security.
"Well, this is an example of how you had state, local and federal all
working together. . . . It's really pretty unbelievable."

To some, though, the incident raised questions about what constitutes
dangerous behavior.

The driver, Ismail Elbarasse, a U.S. citizen of Palestinian origin living in
Annandale, was quickly released on bond, and the material-witness warrant
eventually expired. He was not charged with a crime. His family said the
veiled woman, Elbarasse's wife, was simply taping the bay while returning
from the beach.

"It was regarded in the community as just a case of overreaction to seeing
somebody in a head scarf videotaping," said Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations.

Civil liberties advocates worry that the fledgling fusion centers could
stray into monitoring people engaged in lawful activities, as some members
of new police homeland security units have done. A Georgia homeland security
officer, for example, was discovered photographing a protest by vegans at a
HoneyBaked Ham store in 2003. Privacy advocates are also concerned about the
vast amount of information some fusion centers collect -- and the sometimes
vague limits on its use and storage.

"In Phoenix, we're talking about something like 250,000 police reports a
year: names, addresses, contact information, business cards, tickets, all
the kinds of information that is gathered and that can be of tremendous
value at a national analytical level," said John L. Buchanan, Phoenix
assistant police chief. He added, however, that "we've really got to be
cognizant of the risk" of abuse.

"Fusion center" is a military coinage embraced by civilian homeland security
authorities after Sept. 11, 2001. But turf fights involving the FBI, the
Department of Homeland Security and national intelligence agencies, as well
as local jurisdictions, have delayed the centers' development two years
after Congress passed laws to change intelligence.

To streamline the unwieldy domestic intelligence structure, White House
homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend laid out a new U.S. road
map for intelligence collection on Nov. 27. It urges that fusion centers be
incorporated in a national Information Sharing Environment (ISE).

To support the centers' growing role, and to address complaints from states
that they cannot pay for them alone, the White House is debating whether to
increase funding for them in 2008 and to lift a ban on paying for personnel.

Federal officials emphasize that the centers will be led from the grass
roots. Charles E. Allen, chief intelligence officer for the Homeland
Security Department, said the centers will be "all hazards, all crime, all
threats," targeted not just at terrorism but also at transnational gangs,
immigrant smuggling and other threats.

Thomas E. McNamara, ISE manager under the director of national intelligence,
said the centers will be state-driven and "primarily analytical."

Amid such assurances, it remains unclear just how much fusing of information
is going on day to day.

Existing efforts are insufficient and to blame for "mixed and at times
competing messages" from U.S. officials and limited contributions from state
and local leaders, Townsend wrote.

For example, New York City leaders warned of "a specific threat" to the
city's transit systems in October 2005, which federal officials
simultaneously deemed "noncredible." Meanwhile, U.S. officials say
information flowing from local and state agencies is often of limited use.

An April report by the National Governors Association found that
dissatisfaction with federal information-sharing was growing among state
homeland security directors, with 60 percent unhappy about the specificity
of intelligence. In congressional hearings, state officials have complained
about a lack of federal security clearances and about overlapping, outdated
intelligence databases.

In response, U.S. officials are vowing to speed background checks and to
send Homeland Security intelligence officers to work at 18 state and local
fusion centers in 2007 and 35 by 2008.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), incoming chairman of the House Homeland
Security Committee, would go further. He proposed a new law enforcement
assistance program to make intelligence-led policing the 21st-century
version of community-oriented policing, into which the federal government
has poured $11.3 billion since 1994 to pay for 120,000 local officers.

"The federal government is not reaching out well enough to the intelligence
needs of the cop on the beat," Thompson said. "We shouldn't need more blood
spilled before we take action necessary to make Americans safer."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.