[Infowarrior] - Spies Among Us

[Richard Forno]

Spies Among Us
Despite a troubled history, police across the nation are keeping tabs on
ordinary Americans

By David E. Kaplan

5/8/06

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."

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