[Infowarrior] - Surveillance Effort Draws Civil Liberties Concern

[Richard Forno]

April 29, 2009
Surveillance Effort Draws Civil Liberties Concern
By ERIC SCHMITT

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/us/29surveil.html?pagewanted=print

LOS ANGELES — A growing number of big-city police departments and  
other law enforcement agencies across the country are embracing a new  
system to report suspicious activities that officials say could  
uncover terrorism plots but that civil liberties groups contend might  
violate individual rights.

Here and in nearly a dozen other cities, including Boston, Chicago and  
Miami, officers are filling out terror tip sheets if they run across  
activities in their routines that seem out of place, like someone  
buying police or firefighter uniforms, taking pictures of a power  
plant or espousing extremist views.

Ultimately, state and federal officials intend to have a nationwide  
reporting system in place by 2014, using a standardized system of  
codes for suspicious behaviors. It is the most ambitious effort since  
the Sept. 11 attacks to put in place a network of databases to comb  
for clues that might foretell acts of terrorism.

But the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups warn  
that the program pioneered by the Los Angeles Police Department raises  
serious privacy and civil liberties concerns.

“The behaviors identified by L.A.P.D. are so commonplace and ordinary  
that the monitoring or reporting of them is scarcely any less absurd,”  
the A.C.L.U. said in a report last July.

“This overbroad reporting authority,” the report adds, “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.”

Muslim-American groups here also view the program with suspicion,  
especially after the police department’s counterterrorism and criminal  
intelligence bureau proposed in November 2007 to create a map  
detailing the Muslim communities in the city, ostensibly as a step  
toward thwarting radicalization. Muslim leaders said the idea amounted  
to racial or religious profiling, and it was dropped.

Cmdr. Joan T. McNamara, assistant commander of the counterterrorism  
bureau, said her department was vetting information from the some  
1,500 reports so far in the year-old program. Commander McNamara said  
in an interview that police officers, intelligence analysts and top  
commanders were training in what kind of suspicious behavior to look  
for, based on a 65-item checklist that she and her staff created, as  
well as in privacy and civil liberties issues.

The Los Angeles program has not foiled any terrorism plots, said  
Commander McNamara and Lt. Robert Fox, who runs the department’s  
suspicious reporting program. But they said 67 of the reports had been  
referred to the local Joint Terrorism Task Force, headed by the  
Federal Bureau of Investigation.

About 20 reports have led to arrests in cases involving explosives,  
weapons, bomb threats and organized crime, they said, but they  
declined to give details because the cases are under investigation.

“We’re able to connect the dots like we were never able to before,”  
said Commander McNamara, a 26-year veteran and highly decorated former  
narcotics officer.

The approach is based on experience showing that terrorists typically  
surveil their targets before an attack, conducting dry runs of their  
operations to note guard schedules, to gauge how emergency personnel  
react to false alarms or abandoned packages and to seek out security  
weaknesses.

Some programs are in their infancy, but senior police officers in  
other cities said a searchable network of standardized databases could  
help with reporting and analyzing suspicious behavior possibly linked  
to terrorism that might previously have fallen through the cracks.

“This is the piece of the whole puzzle that’s been missing,” said Earl  
O. Perkins, a deputy superintendent with the Boston Police Department  
who oversees its intelligence center.

Mr. Perkins said that his department had not detected any terror plots  
in the nine months the program had been operating but that it had led  
to arrests involving credit-card fraud and identify theft, crimes  
associated with terrorism cells in the past.

A branch of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is  
sponsoring the national pilot program that in addition to Boston and  
Los Angeles includes police departments in Chicago, Houston, Las  
Vegas, Miami, Phoenix, Seattle and Washington, as well as state  
intelligence fusion centers in Florida, New York and Virginia. Nearly  
two dozen other cities have expressed interest.

The New York City Police Department has an extensive reporting system  
that works closely with the F.B.I., said Paul J. Browne, a department  
spokesman.

After issuing the report critical of the Los Angeles program, A.C.L.U.  
lawyers have met in recent months with police and federal officials to  
try to work out tougher safeguards on vetting information that goes  
into the reports, police training and privacy and civil liberties  
protections.

“Our concern lies with the investigation of noncriminal, ordinary  
activity,” said Peter Bibring, a staff lawyer with the A.C.L.U. of  
Southern California, who met recently with Los Angeles police  
officials. “It remains to be seen how much of my feedback they take.”

Civil liberties advocates praise the transparency of the police  
efforts in Los Angeles and a few other cities. But they also cite  
problems in places where police or other law enforcement officials  
have overreached — examples they say will multiply if the program to  
report suspicious activity expands.

In September 2007, a 24-year-old Muslim-American journalism student at  
Syracuse University was stopped by a Veterans Affairs police officer  
in New York for taking photographs of flags in front of a V.A.  
building as part of a class assignment. The student was taken into an  
office for questioning, and the images were deleted from her camera  
before she was released.

Also that year, a 54-year-old artist and fine arts professor at the  
University of Washington was stopped by Washington State police for  
taking photographs of electrical power lines as part of an art  
project. The professor was searched, handcuffed and placed in the back  
of a police car for almost half an hour before being released.

Police officials acknowledge that problems need to be worked out.

“We want police officers to be aware of criminal activities with nexus  
to terrorism, but we don’t want them stopping everyone who takes a  
picture of the Golden Gate Bridge,” said Tom Frazier, a former  
Baltimore police commissioner who is executive director of the Major  
Cities Chiefs Association, which represents the nation’s 56 largest  
police departments.

In Los Angeles, Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing, head of the police  
counterterrorism bureau, said the program should give law enforcement  
officials more warning to help avert an attack.

“We should be able to see something coming, harden the target and  
deploy resources to it,” Chief Downing said.