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<h2><b>The Advent of the Surveillance
Society</b></h2><font size=3>Thursday 8 September 2011 <br>
by: Nancy Murray and Kade Crockford, Truthout and ACLU Massachusetts |
Special Feature <br>
<a href="http://www.truth-out.org/advent-surveillance-society/1314207756">
http://www.truth-out.org/advent-surveillance-society/1314207756</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<i><a href="http://www.surveillanceinthehomeland.org/">Ten Years Later:
Surveillance in the "Homeland"</a> is a collaborative project
with Truthout and ACLU Massachusetts.<br><br>
</i>Surveillance now is everyone's business, as the line between
intelligence-gathering and crimefighting rapidly fades and the public is
conditioned to play its part. <br><br>
The work of Deputy Police Chief Michael Downing of the Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD) exemplifies the new surveillance paradigm. The
head of the
<a href="http://www.lapdonline.org/inside_the_lapd/content_basic_view/6502">
750-strong counterterrorism force </a>within the LAPD, he is on the hunt
for "people who follow al-Qaeda's goals and objectives and mission
and ideology." He says his officers collect intelligence and
practice the "essence of community policing" by reaching out to
Muslims and asking them to "weed out" the
"hard-<a href="http://truthout.org/sites/default/files/Executive%20Summary_OIG%20Report%285%29.pdf">
core</a> radicals."<br><br>
He adds that he is pleased that many Muslims have adopted the LAPD's
<a href="http://lapdonline.org/iwatchla">iWatch </a>program and are
prepared, along with the general public, to call in tips about suspicious
activity. With "violent Islamists" as his main target, Chief
Downing is also keeping track of "black separatists, white
supremacist/sovereign citizen extremists and animal rights
terrorists." If threats materialize, he can draw upon
the<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/11/la-police-use-intel-networks-against-terror/print/">
LAPD's "amazing" backup capacity</a> - SWAT units,
direct-action teams, air support, counterassault teams and squads that
specialize in disrupting vehicle bombs.<br><br>
Here we see several of the components of the new surveillance society. A
<a href="http://www.privacysos.org/police_state">militarized police force
</a>no longer leaves intelligence work to federal authorities. It seeks
out information about anything that can be connected to
"suspicious" activity and is keeping track of certain
individuals and groups whether or not there is evidence that they are
engaging in criminal activity. Police are expected to chase down
unsubstantiated tips from the public, and not just to pursue evidence of
wrongdoing. A new notion of "community policing" has emerged,
where monitoring communities - with all the trust issues that this
implies - has taken the place of winning community support by being
accountable to residents and solving crimes.<br><br>
The LAPD is one of some 3,984 federal, state and local agencies now
collecting information about "suspicious activity" that could
be related to terrorism. The Washington Post's
<a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/monitoring-america/1/">
"Top Secret America" series</a> states that 854,000 people now
hold "top-secret" security clearance. We estimate that's about
one for every 215 working-age Americans. An
<a href="http://www.hstoday.us/focused-topics/information-technology/single-article-page/an-end-to-infosharing/55915db66128bc355cd71ca0eeb13a6a.html">
additional 3 million</a> people reportedly hold "secret"
security clearance.<br><br>
The federal government spends more annually on civilian and military
intelligence than the rest of the world put together - $80 billion is a
conservative figure,
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/28/AR2010102807284.html">
according to the October 28, 2010, Post</a>. This is in addition to the
$42-plus billion allocated to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
and the spending on intelligence activities by the LAPD and other state
and local police forces. The homeland security industry is flourishing,
with lucrative contracts being awarded to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon,
Boeing, Northrop Grumman and other major defense contractors. <br><br>
What exactly is being built with these funds? <br><br>
<b>The "Information Sharing Environment"<br><br>
</b>Essentially, the "total information awareness" assumption
that the nation can be made safe by applying advanced technology to
massive databases has been married to the call for a "unity of
effort in sharing information" issued by the
<a href="http://www.9-11commission.gov/">bipartisan 9/11 National
Commission</a>. The commissioners had recommended a fundamental change in
how the nation's 16 intelligence agencies carried out their business.
They urged that the "need to know" culture be replaced with a
"need to share" imperative, with information being transmitted
horizontally among agencies, not just vertically within agencies. They
further recommended that the FBI be equipped to assume prime
responsibility for domestic intelligence-gathering, that it incorporate a
"specialized and integrated national security workforce," and
that it form collaborative relationships with state and local police for
this purpose. <br><br>
To construct a new domestic surveillance network, the
<a href="http://www.nctc.gov/docs/irtpa.pdf">Intelligence Reform and
Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004</a> mandated the creation of
an<a href="http://www.ise.gov/"> Information Sharing Environment
(ISE)</a> under the director of national intelligence. Defined as
"an interrelated set of policies, processes and systems," ISE
was intended to facilitate the sharing of terrorism-related information
with stakeholders at all levels of government and the private
sector. Eventually, foreign governments are supposed to be brought
into the ISE loop. The ISE requires the standardization of information
systems and technology to provide access to the burgeoning number of
databases that serve as its connective tissue, the enlistment of mission
partners across federal, state, local, and tribal agencies and the
private sector to keep the databases supplied with the information that
is its lifeblood, and the use of "analysts, operators and
investigators" from "law enforcement, public safety, homeland
security, intelligence, defense and foreign affairs" to extract,
analyze and disseminate timely intelligence.<br><br>
<b>Fusion Centers and Suspicious Activity Reports<br><br>
</b>The nerve centers of the ISE are the nation's 72 regional and state
fusion centers, which were in part a response to the FBI's reluctance to
share threat information with state and local law enforcement because of
turf and security clearance issues. With considerable variation in what
they do and how they do it, fusion centers were established over the past
seven years with DHS funding to "fuse" and analyze information
from a wide variety of sources and databases and facilitate
information-sharing among themselves through the FBI's eGuardian
database. The secretive fusion centers represent
a<a href="http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/privacy/fusioncenter_20071212.pdf">
significant departure </a>from traditional law enforcement objectives and
methods, with few legal limits on what they can and cannot do, little
respect for long-established jurisdictional boundaries between local,
state, federal, military and private entities and a notable absence of
accountability mechanisms. Given the scarcity of domestic terrorism
plots, it is not surprising that most fusion centers almost immediately
changed the focus of their data collection from fighting terrorism to a
broad "all crimes, all hazards" mission. Many now use federal
counterterrorism funds to collect, store and share data that has little
or no relation to terrorism and, often, no relation to actual
crimes.<br><br>
According to DHS head Janet Napolitano, along with fusion centers, the
<a href="http://nsi.ncirc.gov/">Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting
Initiative</a> serves as the "heart" of the government's effort
to keep Americans safe from "homegrown terrorism." The idea
behind the initiative is to collect as much data about anything
"suspicious" that just may (or may not) be related to criminal
activity. Or, to quote the government's own alarmingly broad definition:
a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) is "official documentation of
observed behavior that may be indicative of intelligence gathering, or
preoperational planning related to terrorism, criminal, or other illicit
intention."<br><br>
SARS programs, piloted by the LAPD, Boston and a handful of other cities,
vary from place to place and are often in competition with one another
for federal dollars. Today some 800,000 state and local law enforcement
officers are
encouraged<a href="http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/matrix/reports/sar_initiative/sar-full-report.pdf">
to file SARs</a> on even the most common everyday behaviors, such as
looking through binoculars, taking pictures of buildings, taking notes in
public and espousing "radical" beliefs.<br><br>
The
<a href="http://www.ise.gov/docs/sar/NSI_CONOPS_Version_1_FINAL_2008-12-11_r5.pdf">
ISE program manager recommended</a> that SARs are reviewed within the
police department before being sent to a fusion center for further review
by an intelligence analyst. If it "meets SAR criteria," it is
then entered into the ISE for wide distribution and "fusion with
other intelligence information." But a January 2010
<a href="http://www.4shared.com/document/Ew1KSF_Z/NSI_EE.html">
evaluation</a> of the ISE and National SAR Reporting Initiative has shown
little uniformity in how SARs are being collected, vetted and shared, and
how much personably identifiable information is being aggregated and
disseminated through the fusion center network and sent to the FBI’s
<a href="http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2008/september/eguardian_091908">
eGUardian system</a>, which is now serving as "an ISE/SAR shared
space." In an effort to address criticisms voiced by civil liberties
groups, ISE adopted a policy requiring that only behavior indicating some
kind of connection to criminal activity or terrorism should be shared
among federal intelligence agencies. But this civil rights protection
does not apply to sharing by state and regional fusion centers.<br><br>
<b>A New Policing Paradigm <br><br>
</b>In addition to writing up SARS, police departments, often working
directly with the FBI through its multi-agency Joint Terrorism Task
Forces (JTTFs), sift "tips and leads" provided in field
reports, through public tip lines, by private entities, by confidential
and anonymous sources, or culled from media sources. Time that used to be
spent investigating reasonable suspicion of criminal activity is now
allocated to assessing randomly collected information to decide whether
it is credible enough to be deposited in the Information Sharing
Environment (ISE) and sent to the FBI’s eGuardian database for
preliminary analysis before being sent to fusion centers for further
analysis and wide distribution.<br><br>
When local police work with the FBI in JTTFs, they become federal
officers who are no longer under the supervision of and accountable to
their local departments and communities, and instead must act in
conformity with
the<a href="http://www.privacysos.org/degraded_standards"> FBI's
guidelines </a>on domestic investigations - regulations that are now so
loose that they allow agents to conduct "assessments" involving
monitoring of meetings and people, infiltration of groups, and personal
interviews with no suspicion of wrongdoing - some
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/27fbi.html?_r=1">11,667
assessments</a> were conducted just in the four-month period beginning in
December 2009, with only a fraction leading to full investigations. And
when local police participate with fusion centers in information
collection and the building of personal files about activities that can
be wholly innocent and may be constitutionally protected, they are
integrated into a domestic surveillance network that is national in
scope, beyond accountability, and far removed from community policing and
public trust.<br><br>
In the process, the line between traditional crimefighting and terrorism
detection has been erased and something new has been born: a concept of
policing that is no longer primarily reactive and focused on solving
crimes or on collecting concrete evidence that a crime might be about to
be committed. In
<a href="http://www.privacysos.org/predictive">"predictive
policing," </a>local police officers serve as a resource for
gathering information on a range of potential threats and situations on
the assumption that criminal activity can be
stopped<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2282252/"> before it
develops</a>. They are trained to use
<a href="http://www.privacysos.org/technologies_of_control">advanced
technologies</a> and tools, including powerful surveillance cameras
provided through DHS grants, to monitor broad sections of the population,
looking for indicators of future crimes before they are committed.
<br><br>
When the net is cast so wide, everything and anything begins to look like
"terrorism-related activity," forcing police officers to waste
time checking out dead-end tips. It is not surprising that
<a href="http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/fusion-center-declares-nation-s-oldest-universities-possible-terrorist-threat">
leaks</a> from fusion centers have revealed that files compiled on
individuals and groups are full of inaccurate information and focus on
activities that may be both entirely innocent and constitutionally
protected.<br><br>
Constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein, a former associate deputy attorney
general in the Reagan
administration,<a href="http://www.securitymanagement.com/news/fusion-centers-should-be-dismantled-expert-says-005461">
told Congress</a> in 2009 that fusion centers and SARs were worthy of
the Soviet Union's KGB and East Germany's Stasi, and should be abandoned:
"To an intelligence agent, informant, or law enforcement officer,
everything unconventional or unorthodox looks like at least a
pre-embryonic terrorist danger."<br><br>
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