[Ppnews] Monitoring America
Political Prisoner News
ppnews at freedomarchives.org
Mon Dec 20 12:23:31 EST 2010
Monitoring America
Dana Priest and William Arkin
Monday, December 20, 2010; 1:40 AM
<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/monitoring-america/?wpisrc=nl_excl>http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/monitoring-america/?wpisrc=nl_excl
Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001,
the United States is assembling a vast domestic
intelligence apparatus to collect information
about Americans, using the FBI, local police,
state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.
The system, by far the largest and most
technologically sophisticated in the nation's
history, collects, stores and analyzes
information about thousands of U.S. citizens and
residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The government's goal is to have every state and
local law enforcement agency in the country feed
information to Washington to buttress the work of
the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.
Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name
two - are well acquainted with such domestic
security measures. But for the United States, the
sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.
This localized intelligence apparatus is part of
a larger Top Secret America created since the
attacks. In July, The Washington Post described
an alternative geography of the United States,
one that has grown so large, unwieldy and
secretive that no one knows how much money it
costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it.
Today's story, along with related material on The
Post's Web site, examines how Top Secret America
plays out at the local level. It describes a web
of 4,058 federal, state and local organizations,
each with its own counterterrorism
responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 935
of these organizations have been created since
the 2001 attacks or became involved in
counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11.
The months-long investigation, based on nearly
100 interviews and 1,000 documents, found that:
* Technologies and techniques honed for use on
the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have
migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.
* The FBI is building a database with the names
and certain personal information, such as
employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens
and residents whom a local police officer or a
fellow citizen believed to be acting
suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing
number of local law enforcement and military
criminal investigators, increasing concerns that
it could somehow end up in the public domain.
* Seeking to learn more about Islam and
terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have
hired as trainers self-described experts whose
extremist views on Islam and terrorism are
considered inaccurate and counterproductive by
the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies.
* The Department of Homeland Security sends its
state and local partners intelligence reports
with little meaningful guidance, and state
reports have sometimes inappropriately reported on lawful meetings.
Counterterrorism on Main Street
In cities across Tennessee and across the nation
local agencies are using sophisticated equipment
and techniques to keep an eye out for terrorist
threats -- and to watch Americans in the process. Launch Gallery »
The need to identify U.S.-born or naturalized
citizens who are planning violent attacks is more
urgent than ever, U.S. intelligence officials
say. This month's FBI sting operation involving a
Baltimore construction worker who allegedly
planned to bomb a Maryland military recruiting
station is the latest example. It followed a
similar arrest of a Somali-born naturalized U.S.
citizen allegedly seeking to detonate a bomb near
a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland,
Ore. There have been nearly two dozen other cases just this year.
"The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists
abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just
that - the old view," Homeland Security Secretary
Janet Napolitano told police and firefighters recently.
The Obama administration heralds this local
approach as a much-needed evolution in the way the country confronts terrorism.
Top Secret America is a project two years in the
making that describes the huge security buildup
in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks. Todays story is about those efforts at
the local level, including law enforcement and
homeland security agencies in every state and
thousands of communities. View previous stories,
explore relationships between government
organizations and the types of work being done,
and view top-secret geography on an interactive map.
However, just as at the federal level, the
effectiveness of these programs, as well as their
cost, is difficult to determine. The Department
of Homeland Security, for example, does not know
how much money it spends each year on what are
known as state fusion centers, which bring
together and analyze information from various agencies within a state.
The total cost of the localized system is also
hard to gauge. The DHS has given $31 billion in
grants since 2003 to state and local governments
for homeland security and to improve their
ability to find and protect against terrorists,
including $3.8 billion in 2010. At least four
other federal departments also contribute to
local efforts. But the bulk of the spending every
year comes from state and local budgets that are
too disparately recorded to aggregate into an overall total.
The Post findings paint a picture of a country at
a crossroads, where long-standing privacy
principles are under challenge by these new efforts to keep the nation safe.
The public face of this pivotal effort is
Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, which
years ago built one of the strongest state
intelligence organizations outside of New York to
try to stop illegal immigration and drug importation.
Napolitano has taken her "See Something, Say
Something" campaign far beyond the traffic signs
that ask drivers coming into the nation's capital
for "Terror Tips" and to "Report Suspicious Activity."
She recently enlisted the help of Wal-Mart,
Amtrak, major sports leagues, hotel chains and
metro riders. In her speeches, she compares the
undertaking to the Cold War fight against communists.
"This represents a shift for our country," she
told New York City police officers and
firefighters on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary
this fall. "In a sense, this harkens back to when
we drew on the tradition of civil defense and
preparedness that predated today's concerns."
----
From Afghanistan to Tennessee
On a recent night in Memphis, a patrol car rolled
slowly through a parking lot in a run-down
section of town. The military-grade infrared
camera on its hood moved robotically from left to
right, snapping digital images of one license
plate after another and analyzing each almost instantly.
Suddenly, a red light flashed on the car's screen
along with the word "warrant."
"Got a live one! Let's do it," an officer called out.
The streets of Memphis are a world away from the
streets of Kabul, yet these days, the same types
of technologies and techniques are being used in
both places to identify and collect information
about suspected criminals and terrorists.
The examples go far beyond Memphis.
* Hand-held, wireless fingerprint scanners were
carried by U.S. troops during the insurgency in
Iraq to register residents of entire
neighborhoods. L-1 Identity Solutions is selling
the same type of equipment to police departments
to check motorists' identities.
* In Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff's
Facial Recognition Unit, using a type of
equipment prevalent in war zones, records 9,000
biometric digital mug shots a month.
* U.S. Customs and Border Protection flies
General Atomics' Predator drones along the
Mexican and Canadian borders - the same kind of
aircraft, equipped with real-time, full-motion
video cameras, that has been used in wars in
Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan to track the enemy.
The special operations units deployed overseas to
kill the al-Qaeda leadership drove technological
advances that are now expanding in use across the
United States. On the front lines, those advances
allowed the rapid fusing of biometric
identification, captured computer records and
cellphone numbers so troops could launch the next surprise raid.
Here at home, it's the DHS that is enamored with
collecting photos, video images and other
personal information about U.S. residents in the
hopes of teasing out terrorists.
The DHS helped Memphis buy surveillance cameras
that monitor residents near high-crime housing
projects, problematic street corners, and bridges
and other critical infrastructure. It helped pay
for license plate readers and defrayed some of
the cost of setting up Memphis's crime-analysis
center. All together it has given Memphis $11
million since 2003 in homeland security grants,
most of which the city has used to fight crime.
"We have got things now we didn't have before,"
said Memphis Police Department Director Larry
Godwin, who has produced record numbers of
arrests using all this new analysis and
technology. "Some of them we can talk about. Some of them we can't."
One of the biggest advocates of Memphis's data
revolution is John Harvey, the police
department's technology specialist, whose
computer systems are the civilian equivalent of
the fancier special ops equipment used by the military.
Harvey collects any information he can pry out of
government and industry. When officers were
wasting time knocking on the wrong doors to serve
warrants, he persuaded the local utility company
to give him a daily update of the names and addresses of customers.
When he wanted more information about phones
captured at crime scenes, he programmed a way to
store all emergency 911 calls, which often
include names and addresses to associate with
phone numbers. He created another program to
upload new crime reports every five minutes and
mine them for the phone numbers of victims,
suspects, witnesses and anyone else listed on them.
Now, instead of having to decide which license
plate numbers to type into a computer console in
the patrol car, an officer can simply drive
around, and the automatic license plate reader on
his hood captures the numbers on every vehicle
nearby. If the officer pulls over a driver,
instead of having to wait 20 minutes for someone
back at the office to manually check records, he
can use a hand-held device to instantly call up a
mug shot, a Social Security number, the status of
the driver's license and any outstanding warrants.
The computer in the cruiser can tell an officer
even more about who owns the vehicle, the owner's
name and address and criminal history, and who
else with a criminal history might live at the same address.
Take a recent case of two officers with the
hood-mounted camera equipment who stopped a man
driving on a suspended license. One handcuffed
him, and the other checked his own PDA. Based on
the information that came up, the man was ordered
downtown to pay a fine and released as the
officers drove off to stop another car.
That wasn't the end of it, though.
A record of that stop - and the details of every
other arrest made that night, and every summons
written - was automatically transferred to the
Memphis Real Time Crime Center, a command center
with three walls of streaming surveillance video
and analysis capabilities that rival those of an Army command center.
There, the information would be geocoded on a map
to produce a visual rendering of crime patterns.
This information would help the crime
intelligence analysts predict trends so the
department could figure out what neighborhoods to
swarm with officers and surveillance cameras.
But that was still not the end of it, because the
fingerprints from the crime records would also go
to the FBI's data campus in Clarksburg, W.Va.
There, fingerprints from across the United States
are stored, along with others collected by
American authorities from prisoners in Saudi
Arabia and Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are 96 million sets of fingerprints in
Clarksburg, a volume that government officials
view not as daunting but as an opportunity.
This year for the first time, the FBI, the DHS
and the Defense Department are able to search
each other's fingerprint databases, said Myra
Gray, head of the Defense Department's Biometrics
Identity Management Agency, speaking to an
industry group recently. "Hopefully in the
not-too-distant future," she said, "our
relationship with these federal agencies - along
with state and local agencies - will be completely symbiotic."
----
The FBI's 'suspicious' files
At the same time that the FBI is expanding its
West Virginia database, it is building a vast
repository controlled by people who work in a
top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J.
Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington. This one
stores the profiles of tens of thousands of
Americans and legal residents who are not accused
of any crime. What they have done is appear to be
acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.
If the new Nationwide Suspicious Activity
Reporting Initiative, or SAR, works as intended,
the Guardian database may someday hold files
forwarded by all police departments across the
country in America's continuing search for terrorists within its borders.
The effectiveness of this database depends, in
fact, on collecting the identities of people who
are not known criminals or terrorists - and on
being able to quickly compile in-depth profiles of them.
"If we want to get to the point where we connect
the dots, the dots have to be there," said
Richard A. McFeely, special agent in charge of the FBI's Baltimore office.
In response to concerns that information in the
database could be improperly used or released,
FBI officials say anyone with access has been
trained in privacy rules and the penalties for breaking them.
But not everyone is convinced. "It opens a door
for all kinds of abuses," said Michael German, a
former FBI agent who now leads the American Civil
Liberties Union's campaign on national security
and privacy matters. "How do we know there are enough controls?"
The government defines a suspicious activity as
"observed behavior reasonably indicative of
pre-operational planning related to terrorism or
other criminal activity" related to terrorism.
State intelligence analysts and FBI investigators
use the reports to determine whether a person is
buying fertilizer to make a bomb or to plant
tomatoes; whether she is plotting to poison a
city's drinking water or studying for a
metallurgy test; whether, as happened on a Sunday
morning in late September, the man snapping a
picture of a ferry in the Newport Beach harbor in
Southern California simply liked the way it
looked or was plotting to blow it up.
Suspicious Activity Report N03821 says a local
law enforcement officer observed "a suspicious
subject . . . taking photographs of the Orange
County Sheriff Department Fire Boat and the
Balboa Ferry with a cellular phone camera." The
confidential report, marked "For Official Use
Only," noted that the subject next made a phone
call, walked to his car and returned five minutes
later to take more pictures. He was then met by
another person, both of whom stood and "observed
the boat traffic in the harbor." Next another
adult with two small children joined them, and
then they all boarded the ferry and crossed the channel.
All of this information was forwarded to the Los
Angeles fusion center for further investigation
after the local officer ran information about the
vehicle and its owner through several crime databases and found nothing.
Authorities would not say what happened to it
from there, but there are several paths a suspicious activity report can take:
At the fusion center, an officer would decide to
either dismiss the suspicious activity as
harmless or forward the report to the nearest FBI
terrorism unit for further investigation.
At that unit, it would immediately be entered
into the Guardian database, at which point one of three things could happen:
The FBI could collect more information, find no
connection to terrorism and mark the file closed,
though leaving it in the database.
It could find a possible connection and turn it into a full-fledged case.
Or, as most often happens, it could make no
specific determination, which would mean that
Suspicious Activity Report N03821 would sit in
limbo for as long as five years, during which
time many other pieces of information about the
man photographing a boat on a Sunday morning
could be added to his file: employment, financial
and residential histories; multiple phone
numbers; audio files; video from the
dashboard-mounted camera in the police cruiser at
the harbor where he took pictures; and anything
else in government or commercial databases "that
adds value," as the FBI agent in charge of the database described it.
That could soon include biometric data, if it
existed; the FBI is working on a way to attach
such information to files. Meanwhile, the bureau
will also soon have software that allows local
agencies to map all suspicious incidents in their jurisdiction.
The Defense Department is also interested in the
database. It recently transferred 100 reports of
suspicious behavior into the Guardian system, and
over time it expects to add thousands more as it
connects 8,000 military law enforcement personnel
to an FBI portal that will allow them to send and
review reports about people suspected of casing
U.S. bases or targeting American personnel.
And the DHS has created a separate way for state
and local authorities, private citizens, and
businesses to submit suspicious activity reports
to the FBI and to the department for analysis.
As of December, there were 161,948 suspicious
activity files in the classified Guardian
database, mostly leads from FBI headquarters and
state field offices. Two years ago, the bureau
set up an unclassified section of the database so
state and local agencies could send in suspicious
incident reports and review those submitted by
their counterparts in other states. Some 890
state and local agencies have sent in 7,197 reports so far.
Of those, 103 have become full investigations
that have resulted in at least five arrests, the
FBI said. There have been no convictions yet. An
additional 365 reports have added information to ongoing cases.
But most remain in the uncertain middle, which is
why within the FBI and other intelligence
agencies there is much debate about the
effectiveness of the bottom-up SAR approach, as
well as concern over the privacy implications of
retaining so much information on U.S. citizens
and residents who have not been charged with anything.
The vast majority of terrorism leads in the
United States originate from confidential FBI
sources and from the bureau's collaboration with
federal intelligence agencies, which mainly work
overseas. Occasionally a stop by a local police
officer has sparked an investigation. Evidence
comes from targeted FBI surveillance and
undercover operations, not from information and
analysis generated by state fusion centers about people acting suspiciously.
"It's really resource-inefficient," said Philip
Mudd, a 20-year CIA counterterrorism expert and a
top FBI national security official until he
retired nine months ago. "If I were to have a
dialogue with the country about this . . . it
would be about not only how we chase the
unknowns, but do you want to do suspicious
activity reports across the country? . . . Anyone
who is not at least suspected of doing something
criminal should not be in a database."
Charles Allen, a longtime senior CIA official who
then led the DHS's intelligence office until
2009, said some senior people in the intelligence
community are skeptical that SARs are an
effective way to find terrorists. "It's more
likely that other kinds of more focused efforts
by local police will gain you the information
that you need about extremist activities," he said.
The DHS can point to some successes: Last year
the Colorado fusion center turned up information
on Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born U.S. resident
planning to bomb the New York subway system. In
2007, a Florida fusion center provided the
vehicle ownership history used to identify and
arrest an Egyptian student who later pleaded
guilty to providing material support to
terrorism, in this case transporting explosives.
"Ninety-nine percent doesn't pan out or lead to
anything" said Richard Lambert Jr., the special
agent in charge of the FBI's Knoxville office.
"But we're happy to wade through these things."
----
Expert training?
Ramon Montijo has taught classes on terrorism and
Islam to law enforcement officers all over the country.
"Alabama, Colorado, Vermont," said Montijo, a
former Army Special Forces sergeant and Los
Angeles Police Department investigator who is now
a private security consultant. "California, Texas and Missouri," he continued.
What he tells them is always the same, he said:
Most Muslims in the United States want to impose sharia law here.
"They want to make this world Islamic. The
Islamic flag will fly over the White House - not
on my watch!" he said. "My job is to wake up the
public, and first, the first responders."
With so many local agencies around the country
being asked to help catch terrorists, it often
falls to sheriffs or state troopers to try to
understand the world of terrorism. They aren't
FBI agents, who have years of on-the-job and classroom training.
Instead, they are often people like Lacy Craig,
who was a police dispatcher before she became an
intelligence analyst at Idaho's fusion center, or
the detectives in Minnesota, Michigan and
Arkansas who can talk at length about the lineage
of gangs or the signs of a crystal meth addict.
Now each of them is a go-to person on terrorism as well.
"The CIA used to train analysts forever before
they graduated to be a real analyst," said Allen,
the former top CIA and DHS official. "Today we
take former law enforcement officers and we call
them intelligence officers, and that's not right,
because they have not received any training on intelligence analysis."
State fusion center officials say their analysts
are getting better with time. "There was a time
when law enforcement didn't know much about
drugs. This is no different," said Steven W.
Hewitt, who runs the Tennessee fusion center,
considered one of the best in the country. "Are
we experts at the level of [the National
Counterterrorism Center]? No. Are we developing an expertise? Absolutely."
But how they do that is usually left up to the
local police departments themselves. In their
desire to learn more about terrorism, many
departments are hiring their own trainers. Some
are self-described experts whose extremist views
are considered inaccurate and harmful by the FBI
and others in the intelligence community
Like Montijo, Walid Shoebat, a onetime Muslim who
converted to Christianity, also lectures to local
police. He too believes that most Muslims seek to
impose sharia law in the United States. To
prevent this, he said in an interview, he warns
officers that "you need to look at the entire pool of Muslims in a community."
When Shoebat spoke to the first annual South
Dakota Fusion Center Conference in Sioux Falls
this June, he told them to monitor Muslim student
groups and local mosques and, if possible, tap
their phones. "You can find out a lot of information that way," he said.
A book expanding on what Shoebat and Montijo
believe has just been published by the Center for
Security Policy, a Washington-based
neoconservative think tank. "Shariah: The Threat
to America" describes what its authors call a
"stealth jihad" that must be thwarted before it's too late.
The book's co-authors include such notables as
former CIA director R. James Woolsey and former
deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence
Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, along with the
center's director, a longtime activist. They
write that most mosques in the United States
already have been radicalized, that most Muslim
social organizations are fronts for violent
jihadists and that Muslims who practice sharia
law seek to impose it in this country.
Frank Gaffney Jr., director of the center, said
his team has spoken widely, including to many law enforcement forums.
"Members of our team have been involved in
training programs for several years now, many of
which have been focused on local law enforcement
intelligence, homeland security, state police,
National Guard units and the like," Gaffney said.
"We're seeing a considerable ramping-up of
interest in getting this kind of training."
Government terrorism experts call the views
expressed in the center's book inaccurate and
counterproductive. They say the DHS should
increase its training of local police, using
teachers who have evidence-based viewpoints.
DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said the department
does not maintain a list of terrorism experts but
is working on guidelines for local authorities wrestling with the topic.
So far, the department has trained 1,391 local
law enforcement officers in analyzing public
information and 400 in analytic thinking and
writing skills. Kudwa said the department also
offers counterterrorism training through the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, which this
year enrolled 94 people in a course called
"Advanced Criminal Intelligence Analysis to Prevent Terrorism."
----
A lack of useful information
The DHS also provides local agencies a daily flow of information bulletins.
These reports are meant to inform agencies about
possible terror threats. But some officials say
they deliver a never-ending stream of information
that is vague, alarmist and often useless. "It's
like a garage in your house you keep throwing
junk into until you can't park your car in it,"
says Michael Downing, deputy chief of
counterterrorism and special operations for the Los Angeles Police Department.
A review of nearly 1,000 DHS reports dating back
to 2003 and labeled "For Official Use Only"
underscores Downing's description. Typical is one
from May 24, 2010, titled "Infrastructure
Protection Note: Evolving Threats to the Homeland."
It tells officials to operate "under the premise
that other operatives are in the country and
could advance plotting with little or no
warning." Its list of vulnerable facilities seems
to include just about everything: "Commercial
Facilities, Government Facilities, Banking and
Financial and Transportation . . ."
Bart R. Johnson, who heads the DHS's intelligence
and analysis office, defended such reports,
saying that threat reporting has "grown and
matured and become more focused." The bulletins
can't be more specific, he said, because they
must be written at the unclassified level.
Recently, the International Association of Chiefs
of Police agreed that the information they were
receiving had become "more timely and relevant" over the past year.
Downing, however, said the reports would be more
helpful if they at least assessed threats within a specific state's boundaries.
States have tried to do that on their own, but
with mixed, and at times problematic, results.
In 2009, for instance, after the DHS and the FBI
sent out several ambiguous reports about threats
to mass-transit systems and sports and
entertainment venues, the New Jersey Regional
Operations Intelligence Center's Threat Analysis
Program added its own information. "New Jersey
has a large mass-transit infrastructure," its
report warned, and "an NFL stadium and NHL/NBA
arenas, a soccer stadium, and several concert
venues that attract large crowds."
In Virginia, the state's fusion center published
a terrorism threat assessment in 2009 naming
historically black colleges as potential hubs for terrorism.
From 2005 to 2007, the Maryland State Police
went even further, infiltrating and labeling as
terrorists local groups devoted to human rights, antiwar causes and bike lanes.
And in Pennsylvania this year, a local contractor
hired to write intelligence bulletins filled them
with information about lawful meetings as varied
as Pennsylvania Tea Party Patriots Coalition
gatherings, antiwar protests and an event at
which environmental activists dressed up as Santa
Claus and handed out coal-filled stockings.
----
'We have our own terrorists'
Even if the information were better, it might not
make a difference for the simplest of reasons: In
many cities and towns across the country, there
is just not enough terrorism-related work to do.
In Utah on one recent day, one of five
intelligence analysts in the state's fusion
center was writing a report about the rise in
teenage overdoses of an over-the-counter drug.
Another was making sure the visiting president of
Senegal had a safe trip. Another had just helped
a small town track down two people who were
selling magazine subscriptions and pocketing the money themselves.
In the Colorado Information Analysis Center, some
investigators were following terrorism leads.
Others were looking into illegal Craigslist
postings and online "World of Warcraft" gamers.
The vast majority of fusion centers across the
country have transformed themselves into
analytical hubs for all crimes and are using
federal grants, handed out in the name of
homeland security, to combat everyday offenses.
This is happening because, after 9/11, local law
enforcement groups did what every agency and
private company did in Top Secret America: They followed the money.
The DHS helped the Memphis Police Department, for
example, purchase 90 surveillance cameras,
including 13 that monitor bridges and a causeway.
It helped buy the fancy screens on the walls of
the Real Time Crime Center, as well as radios,
robotic surveillance equipment, a mobile command
center and three bomb-sniffing dogs. All came in
the name of port security and protection to critical infrastructure.
Since there hasn't been a solid terrorism case in
Memphis yet, the equipment's greatest value has
been to help drive down city crime. Where the
mobile surveillance cameras are set up, criminals
scatter, said Lt. Mark Rewalt, who, on a recent
Saturday night, scanned the city from an altitude of 1,000 feet.
Flying in a police helicopter, Rewalt pointed out
some of the cameras the DHS has funded. They are
all over the city, in mall parking lots, in
housing projects, at popular street hang-outs.
"Cameras are what's happening now," he marveled.
Meanwhile, another post-9/11 unit in Tennessee
has had even less terrorism-related work to do.
The Tennessee National Guard 45th Weapons of Mass
Destruction Civil Support Team, one of at least
50 such units around the country, was created to
respond to what officials still believe is the
inevitable release of chemical, biological or
radiological material by terrorists.
The unit's 22 hazardous-materials personnel have
the best emergency equipment in the state. A
fleet of navy-blue vehicles - command, response,
detection and tactical operations trucks - is
kept polished and ready to roll in a garage at the armory in Smyrna.
The unit practices WMD scenarios constantly. But
in real life, the crew uses the equipment very
little: twice a year at NASCAR races in nearby
Bristol to patrol for suspicious packages. Other
than that, said Capt. Matt Hayes, several times a year they respond to hoaxes.
The fact that there has not been much terrorism
to worry about is not evident on the Tennessee
fusion center's Web site. Click on the incident
map, and the state appears to be under attack.
Red icons of explosions dot Tennessee, along with
blinking exclamation marks and flashing skulls.
The map is labeled: "Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity.
But if you roll over the icons, the explanations
that pop up have nothing to do with major
terrorist plots: "Johnson City police are
investigating three 'bottle bombs' found at homes
over the past three days," one description read
recently. ". . . The explosives were made from
plastic bottles with something inside that
reacted chemically and caused the bottles to burst."
Another told a similar story: "The Scott County
Courthouse is currently under evacuation after a
bomb threat was called in Friday morning. Update:
Authorities completed their sweep . . . and have called off the evacuation."
Nine years after 9/11, this map is part of the
alternative geography that is Top Secret America,
where millions of people are assigned to help
stop terrorism. Memphis Police Director Godwin is
one of them, and he has his own version of what
that means in a city where there have been 86 murders so far this year.
"We have our own terrorists, and they are taking
lives every day," Godwin said. "No, we don't have
suicide bombers - not yet. But you need to remain
vigilant and realize how vulnerable you can be if you let up."
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this story.
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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