8 May 2006 By David E. Kaplan
Spies Among Us
Despite a troubled history, police across the nation are keeping
tabs on ordinary Americans
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 Wa****ngton, 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 Wa****ngton'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."
Rap sheets. Chief Bratton is referring to the infamous city "Red Squads"
that targeted civil rights and antiwar groups in the 1960s and 1970s (Page
48). Veteran police officers say no one in law enforcement wants a return
to
the bad old days of domestic spying. But civil liberties watchdogs warn
that
with so many cops looking for terrorists, real and imagined, abuses may be
inevitable. "The restrictions on police spying are being removed," says
attorney Richard Gutman, who led a 1974 class action lawsuit against the
Chicago police that obtained hundreds of thousands of pages of
intelligence
files. "And I don't think you can rely on the police to regulate
themselves."
Good or bad, intelligence gathering by local police departments is back.
Interviews with police officers, homeland security officials, and privacy
experts reveal a transformation among state and local law enforcement.
Among the changes:
Since 9/11, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have
poured over a half-billion dollars into building up local and state police
intelligence operations. The funding has helped create more than 100
police
intelligence units reaching into nearly every state.
To qualify for federal homeland security grants, states were told to
assemble lists of "potential threat elements"--individuals or groups
suspected of possible terrorist activity. In response, state authorities
have come up with thousands of loosely defined targets, ranging from
genuine
terrorists to biker gangs and environmentalists.
Guidelines for protecting privacy and civil liberties have lagged far
behind
the federal money. After four years of doling out homeland security grants
to police departments, federal officials released guidelines for the
conduct
of local intelligence operations only last year; the standards are
voluntary
and are being implemented slowly.
The resurgence of police intelligence operations is being accompanied by a
revolution in law enforcement computing. Rap sheets, intelligence re****ts,
and public records are rapidly being pooled into huge, networked computer
databases. Much of this is a boon to crime fighting, but privacy advocates
say the systems are wide open to abuse.
Behind the windfall in federal funding is broad agreement in Wa****ngton on
two areas: first, that local cops are America's front line of defense
against terrorism; and second, that the law enforcement and intelligence
communities must do a far better job of sharing information with state and
local police. As a re****t by the International Association of Chiefs of
Police stressed: "All terrorism is local." Oklahoma City bomber Timothy
McVeigh was arrested by a state trooper after a traffic stop. And last
year,
local police in Torrance, Calif., thwarted what the FBI says could have
been
America's worst incident since 9/11--planned attacks on military sites and
synagogues in and around Los Angeles by homegrown jihadists.
The numbers tell the story: There are over 700,000 local, state, and
tribal
police officers in the United States, compared with only 12,000 FBI
agents.
But getting the right information to all those eyes and ears hasn't gone
especially well. The government's failure at "connecting the dots," as the
9/11 commission put it, was key to the success of al Qaeda's fateful
hijackings in 2001. Three of the hijackers, including ringleader Mohamed
Atta, were pulled over in traffic stops before the attacks, yet local cops
had no inkling they might be on terrorist watch lists. A National Criminal
Intelligence Sharing Plan, released by the Justice Department in 2003,
found
no shortage of problems in sharing information among local law
enforcement:
a lack of trust and communication; lack of funding for a national
intelligence network; lack of database connectivity; a shortage of
intelligence analysts, software, and training; and a lack of standards and
policies.
The flood of post-9/11 funding and attention, however, has started making
a
difference, officials say. Indeed, it has catalyzed reforms already
underway
in state and local law enforcement, giving a boost to what reformers call
intelligence-led policing--a kind of 21st-century crime fighting driven by
computer databases, intelligence gathering, and analysis. "This is a new
paradigm, a new philosophy of policing," says the LAPD's Bratton, who
previously served as chief of the New York Police Department. In that job,
Bratton says, he spent 5 percent of his time on counterterrorism; today,
in
Los Angeles, he spends 50 percent. The key to counterterrorism work,
Bratton
adds, is intelligence.
The change is "huge, absolutely huge," says Michigan State University's
David Carter, the author of Law Enforcement Intelligence. "Intelligence
used
to be a dirty word. But it's a more thoughtful process now." During the
1980s and 1990s, intelligence units were largely confined to large police
departments targeting drug smugglers and organized crime, but the national
plan now being pushed by Wa****ngton calls for every law enforcement agency
to develop some intelligence capability. Experts estimate that well over
100
police departments, from big-city operations to small county
sheriffs'offices, have now established intelligence units of one kind or
another. Hundreds of local detectives are also working with federal agents
on FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which have nearly tripled from 34
before 9/11 to 100 today. And over 6,000 state and local cops now have
federal security clearances, allowing them to see classified intelligence
re****ts.
"The front line." Some police departments have grown as sophisticated as
those of the feds. The LAPD has some 80 cops working counterterrorism,
while
other big units now exist in Atlanta, Chicago, and Las Vegas. Then there's
the NYPD, which is in a class by itself--with a thousand officers assigned
to homeland security. The Big Apple's intelligence chief is a former head
of
CIA covert operations; its counterterrorism chief is an ex-State
Department
counterterrorism coordinator. The NYPD has officers based in a half-dozen
countries, and its counterterrorism agents visit some 200 businesses a
week
to check on suspicious activity.
Many of the nation's new intelligence units are dubbed "fusion centers."
Run
by state or local law enforcement, these regional hubs pool information
from
multiple jurisdictions. From a mere handful before 9/11, fusion centers
now
exist in 31 states, with a dozen more to follow. Some focus exclusively on
terrorism; others track all manner of criminal activity. Federal officials
hope to eventually see 70 fusion centers nationwide, providing a
coast-to-coast intelligence blanket. This vision was noted by President
Bush
in a 2003 speech: "All across our country we'll be able to tie our
terrorist
information to local information banks so that the front line of defeating
terror becomes activated and real, and those are the local law enforcement
officials."
Intelligence centers are among the hottest trends in law enforcement. Last
year, Massachusetts opened its Commonwealth Fusion Center, which boasts 18
analysts and 23 field-intelligence officers. The state of California is
spending $15 million on a string of four centers this year, and north
Texas
and New Jersey are each setting up six. The best, officials say, are
focused
broadly and are improving their ability to counter sophisticated crimes
that
include not only terrorism but fraud, racketeering, and computer hacking.
The federal Department of Homeland Security, which has bankrolled
start-ups
of many of the centers, has big plans for the emerging network. Jack
Tomarchio, the agency's new deputy director of intelligence, told a law
enforcement conference in March of plans to embed up to three DHS agents
and
intelligence analysts at every site. "The states want a very close
synergistic relation****p with the feds," he explained to U.S. News.
"Nobody
wants to play by the old rules. The old rules basically gave us 9/11."
Reasonable suspicion." The problem, skeptics say, is that no one is quite
sure what the new rules are. "Hardly anyone knows what a fusion center
should do," says Paul Wormeli of the Integrated Justice Information
Systems
Institute, a Justice Department-backed training and technology center.
"Some
states have responded by putting 10 state troopers in a room to look at
databases. That's a ridiculous approach." Another law enforcement veteran,
deeply involved with the fusion centers, expressed similar frustration.
"The
money has been moved without guidance or structure, technical assistance,
or
training," says the official, who is not authorized to speak publicly.
There
are now guidelines, he adds, "but they're not binding on anyone." In the
past year, the Justice Department has issued standards for local police on
fusion centers and privacy issues, but they are only advisory. Most
federal
funding for the centers now comes from the Department of Homeland
Security,
but DHS also requires no intelligence standards from its grantees.
At the state level, regulations on police spying vary widely, but a
general
rule of thumb comes from the Justice Department's internal guidelines that
forbid intelligence gathering on individuals unless there is a "reasonable
suspicion" of criminal activity. Since the reforms of the 1970s, the FBI
says its agents have followed this standard; Justice Department
regulations
require local police who receive federal funding to do the same in
maintaining any intelligence files. But there is considerable leeway at
the
local level, and since 2001, judges have watered down police spying limits
in Chicago and New York. The federal regs, moreover, have not stopped a
parade of questionable cases.
Suspicion of spying is so rife among antiwar activists, who have loudly
protested White House policy on Iraq, that some begin meetings by
welcoming
undercover cops who might be present. "People know and believe their
activities are being monitored," says Leslie Cagan, national coordinator
of
United for Peace and Justice, the country's largest antiwar coalition.
There
is some evidence to back this up. Documents and videotapes obtained from
lawsuits against the NYPD reveal that its undercover officers have joined
antiwar and even bicycle-rider rallies. In at least one case, an apparent
undercover officer incited a crowd by faking his arrest. In Fresno,
Calif.,
activists learned in 2003 that their group, Peace Fresno, had been
infiltrated by a local sheriff's deputy--piecing it together after the man
died in a car crash and his obituary appeared in the paper.
The California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, a $7 million fusion
center
run by the state Department of Justice, also ran into trouble in 2003 when
it warned of potential violence at an antiwar protest at the ****t of
Oakland. Mike Van Winkle, then a spokesman for the center, explained his
concern to the Oakland Tribune: "You can make an easy kind of a link that,
if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being
fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at
that
protest. You can almost argue that a protest against [the war] is a
terrorist act." Officials quickly distanced themselves from the statement.
The center's staff had confused political protest with terrorism,
announced
California's attorney general, who oversees the office.
"Absurd" threats. But this expansive view of homeland security has at
times
also extended to union activists and even library Web surfers. In February
2006 near Wa****ngton, D.C., two Montgomery County, Md., homeland security
agents walked into a suburban Bethesda library and forcefully warned
patrons
that viewing Internet ****ography was illegal. (It is not.) A county
official later called the incident "regrettable" and said those officers
had
been reassigned. Similarly, in 2004, two plainclothes Contra Costa County
sheriff's deputies monitored a protest by striking Safeway workers in
nearby
San Francisco, identifying themselves to union leaders as homeland
security
agents.
Further blurring the lines over what constitutes "homeland security" has
been a push by Wa****ngton for states to identify possible terrorists. In
2003, the Department of Homeland Security began requiring states to draft
strategic plans that included figures on how many "potential threat
elements" existed in their backyards. The definition of suspected
terrorists
was fairly loose--PTEs were groups or individuals who might use force or
violence "to intimidate or coerce" for a goal "possibly political or
social
in nature." In response, some states came up with alarming numbers. Most
of
the re****ts are not available publicly, but U.S. News obtained nine state
homeland security plans and found that local officials have identified
thousands of "potential" terrorists. There are striking disparities, as
well. South Carolina, for example, found 68 PTEs, but neighboring North
Carolina uncovered 506. Vermont and New Hamp****re found none at all. Most
impressive was Texas, where in 2004 investigators identified 2,052
potential
threat elements. One top veteran of the FBI's counterterrorism force calls
the Texas number "absurd." Included among the threats cited by the states,
sources say, are biker gangs, militia groups, and "save the whales"
environmentalists.
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