Late last year, the Tennessee state surveillance (or so-called “fusion”) center put the ACLU of Tennessee on a map listing “Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity”. Read more about that controversy here, here, and here.
Today DHS director Janet Napolitano awarded the Tennessee spy center with the “Fusion Center of the Year” award at the “National Fusion Center Conference” in Denver.
We’ve heard of other examples of fusion centers classifying non-violent advocacy or activism as terror-related over the past year. A notorious case was in Pennsylvania, where the spy center got caught buying information from a contractor about anti-fracking activists, anti-war protesters, “black militants”, a gay and lesbian festival, and Muslims observing Ramadan. The information about anti-fracking activists was reportedly fed to natural gas companies. Perhaps not coincidentally, celebrity anti-fracking spokesman and activist Mark Ruffalo was added to an anti-terror no-fly list.
Among the many local, state and federal agencies with official presence at the spy centers is the FBI. A September 2010 report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General concluded that the FBI had “little or no basis” for investigating many advocacy groups and had lied to cover up this fact. FBI head Robert Mueller was given “mistaken and misleading” information which he conveyed to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
It appears that the FBI isn’t the only federal agency that gets away with bad behavior. Awarding the Tennessee spy center for monitoring the activities of a civil liberties organization like the ACLU sends a terrible message to the other 71 surveillance centers nationwide:
“It’s ok if you spy on First Amendment protected speech. We might even give you an award for it!”