Americans were easily persuaded that the events of 9/11 reflected a lack of preparedness to deal with the threat of terrorism. This of course was foreign terrorism that was being committed by people who look funny and talk funny. Both parties in congress gave overwhelming support to the Bush administration's request for massive appropriations and greater legal authority to respond to this threat. What got most of the headlines were the external responses, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the establishment of the prison at Gitmo, the rendention flights. Most of the targets of these activities were not American citizens. When occasionally one was caught up in the net that was readily dismissed as an unfortunate necessity.
The American public has had little awareness of the parallel developments that have been going on in the arena of domestic security under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security. The only really visible part of an extensive operation is the Transportation Security Administration that annoys and disrupts air travelers. With the rise of the Occupy Movement Americans are beginning to get a glimpse of more of it and many of them are becoming increasingly disturbed by what they see. Some background research seems like a very timely undertaking.
Last year the Washington Post published an extensive investigative report entitled Top Secret America by Dana Priest and William Arken. It offers us an excellent starting place.
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
The report is very extensive and detailed. It is broken down into four long articles.
A Hidden World Growing Beyond Control
National Securit, Inc.
The Secrets Next Door
Monitoring America
I would urge anybody who is interested in getting their head out from under the covers to read the entire series. It is a major eye opener. Since the current debates on Daily Kos are focused on what role the federal government might be playing in the coordinating of the response of various police departments to the Occupy Movement, I am going to focus on information provided in the article titled Monitoring America as it provides a detailed picture of the increasingly interconnected relationships of law enforcement agencies.
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.
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.
DHS has been involved in a wide variety of initiatives with local law enforcement agencies. The high tech riot gear that you see on the news and internet videos was mostly purchased with federal grants. They have acquired a lot more surveillance toys that what you have seen so far.
The FBI has long maintained files of criminal records that are supplied by and available to local law enforcement. What is new in all of this is that they have now moved well beyond this. DHS has established a vast network to collect and record suspicious information. Ms. Napolitano's partnership with Walmart provides the convenience of being able to report your friends and neighbors to a Walmart manager with the assurance that the information will be on its way to the FBI. All sorts of law enforcement agencies feed into this network and DHS and the FBI feed informational alerts back to them. A key component of the network is something called Fusion Centers. The linked document is an official detailed description of the process.
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.
The state level fusion centers collect information from all sorts of people and "process" it. It looks like this is where the items collected by Walmart would be routed. The original justification for this network was the War On Terror. However, in the best of bureaucratic traditions it seems to be experience an acute case of mission creep.
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.
So there is a description of the network that has come into existence in the decade since 9/11. It is actively churning away to justify its existence and keep the money flowing. If I were running one of those fusion centers, I'd see the Occupy Movement as the equivalent of the gold rush.
There are some people who have tried to paint any suggestions that DHS and FBI could have played a role in coordinating the evictions of the occupation camps as venturing into tinfoil hat territory. The Washington Post is not what one would call the far left fringe. If they are raising concerns about the growth of the security state, it seems like its time for serious consideration. Given the network of relationships that they have documented, what would seem preposterous to me is a suggestion that federal agencies are NOT working closely with local enforcement in response to what is a national protest movement.