Intellectual Property Law

Federal, state and local cops are fusing anti-terror information and tips in ways they never have before, and they want the American people to know about it, sort of.

Some of the nation's top law enforcement and anti-terror officials tried to tell the public Tuesday and Wednesday a bit about the growing importance and effectiveness of the nation's so-called fusion centers. Those fifty or so centers are where the federal, state and local cops share intelligence, sift data for clues, run down reports of suspicious packages and connect dots in an effort to detect and thwart terrorism attacks, drug smuggling and gang fighting.

To talk a little more about the little-known new fusing, the officials held press conferences at Tuesday and Wednesday mornings at the second annual National Fusion Center conference being held in San Francisco.

But the openness extended only so far, and the press was not allowed into sensitive sessions such as "How to Generate Suspicious Activity Reporting" and "Commanders and Analysts: Sharing Perspectives."

A total of three reporters showed up over two days to hear from officials such as Leonard Boyle who runs the Terrorist Screening Center, Charlie Allen -- the chief intelligence officer for the Department of Homeland Security, and Los Angeles police chief William Bratton. THREAT LEVEL was the only media outlet to show up two days running, and neither of San Francisco's dailies sent a reporter.

Despite journalists taking up only two of the fifty or so chairs, officials stuck with the formality of a press conference.

Each day six to eight officials stood in a semicircle flanking the lectern and took turns issuing short remarks. After each set of speeches, the director of the Iowa fusion center and designated emcee Russell Porter allowed for a handful of questions from the two-reporter audience.

Homeland Security Under Secretary Charlie Allen, formerly of the CIA, described how sharing threat assessments and even the occasional raw intel with the new fusion centers marked a cultural shift from when the natino's spooks focussed on tracking of Communist Russia. Back then, the spooks treated everyone, other departments and agencies included, as suspicious.

"Things have changed remarkably in Washington. We are talking to each other," Allen said Tuesday. "I am from the shadows of the CIA where in the Cold War, we followed a different model.. That model does not apply for the kinds of threats we have today that are borderless. The threats are so different and so remarkably dangerous for our citizens."

Also present was Ambassador Thomas McNamara who now works at the Director of National Intelligence Office.

He's charged with finding a strategy for sharing intelligence information among the nation's spy agencies and beyond. McNamara's group is working on custom-built XML schemes, such as a standard for Supicious Activity Reports. The idea is have all fusion centers and intelligence agencies using the same data format, to more easily share, search, sort and store intelligence data.

State and local officials have complained for years that the feds don't share any useful information. The 9/11 Commission agreed, blaming the CIA and FBI's lack of information sharing for wasting chances to stop the airline hijackings. The commission strongly urged they change their ways and put holes in so-called "stove pipes." And in 2007, the Democrats boosted fusion centers' stature and funding centers in the first bill they passed after taking control of Congress.

More than $130 million federal dollars have fed the development of the fusion centers in locations as diverse as Kansas and Northern California.

San Francisco police chief Heather Fong said the information flow was getting better, especially around big events being held in the city.

"When we get information, it's not how much can we amass and keep to ourselves," Fong said. "It's how much information can we obtain but appropriately share so that it positively assists others in doing their jobs around the country and the world."

The dominant catchphrase from the officials was that the centers need to focus on "all threats, all hazards."

That means that the fusion centers, where state and local cops work alongside federal employees, would be working on immigration, radicalization, demographic changes, hurricanes, biological and chemical threats, as well as common criminal activity.

Officials say the centers must look at even the most mundane crimes, since they can be used to fund terrorism.

On Wednesday, L.A. police chief Bratton cited the investigation of a string of gas station stick-ups in L.A. in 2005. Turns out the stick-ups led to the prosecution of militant Muslim convicts who were planning attacks on synagogues. That, Bratton said, illustrates why these intelligence centers need to be analyzing run-of-the-mill crimes.

"Information that might seem innocuous may have some connection to terrorism," Bratton said.

But that "all hazards, all threats" approach sounds suspiciously like the government is building a distributed domestic intelligence service that could easily begin keeping tabs on Americans exercising their First Amendment rights. The scope also seems at odds with the federal government's Information Sharing Environment guidelines, which say these centers are supposed to focus on terrorism.

It's not too hard to imagine how anti-terrorism information centers might decide that anti-war protesters are fair game. In fact, California's Anti-Terrorism Information Center admitted just that in 2003. Denver's police department built their own secret spy files on Quakers and 200 other organizations.

The ACLU issued a warning report about Fusion Centers, complete with an interactive fusion center map, earlier this year. The report, entitled What's Wrong With Fusion Centers, cited concerns about military units operating in the cetners, scope creep and data mining. They also want to know how citizens can contest information about themselves, given the patchwork of state, local and federal laws that may or may not apply.

In a conference keynote, Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-California), a powerful force in intelligence matters and funding, said she supported both fusion centers and privacy and civil liberties.

"I was frustrated when I met with the [ACLU] report authors and they could not point to a single instance of a fusion center violating someone's civil rights or liberties," Harman said Tuesday. "In fact, state and local laws and protections in place at many fusion centers are more rigorous than their federal counterparts."

Tim Sparapani, the ACLU's top legislative lawyer in D.C., shot back via email.

Our prognosticating track record in identifying programs ripe for abuse of privacy and civil liberties is pretty solid.

We said the FBI would abuse their National Security Letter authority, and they have. We said that the Patriot Act went too far, and multiple federal courts agreed and struck down sections of the law. We said the watch lists would be a mess, and they?ve wrongly ensnared tens of thousands of law-abiding Americans.  We said that the government would try to reconstitute the data mining morass of the Total Information Awareness program and now we?ve got reports corroborating that fact.

That?s not luck.  It?s a trend based on seeing the surveillance industrial complex being built bit-by-bit and terabyte by terabyte. As sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, if Fusion Centers aren?t built with rigid controls they will be privacy-invading monsters.

The ACLU also points to Virginia where legislators are moving to exempt their fusion center from government sunshine laws and give legal immunity to companies that report information -- such as the name of a person accosted by a private security guard for taking pictures of a skyscraper.

On Wednesday, a trio of federal privacy and civil liberties officers, including Homeland Security's chief privacy officer Hugo Teufel, promised they were working to make sure the centers respect citizens' civil liberties and privacy.

David Gersten, the director of the civil rights and civil liberties programs at DHS, said he was working to expand their training course for Fusion Center employees to "include an examination of the history of privacy and civil liberties as they relate to intelligence and criminal investigations."

That sounds as if they'll be handing out copies of the Church Committee report on the FBI's COINTELPRO spying program, whose introduction states "Unless new and tighter controls are established by legislation, domestic intelligence activities threaten to undermin our democratic society and fundamentally alter its nature.

THREAT LEVEL asked about the concerns about expanding the dissemination of intelligence given the continuing Americans have getting on and off the nation's unified terrorist watch list.

Just this week, the Justice Department's inspector general issued another watch list audit (.pdf), finding that FBI agents were watch listing people who they weren't even investigating. Moreover, since those names were added through a back channel, there was no scheduled review or follow-up to take them off the watch list.

[W]e learned that the National Counter Terrorism Center is receiving nominations for non-investigative subjects directly from FBI field personnel. Because this nomination practice is not covered in FBI policy, there are no requirements for FBI personnel to ensure that any resulting watchlist records are updated or removed as appropriate.  There is likewise no mechanism to ensure that the nominations directly passed to NCTC by field personnel are appropriate and that the information is complete and accurate.

Leonard Boyle, who runs the Terrorist Screening Center which curates and runs the watch list, said those problems are being fixed.

"We have streamlined our processes so [...] we avoid delays in amending nominations or removing people who ought to be removed because they are no longer suspected of having a nexus to terrorism," Boyle said.

When THREAT LEVEL edged out all the other reporters to pose a follow-up on whether widespread information sharing will only increase citizens' watch list frustrations, five officials took turns defending the government's redress programs.

One of those was Russ Travers, who works as the deputy director of information sharing and knowledge management at the National Counter Terrorism Center.

"As for languishing on the list, I have no doubt that improvements could be made," Travers said. "But as a factual matter, we average taking some 15 to 20 thousand people a year off the list, so there is a great deal of purging of information that shouldn't be on the list to start with."

While that may be true, it's not clear how that model extends when there's no central information clearinghouse that checks all information going into a distributed network of fusion centers.

And what happens when fusion center employees in Kansas find they have no violent jihadist information to fuse? How else does one justify continuing federal dollars if you aren't generating reports?

And as for information sharing, some of the feds seem more willing to talk than others.

Government employees manning an informational booth for the Director of National Intelligence's OpenSource.gov website refused to even describe the program to THREAT LEVEL, saying they would need to call in a press minder.

The website seems to indicate that the program is a way for the government to share analysis composed from reading newspapers and watching TV stations from around the world.

THREAT LEVEL guessed we would not be able to sign up for the email blasts, which the tactiurn DNI employees confirmed due to our propensity to share information with the public, adding that they also couldn't share the information from OpenSource.gov due to copyright issues.

See Also:

• Fusion Center Cash Infusion
• Homeland Security Fusion Centers Fuse What?
• Homeland Security Fusion Centers Chase Tips, Find Little
• The Architecture Reaches Out To Arrest Activist