Fusion Centers are spying on innocent Americans & have virtually no oversight
Fusion Centers should be defunded & ended immediately.
Click here & here to petition our politicians to end Fusion Centers.
The Government Accountability Office has come out with a new report that exposes the lack of accountability for use of federal funds at fusion centers. But it doesn’t address the most serious issue with fusion centers: that they’re yet another weapon in the government’s bloated surveillance arsenal—and there’s virtually no oversight for what they’re doing and how they may be violating peoples’ rights.
The sheer numbers (800,000-plus officers) of local law enforcement working in the U.S. is staggering and enlisting them in the surveillance state exponentially multiplies the potential for privacy and civil liberties violations.
New documents roll back the curtain on the Fusion Centers and show the communications, interactions and emails of a massive national web of federal agents, officials, police, and private “security” contractors to accumulate and share information, reporting on all manner of peaceful and lawful political activity that took place during the Occupy Movement from protests and rallies to meetings and educational lectures. This enormous spying and monitoring apparatus included the Pentagon, FBI, DHS, police departments and chiefs, private contractors and commercial business interests.
There is now, with the release of these documents, incontrovertible evidence of systematic and not incidental conduct and practices of the Fusion Centers and their personnel to direct their sights against a peaceful movement that advocated social and economic justice in the United States.
These documents, along with materials previously released by the PCJF that exposed the FBI and other domestic intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ targeting of Occupy, reveal a U.S. surveillance-industrial apparatus charging forward in willful disregard for the fundamental civil liberties and political freedoms of the people. Targeting a peaceful social justice movement as a criminal or terrorist enterprise is incompatible with a constitutional democracy.
These documents show that the Fusion Centers constitute a menace to democracy. This gross misuse of U.S. taxpayers’ money also demonstrates that the Fusion Centers are a colossal rat hole of waste.
Documents reveal that the police chiefs of major U.S. cities created an “Emerging Issues” Subcommittee to “identify, research and document trends or activities that may threaten public safety” for communication to the nationwide network of Fusion Centers and that “The first issue the committee is working is the Occupy Movement.” The documents show that the Major Cities Chiefs (MCC) efforts to “increase situational awareness and promote public safety” required “twice a week”-produced bulletins on the Occupy Movement. “At the present time it is our intention to utilize the services of the Southern Nevada Counter Terrorism Center to collect, analyze and disseminate bulletins twice a week.”
The distribution list for these Fusion Center-issued bulletins includes virtually every single Fusion Center in the United States.
The Boston Regional Intelligence Center Monitored and Catalogued Occupy-Associated Activities from Student Organizing to Political Lectures
In the Fall of 2011, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) devoted significant resources including deployment of intelligence analysts to a detailed monitoring and cataloging operation, issuing twice-daily “Situation Awareness” Bulletins on Occupy Boston. We have obtained over 1,200 pages of these bulletins which have not been previously disclosed.
The BRIC intelligence analysts monitored Occupy activists’ Twitter accounts and poured over Facebook pages constantly reporting and then repeatedly providing updates on the number of people who may have indicated they would be attending any event or lecture. The BRIC documents catalogued plans and meetings, including labor rallies and activities by nurses, the Professional Fire Fighters of Massachusetts (AFL-CIO), and Verizon workers; student organizing and meetings at Boston University, Suffolk, Harvard, Tufts and throughout the area.
(“Analyst Notes: Tufts students are organizing a group to go to Dudley Square to show support for the Occupy the Hood … As of 3:00 p.m. on 20 October 2011, 35 people are listed as attending, 9 maybes on the Facebook event page”); speakers, authors, personalities and lecturers, including Noam Chomsky, writer/director David Rothauser (“Analyst note: … It is unknown at this time if Rothauser is a known/respected figure within the anarchist movement”), Bill McKibben (“Analyst note: … [he] organized a sit-in near the White House in August of this year to protest construction of a pipeline.”), Russell Simmons, Van Jones, Brian Wilson of VFP, representatives from the National Lawyers Guild, the National Police Accountability Project and the ACLU-Mass. From musical concerts to women’s caucus meetings, to yoga, to meetings and lectures on college campuses nothing was outside the purview of the Boston Fusion Center’s supposed anti-terrorism and anti-crime mandate and vast resources.
The PCJF had previously obtained and exposed a handful of documents of a different nature showing BRIC’s reporting on Occupy, which investigative reporter Michael Isikoff of NBC News noted in an article “Unaware of Tsarnaev warnings, Boston counterterror unit tracked protesters.” What was less known from the earlier documents but revealed in the new massive BRIC document release was the immense scope and intensity of hour-by-hour reporting on the Occupy Movement indicating not only an interest but an actual preoccupation with intelligence gathering on all manner of political speech, meeting, thought and expression affiliated with Occupy.
The Boston Police Department stated in 2012, according to The Boston Globe, that the “Boston Regional Intelligence Center … does not conduct surveillance on protest groups without reason to believe they are tied to crime or terrorism.” An email, in the newly released documents, from a high level official in the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center (D.C. Fusion Center) in December of 2011, and sent to D.C. police officials, states:
“I just received a call from the City of Boston. I was informed that a group of 15-20 Occupy Boston members and other activist group members departed Boston by bus this morning on their way to the District for a ‘Week of Action.’ According to the caller, none of the people are ‘known to be troublemakers."
It's much worse than what's happening in Boston. Please click HERE to read more.
Fusion centers are a waste of taxpayer dollars. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, which administers the federal grants that partially fund fusion centers) has no system in place to accurately account for how much is spent.
“According to federal cost inventory reports, federal agencies provided fusion centers with non- personnel support totaling about $32.8 million in fiscal year 2011 and about $18 million in fiscal years 2012 and 2013.” Federal agencies also have deployed 288 staff to these centers.
DHS is developing laughable “performance” measures. But many of these measures aren’t meaningful, for example:
Number of threat tips and leads processed by fusion centers
Number of suspicious activity reports submitted by fusion centers
Number of suspicious activity reports vetted and submitted by fusion centers that result in the initiation or enhancement of an investigation by the FBI
Percentage of requests for information from the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) for which fusion centers provided information for a TSC case file
Suspicious activity reports (SARs) are based on standards ripe for abuse of discretion: the specific set of behaviors listed in the national SAR standards include innocuous activities such as “demonstrating unusual interest in facilities, buildings, or infrastructure.” And they have been abused. Public records act requests have shown that people of color make up a disproportionate number of SARs filed.
The report confirmed the extent to which fusion centers host staff from federal agencies:
“As of June 2014, the FBI had deployed 94 intelligence analysts, special agents, and others to 58 fusion centers, and had installed its secure data system (FBINet) at 51 centers.”
What may be more surprising is that the centers also host approximately 30 Immigrations and Customs Enforcement staff, and approximately 20 Customs and Border Patrol Officers. This makes it clear: fusion centers truly are a local arm of the surveillance state.
The report notes that the DHS has highlighted the need for “expanded involvement in local government bodies to promote improved collaboration.” What does that mean? The director of the Northern California fusion center fusion center has attended city council meetings to encourage implementation of automated license plate readers and to oppose implementation of civil liberties protections in Berkeley.
http://www.justiceonline.org/one-nation-under-surveillance/report.html
America's terror psychosis:
America is afflicted with a debilitating ailment that has warped the collective national mind. Its symptoms are the experience of persistent delusions and a distorted sense of objective reality. The disorder impairs functioning since the subjective perception of the world does not match actual conditions. That marks the classic psychotic syndrome.
Psychosis can stem from trauma and acute stress. In our case, the traumatic event was 9/11. Characteristically, an experientially caused psychosis, as opposed to one with organic roots, is short-term. The terror psychosis is well into its second decade with no signs that it is ameliorating. That indicates the active presence of psychosocial factors that perpetuate the acute anxiety and apprehension associated with the original traumatic event. Those factors do not take the form of aftershocks.
There have been no serious attacks against the United States over the past 13 years -- much less any that registered a facsimile of the damage produced by the precipitating shock. Those that have occurred have had domestic sources, and have been minor by several orders of magnitude.
The massive, systematic electronic surveillance programs of the NSA have made a mockery of the Fourth Amendment.
The President has arrogated to himself the power to kill American citizens abroad without due process or even notification based on nothing more than him own determination and will. President Obama also signed a law that requires the Executive to arrest, imprison indefinitely, and otherwise punish any citizen whom it has determined presents a clear and imminent threat to the country's security without due process or even public notice of the actions taken. The undermining of the U.S. Constitutionally grounded legal system has extended to the Judiciary which has been a willing accomplice to these actions.
This pattern conforms to the profile of psychosis. Little of this stunning reality is recognized, understood and responded to by an adjustment of behavior. Delusion rules.
The overshadowing delusion is that the U.S. is besieged by legions of Islamist enemies scaling the walls of the Republic bent on mayhem. Only the ingenious defenses that we have erected, and the valiant efforts of our DHS/police warriors can keep this diabolical foe at bay.
Actual reality: there are a few hundred poorly organized, scattered remnants who have the intention and will even to imagine a direct attack on the US. That small coterie lacks the means. In any case, they could not conceivably replicate anything like 9/11. In our world of delusion, any Islamist group which espouses an anti-American creed is declared a grave threat. What should be an international police exercise to apprehend criminals has been transmuted into a global war on fundamentalist Islam.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-brenner/treating-the-terror-psych_b_6171680.html