Indefinite detention of Americans looms on the horizon as Fusion Centers spy on protestors & troublemakers
Terrorism has fed the FBI's growth. Between 2001 and 2013, its budget nearly doubled after adjusting for inflation. But Comey was not pleased on arriving to learn that he would be inconvenienced by last year's federal budget sequester.
"I was very surprised to learn how severe the potential cut is," he complained. He warned he might have to cut 3,000 jobs. His estimate was inflated—the agency now says it eliminated just 2,200 positions through attrition. The agency's website, however, says it has 35,344 employees—up by 30 percent since 2001.
Comey is upholding the tradition that once the government identifies an evil, the evil never goes away—it only gets bigger and tougher, requiring ever-increasing efforts to combat it. The Department of Energy was created during the "energy crisis" of the 1970s. The crisis didn't last, but the department did.
The same pattern holds here. In the decade after 9/11, the number of terrorist episodes in this country averaged 17 a year, compared to 41 a year in the 1990s. Nor is al-Qaida gaining ground. Since 9/11, reports the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, it has carried out no attacks in the U.S.
But progress is never taken as progress. It's always interpreted as the calm before the storm.
When Comey arrived, nerves were raw from the Boston Marathon bombing, which sparked fears of a wave of domestic attacks. Since then, there has not been a single death from homegrown terrorism in the U.S. In the following 12 months, the number of Muslim-Americans arrested on terrorism charges was 15, below the annual average of 20.
"Almost all of these arrests were for attempting to join a foreign terrorist organization abroad, not for planning attacks in the homeland, and were motivated by sympathies with rebels in Syria and elsewhere rather than by al-Qaida's call for Muslims to attack the West," wrote David Schanzer of Duke University and Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in The News and Observer of Raleigh.
None of this matters to Comey or his associates in the federal government, which has an unbreakable addiction to dire forecasts. When it comes to national security, they see every silver lining as attached not just to a cloud, but to a skyful of black thunderheads.
In 1993, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a nuclear-armed existential threat, the nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency, James Woolsey, told the Senate Intelligence Committee, "Yes, we have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes." The number of serious security threats, Woolsey claimed, had "grown, not shrunk."
http://reason.com/archives/2014/05/26/the-fbi-prospers-by-feeding-fears
Fusion Centers are being used to spy on innocent protestors & more:
Fusion Centers, which operate as ill-defined "counter-terrorism" intelligence gathering and sharing centers, conducted spy operations against Occupy protesters involving police, the Pentagon, the FBI, military employees, and business people.
So finds a report released Friday by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund based on 4,000 public documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The release was accompanied by an in-depth article by the New York Times.
"The U.S. Fusion Centers are using their vast counter-terrorism resources to target the domestic social justice movement as a criminal or terrorist enterprise," PCJF Executive Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard stated. "This is an abuse of power and corruption of democracy."
The newly published documents reveal the actual workings of the Fusion Centers – created ostensibly to coordinate anti-terrorism efforts following the September 11, 2001, attacks – in collecting and providing surveillance information on peaceful protestors.
The 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.
Until now the role of the Fusion Centers in their application of anti-terrorism authority and resources has been shrouded in secrecy. In 2012, the Senate issued an investigative report on the Fusion Centers that The Washington Post described as revealing “pools of ineptitude, waste and civil liberties intrusions.” The Department of Homeland Security immediately dismissed and “condemned the report and defended the fusion centers, saying the Senate investigators relied on out-of-date data,” from 2009 and 2010, and prior years of materials. The public was not privy to the records underlying that investigation, however, the documents that the Senate reviewed predated the documents that the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has obtained and made public. The newly released documents show that the Department of Homeland Security’s representations were far from true, that the conduct of the Fusion Centers continued unabated.
The American people can now see for themselves how the U.S. government and DHS are spending hundreds of millions of dollars of their money in Fusion Center operations. 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. The Fusion Centers should be defunded and ended immediately.
The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has initiated a nationwide campaign to End the Fusion Centers! The campaign includes a mass email and letter-writing effort to President Obama and all members of Congress calling on them to defund and end the Fusion Centers. As part of the End the Fusion Centers campaign and to broaden awareness of the dangers posed by the Fusion Centers, the PCJF has also made the new documents fully available to the public and to the media in searchable format at BigBrotherAmerica.org.
Police use anti-terrorism resources to spy on the Occupy Movement; Major city police chiefs used The Southern Nevada Counter Terrorism Center to produce regular national reports.
Although the Fusion Centers’ existence is justified by the DHS as a necessary component in stopping terrorism and violent crime, the documents show that the Fusion Centers in the Fall of 2011 and Winter of 2012 were devoted to unconstrained targeting of a grassroots movement for social change that was acknowledged to be peaceful in character.
The 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 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 (BRIC) monitored and catalogued Occupy-Associated activities from student organizing to political lectures.
The BRIC, issued scores of bulletins listing hundreds of events including a protest of “irresponsible lending practices,” a food drive and multiple “yoga, faith & spirituality” classes.
In the Fall of 2011, the 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.
We need your help! PCJF attorneys have worked for years to expose the government’s use of counter-terrorism authority to carry out illegal spying on peace and social justice movements, including the Occupy movement. Please make an urgently needed tax-deductible contribution to support these efforts in defense of freedom, dissent and constitutional rights. 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.’”
http://www.infowars.com/hidden-role-of-fusion-centers-in-nationwide-spying-operation-against-occupy-movement/
