Police Chiefs have created the "Criminal Intelligence Enterprise" to spy on Americans
An organization representing police chiefs from major cities around the U.S. is promoting an initiative to strengthen intelligence collection at the local level, increasing the integration of state and local law enforcement into the larger structure of the U.S. intelligence community.
In 2011, the Major Cities Chiefs’ Association (MCCA) began the initiative aimed at strengthening domestic intelligence collection efforts and creating a “more defined, whole-of-government architecture that interconnects and better integrates state and local criminal intelligence and counterterrorism operations.” The Major Cities Chiefs’ Criminal Intelligence Enterprise (CIE) is an effort to create “better connectivity” between “state and local counterterrorism and intelligence units and among locally-led operations, fusion centers, and federally-led operations” such as Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) and Field Intelligence Groups (FIGs). The initiative is being organized around the pre-existing infrastructure of the Major Cities Chiefs’ Intelligence Commanders Group (MCCICG), a working group of the MCCA that played a significant role in creating the unified national suspicious activity reporting process.
A nine page proposal for the CIE written in March 2012 by MCCICG Steering Committee Chair Greg McCurdy argues that the “unprecedented growth of transnational organized crime” poses a significant threat to national security and public safety” requiring that “criminal intelligence and information sharing should be enhanced, and collaboration with state and local law enforcement should continue to grow and improve.” Criminal threats including “well-organized and disproportionately funded drug trafficking, human smuggling, and weapons trafficking” continue to threaten American communities as well as “violent extremism” and homegrown terrorism. In order to dismantle these criminal enterprises, McCurdy argues that “community engagement programs” including those designed to enable citizens to report suspicious activities are insufficient:
“While community engagement programs help in this identification, relying solely on citizens to report suspicious activity or a crime may leave law enforcement dependent on a limited window of opportunity to respond. As such, to ensure that law enforcement has the information needed to disrupt criminal activity before it occurs, state and local law enforcement agencies must also conduct criminal and terrorism-related investigations and intelligence operations when appropriate. Provided that the collection of information is adherent to strict privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties guidelines; these efforts offer a proactive approach for identifying violent extremism and the activities of criminal enterprises.”
To address this deficiency, McCurdy outlines four objectives for the CIE. The first objective is increasing “connectivity among state and local counterterrorism and intelligence units and among locally-led operations, fusion centers, and federally-led operations.” Discussing this objective, McCurdy emphasizes that “transnational crime and terrorism know no geographic boundaries” and therefore “the law enforcement intelligence community must virtually eliminate theirs.” He adds that “actions that occur in a different state or, for that matter, in a different country now become relative.”
The second objective of the CIE is the “development and sharing of local threat domain assessments so that the collection component of each major locality can better address the specific threats that affect their individual communities.” This involves local law enforcement agencies working with fusion centers to assess their “respective domains to identify what criminal or terrorist groups pose the greatest threat” and establish “Standing Information Needs (SINs), Prioritized Information Needs (PINs), and Intelligence Directives.”
Third, the CIE will coordinate the “development, implementation, and sharing of local collection plans” for intelligence gathering. The CIE will “provide the necessary template that state and local counterterrorism and intelligence units need to establish a standardized systematic process that identifies the tools and methods that can be used to effectively and properly collect crime and terrorism information from within their threat domain.” Increased interconnection generated by the CIE will “enable local law enforcement agencies to expand their geographical reach while physically maintaining their jurisdictional boundaries.” Utilizing ”interconnected collection efforts”, the CIE will allow local law enforcement to “effectively but appropriately” transcend borders.
The fourth objective of the CIE initiative is to develop and deploy a “secure, socially driven interface” resembling Facebook that enables “state and local intelligence and counterterrorism personnel to effectively network while still adhering to strict privacy guidelines.” McCurdy says that “in the state and local criminal intelligence and counterterrorism environment where collaboration is of the utmost importance, the use of socially driven networking becomes advantageous” allowing “a detective in Las Vegas . . . to securely customize a profile page, build a network of ‘friends’ who are in fact colleagues in other agencies, and network by sharing nonsensitive information through wall posts, messages, and status updates . . .”
Besides McCurdy’s proposal, little information about the initiative is publicly available, though the initiative is mentioned in the 2012 annual report for the MCCA as a “continuing priority.” Congressional testimony from the former head of the MCCA shows that the group was asking as early as 2009 to use the MCCICG to construct a “integrated national intelligence capability.”
http://publicintelligence.net/criminal-intelligence-enterprise/
Intelligence-led policing: The new intelligence architecture
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/bja/210681.pdf
Law enforcement intelligence: A guide for state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies
http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/default.asp?item=1404&field=priority&order=1&parent=0
The Criminal Intelligence Coordinating Council (CICC) and Global Intelligence Working Group (GIWG)
https://it.ojp.gov/cicc
Policing terrorism in the United States: The Los Angeles police department's convergence strategy
http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=1729&issue_id=22009
ACLU report: Surveillance on the northern border White River Junction, Vermont
The "Surveillance on the Northern Border" report describes the dangerous shift in post-9/11 security policy in the Green Mountain State. Along with the report, which describes the creation of the state's fusion center, and the use of automated license plate readers, drones, face recognition, and enhanced border patrols, the ACLU produced this incredible video demonstrating all the ways in which the government tracks and monitors the behavior of ordinary people in the northern states. Note while watching it that nearly everything discussed in the clip applies to all of us in the United States, not just to our friendly neighbors in the north.
The Vermonters ask a critical question that has largely gone unasked in the decade plus since 9/11: Has the trickle down of the surveillance state to the local level, costing us billions of dollars every year, had any measurable effect on our safety?We know for a fact that the new surveillance state hurts our privacy, but there is little to no evidence to suggest that it makes us safe.
"Surveillance on the Northern Border" provides yet more evidence that the rapidly advancing surveillance state isn't only a waste of money -- it is an anti-democratic threat to our most fundamental rights.
http://www.acluvt.org/blog/2013/09/17/surveillance-on-the-northern-border-report-released/
DHS Northern Border Strategy:
http://www.pnwbha.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/dhs-northern-border-strategy.pdf
You’re much more likely to be killed by lightning than by a terrorist:
Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control show that Americans are 110 times more likely to die from contaminated food than terrorism. And see this.
The Jewish Daily Forward noted in May that – even including the people killed in the Boston bombing – you are more likely to be killed by a toddler than a terrorist. And see these statistics from CNN.
The U.S. Department of State reports that only 17 U.S. citizens were killed worldwide as a result of terrorism in 2011. That figure includes deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq and all other theaters of war.
In contrast, the American agency which tracks health-related issues – the U.S. Centers for Disease Control – rounds up the most prevalent causes of death in the United States:
Comparing the CDC numbers to terrorism deaths means:
– You are 35,079 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack
– You are 33,842 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/09/youre-68-times-more-likely-to-be-hit-and-killed-by-lightning-than-murdered-by-a-terrorist.html
Americans are 110 times more likely to die from contaminated food than terrorism:
In 2011, the year of Osama bin Laden's death, the State Department reported that 17 Americans were killed in all terrorist incidents worldwide. The same year, a single outbreak of listeriosis from tainted cantaloupe killed 33 people in the United States. Foodborne pathogens also sickened 48.7 million, hospitalized 127,839 and caused a total of 3,037 deaths. This is a typical year, not an aberration.
We have more to fear from contaminated cantaloupe than from al-Qaeda, yet the United States spends $75 billion per year spread across 15 intelligence agencies in a scattershot attempt to prevent terrorism, illegally spying on its own citizens in the process. By comparison, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is struggling to secure $1.1 billion in the 2014 federal budget for its food inspection program, while tougher food processing and inspection regulations passed in 2011 are held up by agribusiness lobbying in Congress. The situation is so dire that Jensen Farms, the company that produced the toxic cantaloupe that killed 33 people in 2011, had never been inspected by the FDA.
In the past 10 years, outbreaks of foodborne illness have affected all 50 states, with hundreds of food recalls annually involving many of America's leading brands, including Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Taylor Farms Organics, Ralph's, Kroger, Food 4 Less, Costco, Dole, Kellogg's and dozens of others.
There have been multi-state recalls of contaminated cheese, organic spinach, salad greens, lettuce, milk, ground beef, eggs, organic brown rice, peanut butter, mangoes, cantaloupe and hundreds of other popular foods.
Americans are 110 times more likely to die from contaminated food than terrorism, with 1 in 6 sickened every year at an annual cost to the economy of nearly $80 billion. Children and the elderly are the most vulnerable because their immune systems are weakest.
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/18715-cantaloupe-vs-al-qaeda