The following comes from the Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ)
by Mitzi Waltz
The following comes from the Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ)
by Mitzi Waltz
Local political spying is on the rise,
with help from above.
| LIKE A VAMPIRE who has developed a tolerance for garlic, Red Squads are back. Throughout the Cold War, these guardians of political compliance spied on and harassed law-abiding activists who veered too far left of the political center. Dedicated civil rights advocates and others fought back and won on local, state, and federal fronts. But their success was often short-lived. New technologies; new laws; and increased interaction among international, federal, military, state, and local law enforcement, | intelligence
agencies, and private corporations are threatening not only to put Red
Squads back in business nationwide, but to increase the scope of their
power to pry, to harm, and to imprison.
With the "International Communist Conspiracy" gone, Red Squads need a new raison d'ˆtre. Studies by RAND the Heritage Foundation, and several private companies in the security industry have provided proponents of the Surveillance State with both a |
rationale and a blueprint for action. First, these groups have presented research to the law enforcement community documenting that the public can be frightened by the specter of terrorism into accepting and even calling for increased spying. Second, after studying anti-terrorist measures from around the world, they have decided that multi-jurisdictional taskforces offer the best way to circumvent civilian oversight. For example, the RAND report Domestic Terrorism: A National Assessment of State and Local Preparedness,explicitly touts taskforce |
| participation
as a way to get around local laws restricting political intelligence work,
and also promotes taskforces as a mechanism for putting such operations
on the local and state agenda by providing funding, equipment, publicity,
and other inducements. And as we shall see, in cities where it operates
counterterrorism taskforces, the FBI pressures local police to ditch limits
on political spying.
The taskforce concept and the cooperation it engenders between local and federal |
agencies, has another benefit, according to this report: It allows federal agencies to obtain information on a broad range of activities that do not fall under the current legal definition of "terrorism," but that are of political interest. That's because local police are much more responsive to demands from large corporations and influential organizations. These groups often have significant influence over political or budgetary matters in the local arena and are not loath to use their clout to discipline | "uncooperative"
police. The RAND study reports that local police will generally share freely
what they gather with higher-level agencies.
This back-scratching is not a new practice:A 1976 General Accounting Office report about FBI investigative protocol noted that local and state police were the bureau's second most prolific source of information, surpassed only by its own informants. In fact, in these days of grant-based "entrepreneurial" law-enforcement funding, the locals had better |
| cooperate:
Their budgets may depend on federal grants based on performing particular
types of policing.
The taskforce trend began with the post-riot commissions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As an official Department of Justice (DoJ) history of community policing puts it, "The police force's inability to handle urban unrest in an effective and appropriate manner brought demands by civic leaders and politicians for a reexamination of police practices." The 1967 Kerner Commission and 1968 Eisenhower Commission focused on the growing divide |
between
police and "civilians" as it was angrily expressed in the Watts riot and
other uprisings. The recommendations of these bodies touted police-community
dialogue as the key to curbing such unrest, expressing the hope that federal
oversight could end abuse of protesters and minorities by "rogue cops."
This goal was the foundation for community policing as we know it today.
Later commissions that concentrated on reducing street crime looked to
federal agencies to improve training and equipment in local law enforcement.
Although community policing has not been as successful in curbing street crime as |
its proponents
might have hoped, it has been a public relations success and enjoys the
support of many well-intentioned liberals. But heirs to the Red Squads
have found it an excellent mechanism as well. Savvy law enforcement types
realized that under the community policing rubric, cops, community groups,
local companies, private foundations, citizen informants, and federal agencies
could form alliances without causing public outcry. Riding on fears from
the trumped-up missing children campaign of the 1980s to the anti-drug
hysteria of the 1990s community policing has been the public face of under-the-radar
efforts to create an impenetrable web of surveillance and enforcement.
And not surprisingly in this |
| age of
globalization, the taskforce concept benefits from international support
as well. Several anti-terrorism summits held by the G-7 nations since 1984
have advocated building strong national and international multi-agency
taskforces, based on the models set up in Germany and the UK.
FINISHING THE JOB
|
COINTELPRO
revelations of the 1970s briefly turned federal
intelligence agencies into political hot potatoes. But collective memory
is short. In step with RAND's 1992 and 1995 recommendations, regional taskforces
that directly address political and social activism are now proliferating,
and existing systems have been strengthened. The previously missing ingredients
appropriate technologies and a legal framework for cooperation are now
falling into place.
For example, the Department of |
Justice's Regional Information Sharing Systems Program (RISS) includes six regional data- and equipment-sharing projects and has more than quadrupled the number of participating agencies since 1982. Most of this growth has occurred since 1990. From 1993-95 alone, RISS had a 47 percent increase in the number of database inquiries; just last year, it achieved full electronic connectivity among the centers. Each regional RISS project coordinates the intelligence efforts of hundreds of municipal,county,state, and federal agencies, as well as several Canadian |
High-tech equipment is loaded to RISS members.
| provinces,
the District of Columbia, and US intelligence operatives in Mexico. Funding
for these centers and grants for member agencies are administered through
the Bureau of Justice Assistance program.
Officially, RISS projects concentrate on drug and organized crime activities, but since Criminal Intelligence units are used in many jurisdictions to surveil political suspects as well, their personnel also have access to information that RISS systems store. RISS documents and regulations make |
it clear that its databases are used to exchange data about politically-motivated crimes. This phenomenon was particularly obvious in a set of guidelines passed by the DoJ in late 1993 to curb abuses of criminal intelligence data banks in such cases, presumably at least in part owing to the Anti Defamation League (ADL) intelligence scandal earlier that year. The rules included barring data gathered in violation of local, state or federal law; mandating security measures and penalties for unauthorized dissemination of data; and prohibiting the sharing of data on lawful | political
activity through taskforce databases.
It is uncertain whether the limits set in these regulations have been carefully observed. When sent to taskforce members, the DoJ ruling was accompanied by detailed responses to objections received from participating local police agencies. These responses appeared to serve as advice for circumventing the new rules. They helpfully note, for example, that off-site databases under private control might be used to store data, such as field interrogation records,that don't |
| meet
DoJ criteria.
ANTI-TERRORISM IN ACTION
|
recruit
officers on urban police forces to work directly with the FBI. They are
funded in part by the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act, which authorized $468 million
for the FBI's counterterrorism and counterintelligence efforts.
Until an FBI proposal to add a new center in San Francisco sparked a public fight, the program was almost completely unknown outside the Bureau. (See p. 24.) San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown opposed the center's establishment, saying that he would "not go |
along
with or support any attempt to circumvent San Francisco's current policy
on surveillance." As a result of activist pressure and repeated scandals
involving political spying, including the ADL case, San Francisco police
regulations outlaw surveillance of lawful political activities.
While FBI activities that become public are subject to citizen pressure, the agency's internal operations rarely see sunshine. The recent revelations about mishandling and manufacturing of evidence at the FBI's crime |
Probably no group was targeted as violently and extensively
by law enforce-
ment agencies as the Black Panthers, here rallying in
New York, 1970.
| lab the
first whistleblowing in years to break the code of silence hint at the
extent of the problems. Like the labs, which operated for decades without
safeguards, the FBI's internal databases conceal abuses. And since they
are not subject to the DoJ regulations or oversight, no one can assess
how much erroneous or illegally gathered information they contain.
What is apparent is that both the FBI's internal and external political intelligence |
systems are extensive: Its Terrorist Information System contains data on more than 200,000 individuals and 3,000 groups, institutions and businesses. It is cross-referenced with criminal records; interview and surveillance transcripts; information on associates, contacts, victims and witnesses related to people in the database; plus financial, telephone, and other data if collected or obtained from other sources, such as the DoJ's FinCEN databases, which are used to track and analyze financial | data
linked to criminal suspects.
Moreover, the National Crime Information Center 2000 (NCIC 2000) project now under way will extend the process of linking FBI information with other database systems. THE "GIGO" FACTOR
|
| availability
of high-tech tools, criminal intelligence officers and counterterrorism
investigators increasingly rely on so-called Confidential Reliable Informants.
In drug cases, CRIs tend to be motivated by money, personal animus, or
promises of leniency for their own offenses.
One need only look at the recent case involving Qubilah Shabazz and Michael Fitzpatrick to see what can happen when financial incentives and political |
motivation drive federal investigations.Fitzpatrick, a freelance informer with an expensive drug habit and a long history of spying for cash, attempted to coerce Shabazz (the daughter of Malcolm X and a former high school classmate of Fitzpatrick's) into supporting an assassination attempt on Louis Farrakhan. Presenting himself as a suitor and playing on Shabazz's belief that Farrakhan was complicit in her father's assassination, Fitzpatrick had his FBI handlers tape their motel room conversations. | Fitzpatrick "never worried about his own illegal conduct, because quite correctly he thought that no matter what he did, he would be able to get off by ensnaring somebody else," said Shabazz's defense attorney Ronald Kuby. Letting "a small-time dirtbag" like Fitzpatrick create and then sell an entrapment scheme to the FBI, Kuby said, "resulted in humiliation and a serious threat of imprisonment for the innocent target, and increased paranoia among those activists whose paths have crossed |
| with
Fitzpatrick's."
Unlike drug snitches, political CRIs sometimes serve private clients as well as the police, collecting cash from political opponents of the groups on which they spy. Many organizations also field private investigators who then share the (frequently dubious) information they have collected with law enforcement. Regardless of who pays the bills, one result of private intelligence operations can be an increase in agent provocateur activity, as paid informants and private security operatives attempt to justify their paychecks. In any case, whether public or private, whether snitching about drugs, politics or |
immigration,
Confidential
Local police defined "terrorism" much more broadly than the feds, often applying it to environmental -ist, animal rights,& union activities that affect large, powerful employers. Reliable Informants are often |
anything
but reliable. As computer programmers say, GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.
In the case of number-crunching computer operations, the result is bad
data; in the case of files on human beings, "garbage in" could literally
mean an unjust deportation,long jail term, or death sentence under the
1996 Anti-Terrorism Act.
Another potentially dangerous application of the GIGO principle is provided by the Clinton administration's October 1996 airline rules. They include passenger "profiling" and movement- tracking via databases, and could easily lead to airport detentions, missed flights, and false arrests. Considering |
Increasingly, local and federal law enforcement agencieslink
databases and share
information with private security firms like those that
guard corporations and
facilities with security concerns. Here high risk plutonium
strage ar Rocky Flats.
| the US
government's history of harassment and even murder of activists and the
recent revelations about the FBI lab, the easy retrieval of dubious data
takes on a very sinister cast for those with long memories.
DangerousDossiers
|
on information-gathering and data manipulation. Most of the technology needed originated in the military, and the Government Technology Transfer Program has played an important part through the National Institute of Justice's (NIJ) National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center, and also through the federal government's four regional technology centers at the Ames, Rome, Los Alamos,and Sandia National Laboratories,which had previously serviced the military and its contractors alone. | "Command
and control" software developed by the military to enhance communications
and information exchange between ground forces and their commanders can
be used to manage police operations during demonstrations or civil unrest.
It may include rapid-access data banks, scene mapping (increasingly using
satellite-based GIS technology), and field-command enhancements using high-tech
communications.
Powerful databases such as the Modernized Intelligence Data |
| Base (MIDB) project currently being revamped by TRW Systems Integration Group for Army Intelligence; NCIC 2000, which is being developed by MITRE Corp. for the FBI; and others let police programmers link activists with their causes, associates, employers, criminal records, mug shots and fingerprints, spending habits, and even tax information. These information tools which meld together details collected by local police and higher-level analysis and background from federal agencies form the backbone of the taskforces' increasing power. | The computerized command and control system implemented for the $300 million Atlanta Olympics' security system is a case in point. Tennesse's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) delivered it to the Atlanta Police Department well in advance of the Olympics as a replacement for the APD's paper-based scheduling system. The system included events-simulation capabilities, personnel-deployment features, interactive mapping, and various field communications features to facilitate | military-style control of a large urban area. It is based on software developed for the Gulf War's Operation Desert Storm, and prepared by a public-private partnership that included Oak Ridge, which is administered by Lockheed Martin for the federal government; the Center for the Application of Science Toward Law Enforcement; and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, better known as the office of the "drug czar." Why would the president's top drug-war officials and a nuclear-research lab run by a major defense contractor be involved in such a project? |
 |
 |
| Bob Hunter
of ORNL's Computational Physics and Engineering Division said in a corporate
press release that "the Office of National Drug Control Policy also wants
this system to be readily transferable to other events, such as a California
earthquake, that could shatter existing infrastructures."
The drug czar is not in charge of natural-disaster planning that's the job of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).However, reporters covering the fall |
of Oliver
North discovered that from FEMA's inception in 1979, the agency was handling
domestic counterinsurgency planning as well. In 1984, it went so far as
to hold national exercises for rounding up and detaining aliens and radicals
in rural camps.
It is not known if the Office of National Drug Control Policy is developing tools for carrying out the same sort of mission. CORPORATE CLOUT
|
data gathered by multi-jurisdictional taskforces is that, as noted earlier, local police are very susceptible to corporate pressure. For example, RAND found that local law enforcement agencies defined "terrorism" much more broadly than did their federal counterparts, often applying the label to environmentalist, animal rights, and union activities that affect large, powerful employers. For example, citizens working to close down the contaminated Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southern Washington report being trailed and harassed by local police working in concert with private security officers. Another instance of the incestuous |
| relationship that can develop between police and corporations was presented by the year-long Detroit newspaper strike. The newspaper companies involved actually reimbursed the local police to the tune of $2.1 million for services rendered in helping break the strike. Couple this with the Anti-Terrorism Act which redefines any form of violent crime and many types of previously lawful political advocacy as "terrorism" for the purposes of federal prosecution and the possibilities are truly chilling. | Large corporations such as IBM and Westinghouse have their own powerful security and counterterrorism divisions. These companies have high-level clout and, more importantly, they have government connections through their military subsidiaries. While in the past, corporations have had more influence over other federal intelligence agencies, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Intelligence Assessment Team, the Department | of Energy's intelligence unit and various military intelligence entities, they have recently found an increasingly sympathetic ear at the FBI. One of the Bureau's most important recent projects was a complete survey of potential terrorist targets that included hundreds of privately owned facilities. It has pledged to come up with plans to protect such targets and to respond to emergencies, tasks that will necessitate working even more closely with corporate and military security. |
| In addition,
both the federal government and its partner corporations have privatized
many security and surveillance functions, such as guarding military facilities
and handling international airport security. A few elite companies get
the nod from both government and corporate clients for these sorts of jobs,
most notably the Wackenhut Corporation, which is in charge of details ranging
from Exxon oil facilities to the Nevada nuclear test site. Such firms maintain
their own extensive databases, and can undertake projects on behalf of
their clients outside the purview of laws on political intelligence-gathering.
BEYOND BASIC INTELLIGENCE
|
tools,
many of which seem
Police programm -ers link activists with their causes, associates, employers, criminal records, mug shots and fingerprints, spending habits, and even tax information. tailor-made for illegal |
political
eavesdropping, is also putting a variety of new surveillance technologies
into police hands. Speech-enhancement devices for monitoring faraway or
muffled conversations, speaker-identification software similar to the "voice-print"
devices used in some corporate security systems, software-based language
translation, passive sensor systems and long-range radar surveillance technologies
are just some of the projects on tap at the Northeast Regional Center,
one of the four Government Technology Transfer Program centers run by National
Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Centers at the Rome, Ames, Sandia,
and Los Alamos National Labs.
Computer technology has also facilitated quick |
| and cheap surveillance of vast numbers of electronic communications, from phone calls, to faxes, to e-mail. A quick browse of police- technology web sites reveals surging interest in the acquisition and use of pen registers, which collect phone numbers called but don't record conversations. The Supreme Court decided in Smith v. Maryland (1979) that pen registers do not perform a search as defined under the Fourth Amendment, and can | even
be used without demonstrating probable cause, much less obtaining a warrant
a simple subpeona to the phone company will do.
Federal use of such devices doubled between 1987 and 1993. With its low cost and easy accessibility, pen register data has been embraced even more fervently by local and state police for example, the |
Nassau,
New York Enterprise Crime Unit, which covers organized crime activities,
more than doubled its use of pen registers in 1995 alone.
Most police database systems for criminal intelligence are now set up to store and cross-reference pen-register data routinely, and this information is not subject to the DoJ regulations governing RISS databases that were mentioned earlier. |
| Scrutiny
of phone records is also made easier through technology. In the Oklahoma
City bombing case investigation, the FBI examined nearly 10,000 telephone
calls to or from radical-right figures, including a lawyer suing the FBI
over the Branch Davidian deaths at Waco, Texas.
The taskforce structure itself |
dictates how such powers are brought to bear on local activists. These technologies are put into the hands of local officers who have been assigned the point position in a national "war on terrorism" by their federal taskforce partners. When the data and permission to use them are coupled with pressure from | corporations and their front groups to watch particular types of activists, not to mention the availability of budget-padding grants for pursuing political targets, you have a recipe for repression. And oversight, if any, will depend largely as it did in the days of the Red Squads on the vigilance of citizens and their effectiveness in fighting back. |