US police are keeping tabs on ordinary people

In the Atlanta suburbs of DeKalb County, local officials wasted no time after the 9/11 attacks. Within weeks of the attacks, officials there boasted that they had set up the nation's first local Department of Homeland Security. Dozens of other communities followed, and, like them, DeKalb County put in for–and got–a series of generous federal counterterrorism grants. The county received nearly $12 million from Washington, using it to set up, among other things, a police intelligence unit. In 2003, one of its plainclothes agents was seen photographing a handful of vegan activists handing out anti-meat leaflets in front of a HoneyBaked Ham store. Police arrested two of the vegans and demanded that they turn over notes, on which they'd written the license-plate number of an undercover car, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is now suing the county. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial neatly summed up the incident: "So now we know: Glazed hams are safe in DeKalb County." Glazed hams aren't the only items that US local cops are protecting from dubious threats. US News & World Report has identified nearly a dozen cases in which city and county police, in the name of homeland security, have surveilled or harassed animal-rights and anti-war protesters, union activists, and even library patrons surfing the internet. Unlike with Washington's warrantless domestic surveillance program, little attention has been focused on the role of state and local authorities in the war on terrorism. Federal officials have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into once discredited state and local police intelligence operations. Millions more have gone into building up regional law enforcement databases to unprecedented levels. Civil liberties watchdogs warn that with so many cops looking for terrorists, real and imagined, abuses may be inevitable. "The restrictions on police spying are being removed," says attorney Richard Gutman, who led a 1974 class action lawsuit against the Chicago police that obtained hundreds of thousands of pages of intelligence files. "And I don't think you can rely on the police to regulate themselves." Intelligence gathering by local police departments is back. Interviews with police officers, homeland security officials and privacy experts reveal a transformation among state and local law enforcement. Since 9/11, the US Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have poured over a half-billion dollars into building up local and state police intelligence operations. The funding has helped create more than 100 police intelligence units reaching into nearly every state. To qualify for federal homeland security grants, states were told to assemble lists of "potential threat elements"–individuals or groups suspected of possible terrorist activity. In response, state authorities have come up with thousands of loosely defined targets, ranging from genuine terrorists to biker gangs and environmentalists. Guidelines for protecting privacy and civil liberties have lagged far behind the federal money. After four years of doling out homeland security grants to police departments, federal officials released guidelines for the conduct of local intelligence operations only last year; the standards are voluntary and are being implemented slowly. The resurgence of police intelligence operations is being accompanied by a revolution in law enforcement computing. Rap sheets, intelligence reports and public records are rapidly being pooled into huge, networked computer databases. "This is a new paradigm, a new philosophy of policing," says Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, who previously served as chief of the New York Police Department. In that job, Bratton says, he spent five percent of his time on counterterrorism; today, in Los Angeles, he spends 50 percent. The change is "huge, absolutely huge," says Michigan State University's David Carter, the author of Law Enforcement Intelligence. The national plan now being pushed by Washington calls for every law enforcement agency to develop some intelligence capability. Experts estimate that well over 100 police departments, from big-city operations to small county sheriffs' offices, have now established intelligence units of one kind or another. Hundreds of local detectives are also working with federal agents on FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which have nearly tripled from 34 before 9/11 to 100 today. And over 6,000 state and local cops now have federal security clearances, allowing them to see classified intelligence reports. Many of the nation's new intelligence units are dubbed "fusion centers." Run by state or local law enforcement, these regional hubs pool information from multiple jurisdictions. From a mere handful before 9/11, fusion centers now exist in 31 states, with a dozen more to follow. Some focus exclusively on terrorism; others track all manner of criminal activity. Federal officials hope to eventually see 70 fusion centers nationwide, providing a coast-to-coast intelligence blanket. Intelligence centers are among the hottest trends in law enforcement. The federal Department of Homeland Security, which has bankrolled start-ups of many of the centers, has big plans for the emerging network. Jack Tomarchio, the agency's new deputy director of intelligence, told a law enforcement conference in March of plans to embed up to three DHS agents and intelligence analysts at every site. "The states want a very close synergistic relationship with the feds," he explained. "Nobody wants to play by the old rules." The problem, skeptics say, is that no one is quite sure what the new rules are. "Hardly anyone knows what a fusion center should do," says Paul Wormeli of the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute, a Justice Department-backed training and technology center. Another law enforcement veteran, deeply involved with the fusion centers, expressed similar frustration. "The money has been moved without guidance or structure, technical assistance or training," says the official, who is not authorized to speak publicly. There are now guidelines, he adds, "but they're not binding on anyone." In the past year, the Justice Department has issued standards for local police on fusion centers and privacy issues, but they are only advisory. Most federal funding for the centers now comes from the Department of Homeland Security, but DHS also requires no intelligence standards from its grantees. Further blurring the lines over what constitutes "homeland security" has been a push by Washington for states to identify possible terrorists. In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security began requiring states to draft strategic plans that included figures on how many "potential threat elements" existed in their backyards. The definition of suspected terrorists was fairly loose–PTEs were groups or individuals who might use force or violence "to intimidate or coerce" for a goal "possibly political or social in nature." In response, some states came up with alarming numbers. Most of the reports are not available publicly, but US News obtained nine state homeland security plans and found that local officials have identified thousands of "potential" terrorists. There are striking disparities, as well. South Carolina, for example, found 68 PTEs, but neighboring North Carolina uncovered 506. Vermont and New Hampshire found none at all. Most impressive was Texas, where in 2004 investigators identified 2,052 potential threat elements. One top veteran of the FBI's counterterrorism force calls the Texas number "absurd." Included among the threats cited by the states, sources say, are biker gangs, militia groups, and "save the whales" environmentalists. "The PTE methodology was flawed," says a federal intelligence official familiar with the process, "and it's no longer being used." Nonetheless, these "threat elements" have, in some cases, become the basis for intelligence gathering by local and state police.