NSA Systematic Abuses in Spying

Revealed: Spying Abuses ‘Systemic’ In Recent Months — Which Is Exactly What the 2008 FISA Law Was Designed to Do

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon. Posted April 16, 2009.

In The New York Times last night, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau — the reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize for informing the nation in 2005 that the NSA was illegally spying on Americans on the orders of George Bush, a revelation that produced no consequences other than the 2008 Democratic Congress’ legalizing most of those activities and retroactively protecting the wrongdoers — passed on leaked revelations of brand new NSA domestic spying abuses, ones enabled by the 2008 FISA law. The article reports that the spying abuses are “significant and systemic”; involve improper interception of “significant amounts” of the emails and telephone calls of Americans, including purely domestic communications; and that, under Bush (prior to the new FISA law), the NSA tried to eavesdrop with no warrants on a member of Congress traveling to the Middle East. The sources for the article report that ”the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the government’s wiretapping powers.”

In reacting to these leaks, I share Digby’s sentiments entirely: “It was so inevitable that I can’t even find the energy to get worked up about it.” I also don’t want this news to distract from what ought to be the singular big story of the day — namely, whether Obama will release the 3 key Bush DOJ memos that legalized specific torture techniques (as Andrew Sullivan correctly says, a failure of full disclosure ”will betray all who supported him to restore the rule of law”). Nonetheless, there are some critical facts that need to be highlighted in order to prevent distortion of the meaning of the Risen/Lichtblau article.

These widespread eavesdropping abuses enabled by the 2008 FISA bill — a bill passed with the support of Barack Obama along with the entire top Democratic leadership in the House, including Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, and substantial numbers of Democratic Senators — aren’t a bug in that bill, but rather, were one of the central features of it. Everyone knew that the FISA bill which Congressional Democrats passed — and which George Bush and Dick Cheney celebrated — would enable these surveillance abuses. That was the purpose of the law: to gut the safeguards in place since the 1978 passage of FISA, destroy the crux of the oversight regime over executive surveillance of Americans, and enable and empower unchecked government spying activities. This was not an unintended and unforeseeable consequence of that bill. To the contrary, it was crystal clear that by gutting FISA’s safeguards, the Democratic Congress was making these abuses inevitable.

Opponents of this bill were warning that exactly these abuses would occur if the bill was passed. Here’s how I summarized some of the opposition to the FISA bill on June 21, 2008 — just a couple of days before its passage:

The ACLU specifically identifies the ways in which this bill destroys meaningful limits on the President’s power to spy on our international calls and emails. Sen. Russ Feingold condemned the bill on the ground that it “fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home” because “the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power.” Rep. Rush Holt — who was actually denied time to speak by bill-supporter Silvestre Reyes only to be given time by bill-opponent John Conyers — condemned the bill because it vests the power to decide who are the “bad guys” in the very people who do the spying.

Abolishing eavesdropping safeguards was the central purpose of the FISA bill. It was why Dick Cheney and Michael McConnell were demanding its passage.  Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin at the time wrote:

Most Americans don’t realize that the FISA compromise comes in two parts. The first part greatly alters FISA by expanding the executive’s ability to wiretap and engage in much broader searches of communications than were permissible under the law before. It essentially gives congressional blessing to some but not all of what the executive was doing under President Bush. President Obama will like having Congress authorize these new powers. He’ll like it just fine. People aren’t paying as much attention to this part of the bill. But they should, because it will define the law of surveillance going forward. It is where your civil liberties will be defined for the next decade.

But key Democrats [and, needless to say, the GOP minority, which (other than Ron Paul) unanimously supported the bill] ran around spouting pure propaganda, telling the public that they were supporting this new FISA bill because it would safeguard and even enhance civil liberties protections. 

Here is what was said about the bill by the Democrats’ House Majority Leader — who, along with Dick Cheney and Jay Rockefeller, was the key force behind its passage:  “In an interview with Politico on Monday, [Steny] Hoyer called the FISA legislation a ’significant victory’ for the Democratic Party — one that neutralized an issue Republicans might have been able to use against Democrats in November while still, in his view, protecting the civil liberties of American citizens.”

Hoyer’s claims were echoed immediately by Barack Obama when he announced that he, too, would support the FISA ”revisions.” Obama said:

Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people . . .

Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President’s illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance – making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people. It also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future.

And here is the excuse which Time Magazine offered for the Democrats as part of an article mindlessly repeating what was told to them by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

What motivated Pelosi and the Democrats to incur the wrath of their liberal base and allow one of the Administration’s most controversial anti-terror policies to be extended? A mix of politics, pragmatism and some significant concessions. …

Stonewalling the Administration and letting the surveillance powers expire could have cost the Democrats swing seats they won in 2006 as well as new ones they have a chance to steal from Republicans this November. “For any Republican-leaning district this would have been a huge issue,” says a top Pelosi aide, who estimates that as many as 10 competitive races could have been affected by it.

The Washington Post Editorial Board — one of our nation’s leading watchdogs over abuses of government power (just ask them and they’ll tell you that) — issued a ringing endorsement of the new bill:

CONGRESSIONAL leaders of both parties should be commended for drafting legislation that brings the country’s surveillance laws into the 21st century while protecting civil liberties and preserving important national security prerogatives. The bill is scheduled to be voted on today in the House, and it deserves to pass.

Worst of all, Obama surrogates  — such as Cass Sunstein, Greg Craig and Nancy Soderberg — were dispatched to tell people with a straight face that the FISA-gutting bill strengthened civil liberties protections and improved eavesdropping oversight. Needless to say, hordes of trusting Obama supporters immediately seized on that blatantly false assertion (“the bill Obama supports strengthens oversight!”) and began reciting it in defense of their candidate. Now, a mere nine months later, The New York Times reports that the bill enabled and caused massive abuses of the NSA’s eavesdropping powers. Imagine that: if you gut even the minimal oversight provisions designed to check presidential eavesdropping abuses, abuses will not (as Democrats and Obama surrogates claimed) decrease, but will actually increase substantially. Who could have guessed?

Several other points to note about these new revelations:

(1) The abuses which Risen and Lichtblau report last night are far from comprehensive. These are just isolated slivers that they are able to describe as a result of individuals leaking portions of what they know.  Indeed, while the article emphasizes that the abuses are “significant and systemic” and ”went beyond the broad legal limits,” there are exceedingly few specifics in their story detailing exactly what the abuses were. In other words, most of the information about the NSA’s abuses remain concealed. We have learned only a small fraction of what took place.

(2) Note the wall of extreme secrecy behind which our Government operates. According to the article, various officials learned of the NSA abuses and then secretly told some members of Congress about them, and those individuals have been secretly discussing what should be done. The idea that the Government or Congress should inform the public about the massive surveillance abuses doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone other than the whistleblowers who leaked what they knew to The New York Times.

(3) Since being elected President, Barack Obama has done everything in his power to block judicial proceedings that would examine allegations that the NSA has been abusing its eavesdropping powers and illegally intercepting the telephone and email communications of Americans. Put another way, Obama — using radical claims of presidential powers of secrecy — has been preventing disclosure of the very abuses disclosed by this article and preventing legal scrutiny, all by claiming that even George Bush’s illegal NSA spying programs are “state secrets” that courts must not adjudicate. That’s what the “state secrets” controversy is about – Obama demanding that courts be barred from examining or ruling on any of these abuses and imposing consequences, based on his claim that these activities are so secret that they must never see the light of day.

(4) In addition to destroying most of the FISA oversight framework, the 2008 bill also sought to terminate all lawsuits that were brought against telecoms for eavesdropping abuses. Those lawsuits would have examined and led to judicial rulings on past NSA abuses, but the Democratic Congress and the Bush White House instead retroactively immunized the lawbreaking telecoms and thus ensured that there would be no consequences for any of it.

It’s true that the Times article claims that these abuses were uncovered as part of the DOJ’s preparation of the semi-annual report which the 2008 FISA law requires be submitted in secret to the FISA court. And, once they knew that the Times had learned of and was preparing to write about these abuses, Obama officials claimed in response that the abuses are being corrected and that eavesdropping activities are now in compliance with the safeguards of the law. The problem, however, is that “the law” — thanks to the Democratic Congress — now has exceedingly few safeguards in it. It allows massive domestic spying without meaningful oversight, and renders these eavesdropping abuses inevitable. That was true in June, 2008 when the FISA-gutting law was passed, and it is just as true now.

Spying on Americans

Obama Administration Endorses Continued Spying on Americans Justice Department Moves to Squash NSA Spying Suits Global Research, April 13, 2009 by Tom Burghardt Since fatuously declaring his to be a “change” administration, President Barack Obama has quickly donned the blood-spattered mantle of state secrecy and executive privilege worn by the Bush regime. On Friday April 3, the Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss one of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) landmark lawsuits against illegal spying by the National Security Agency (NSA). That suit, Jewell v. NSA, was filed last September against the NSA, NSA Director Keith B. Alexander, President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence. But with the departure of the Bush gang, the defendants now include President Barack Obama, NSA Director Keith B. Alexander, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence. When the suit was filed against the government, EFF declared: The lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, is aimed at ending the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans and holding accountable the government officials who illegally authorized it. Evidence in the case includes undisputed documents provided by former AT&T telecommunications technician Mark Klein showing AT&T has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA. (“EFF Sues NSA, President Bush and Vice President Cheney to Stop Illegal Surveillance,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, Press Release, September 18, 2008) Though the drapery in the Oval Office may have changed, the criminal acts against American citizens and legal residents by unaccountable intelligence agencies and privateers in the corporate security industry continue apace. Based on information disclosed by AT&T whistleblower Klein and other sources, including The New York Times, the suit seeks to “halt illegal, unconstitutional, and ongoing dragnet surveillance” by AT&T and other grifting telecoms of the “communications and communications records” of their customers. Klein told the Court in a sworn affidavit that AT&T’s internet traffic in San Francisco runs through fiber-optic cables at the company’s Folsom Street facility. Using a device known as a splitter, a complete copy of internet traffic that AT&T receives–email, web browsing requests and other electronic communications sent by AT&T customers, or received from people who use another internet service provider–was diverted onto a separate fiber-optic cable connected to the company’s SG-3 room, controlled by NSA. Only personnel with NSA clearances–either working for, or on behalf of the agency–have access to this room. The evidence of corporate malfeasance presented by Klein and other whistleblowers, led the civil liberties’ watchdog group to assert that AT&T’s “deployment of NSA-controlled surveillance capability” is not limited to the corporation’s San Francisco facility “and is consistent with an overall national AT&T deployment to from 15 to 20 similar sites, possibly more. This implies that a substantial fraction, probably well over half, of AT&T’s purely domestic traffic was diverted to the NSA. At the same time, the equipment in the room is well suited to the capture and analysis of large volumes of data for purposes of surveillance.” As I reported in November, among the firms supplying the surveillance products hardwired into America’s telecommunications infrastructure is Verint Systems Inc. (formerly Comverse InfoSys). The firm was founded by former Israeli intelligence officer, Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, a corporate grifter who fled the United States for Namibia after being indicted in 2006 on thirty-two counts of fraud. Alexander hatched a backdated stock options scheme that netted him $138 million in profits looted from company shareholders. While Alexander and his family may be safely ensconced in the dry but relatively safe harbor of Windhoek, Verint’s security products live on, providing “actionable intelligence solutions” to repressors world wide. According to a Business Week company profile, Verint Systems, Inc. provides analytic software-based solutions for the security and business intelligence markets. Its analytic solutions collect, retain, and analyze voice, fax, video, email, Internet, and data transmissions from voice, video and IP networks for the purpose of generating actionable intelligence for decision makers. The company primarily offers communications interception solutions, such as STAR-GATE, RELIANT, and VANTAGE; networked video solutions that include NEXTIVA; and contact center actionable intelligence solutions, which include ULTRA. Verint Systems serves government entities, global corporations, law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, transportation agencies, retail stores, utilities, and communications service providers. (Verint Systems, Inc. Business Week, Information Technology Sector, accessed April 11, 2009) Other corporate outfits providing similar intelligence “solutions” to America’s telecommunications firms and agencies such as the CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency include Verint’s rival Narus (another spooky Israeli security firm), Siemans and Ericsson. Despite the economic meltdown, Washington Technology reported March 27 that “technology companies are poised to tap into the billions of dollars that will flow from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into new federal, state and local initiatives.” Many of the initiatives include new corporate welfare projects devised by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI to “keep America safe.” In this context, the Obama administration’s drive to preserve the NSA’s ability to illegally spy on Americans is intimately connected to the corporatist bottom line. After all, Democrat or Republican, the business of government is business. Arguments in San Francisco federal district court by U.S. Attorneys have been described by constitutional law experts as being “worse than Bush.” In their motion to dismiss Jewell, the Obama administration cited the same perverse logic of the previous regime: that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue “out of hand.” Douglas Letter, U.S. Terrorism Litigation Counsel for Obama’s Department of Justice, argued that simply allowing the case to proceed “would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.” Yet more pernicious–and unprecedented–arguments followed. “The DoJ,” according to EFF, now claim “that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying–that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.” Arguing that the state possesses “sovereign immunity,” the “change” administration now claims that under provisions of the disgraceful USA PATRIOT Act–a draconian law rammed through Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–the state is “immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act.” In practice, this means that under a new, ludicrous interpretation of the Orwellian PATRIOT Act, the government can never be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statute. As Glenn Greenwald points out in Salon, In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad “state secrets” privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and–even if what they’re doing is blatantly illegal and they know it’s illegal–you are barred from suing them unless they “willfully disclose” to the public what they have learned. (“New and worse secrecy and immunity claims from the Obama DOJ,” Salon, April 6, 2009) EFF attorney Kevin Bankston told Salon: “This is the first time [the DOJ] claimed sovereign immunity against Wiretap Act and Stored Communications Act claims. In other words, the administration is arguing that the U.S. can never be sued for spying that violates federal surveillance statutes, whether FISA, the Wiretap Act or the SCA.” In their motion to dismiss, DoJ attorneys–like their predecessors–argue on Page 13 of the Government’s brief that “An assertion of the state secretes privilege “must be accorded the ‘utmost deference’ and the court’s review of the claim of privilege is narrow.” Kasza, 133 F.3d at 1166; see also Al-Haramain, 507 F3d at 1203 (‘[W]e acknowledge the need to defer to the Executive on matters of foreign policy and national security and surely cannot legitimately find ourselves second guessing the Executive in this arena’).” On Page 16, the state contends that, “Finally, all of the plaintiffs’ claims require the disclosure of whether or not AT&T assisted the Government in alleged intelligence activities, and the DNI again has demonstrated that disclosure of whether the NSA has an intelligence relationship with a particular private company would also cause exceptional harm to national security–among other reasons by revealing to foreign adversaries which channels of communication may or may not be secure.” If U.S. District Judge Judge Vaughn Walker rules in the state’s favor and dismisses Jewell, constitutional protections under the fourth amendment guaranteeing “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” would be a meaningless charade. There is however, a precedent for the Obama administration’s blatant violation of our rights: that of their predecessors in the Bush regime’s Office of Legal Counsel. According to an October 23, 2001 Department of Justice memorandum titled Authority for Use of Military Force To Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States, authored by torture-enabler and OLC head, John C. Yoo, the military could be deployed domestically to interrogate, detain, raid and spy on Americans, without having to comply with constitutional guarantees under the Bill of Rights. Yoo advised the Oval Office: Fourth, we turn to the question whether the Fourth Amendment would apply to the use of the military domestically against foreign terrorists. Although the situation is novel (at least in the nation’s recent experience), we think that the better view is that the Fourth Amendment would not apply in these circumstances. Thus, for example, we do not think that a military commander carrying out a raid on a terrorist cell would be required to demonstrate probable cause or to obtain a warrant. (Page 2) Additionally, having decided that the President enjoys plenary, that is, unlimited power to carry out the “war on terror” Yoo concludes, after dispensing with Fourth Amendment protections that, First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully. … The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically. Terrorists operate within the continental United States itself, and escape detection by concealing themselves within the domestic society and economy. While, no doubt these terrorists pose a direct military threat to the national security, their methods of infiltration and their surprise attacks on civilian and governmental facilities make it difficult to identify any front line. Unfortunately, the terrorist attacks of September 11 have created a situation in which the battlefield has occurred, and may occur, at dispersed locations and intervals within the American homeland itself. As a result, efforts to fight terrorism may require not only the usual wartime regulations of domestic affairs, but also military actions that have normally occurred abroad. (Pages 24, 25) Indeed, the Bush administration’s so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) transformed the United States into a limitless battlespace where anything goes. From warrantless wiretapping of telephone and internet communications, the seizure of business and medical records, as well as the illegal–and indefinite–detention of citizens and legal residents as “unlawful enemy combatants,” Yoo’s memorandum provided the steel and concrete that gave form to the architectural blueprints for a presidential dictatorship. Instructively, these memos were not withdrawn until 2008. However, in moving to suppress Jewell, Obama’s Justice Department and their private partners in the telecommunications industry in practice, are continuing the same repressive policies. As Wired reported back in January, “NSA whistleblower Russell Tice” revealed “that the National Security Agency spied on individual U.S. journalists, entire U.S. news agencies as well as ‘tens of thousands’ of other Americans.” Tice said on Wednesday that the NSA had vacuumed in all domestic communications of Americans, including, faxes, phone calls and network traffic. Today Tice said that the spy agency also combined information from phone wiretaps with data that was mined from credit card and other financial records. He said information of tens of thousands of U.S. citizens is now in digital databases warehoused at the NSA. “This [information] could sit there for ten years and then potentially it marries up with something else and ten years from now they get put on a no-fly list and they, of course, won’t have a clue why,” Tice said. In most cases, the person would have no discernible link to terrorist organizations that would justify the initial data mining or their inclusion in the database. (Kim Zetter, “NSA Whistleblower: Wiretaps Were Combined with Credit Card Records of U.S. Citizens,” Wired, January 23, 2009) As George Washington University Law Professor and constitutional scholar, Jonathan Turley, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on “Countdown” April 7, I think right now, the Bush people are bringing out their mission-accomplished sign, because they’ve not only gotten Obama to protect Bush and Cheney and others from any criminal investigation on torture, but he’s now gone even further than they did in the protection of unlawful surveillance. This is the ultimate victory for the Bush officials. They have Barack Obama adopting the same extremist arguments, and in fact exceeding the extremist arguments made by President Bush… You cannot any longer suggest that President Obama is advancing the civil liberties and the privacy interests that he promised to advance. This is a terrible roll-back. It’s a terrible decision. (“Countdown” with Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, Tuesday, April 7, 2009) And with Congress’ passage of the abominable FISA Amendments Act (FAA) last July, handing the NSA carte blanche to continue warrantless spying and driftnet surveillance of Americans, granting grifting telecom giants such as AT&T, Sprint and Verizon get-out-of-jail-free-cards in the form of retroactive immunity for their collusive and wholly illegal activity with NSA and other state agencies, America’s post-constitutional new order continues apace. As I reported last September, “the extent of these illegal programs have revealed, the ‘enemy’ is none other than the American people themselves!” Three months into the Obama administration, the contours of a new and improved “liberal” police state reveal the same rotten, nidorous core as that of their predecessors. This time around however, the mailed fist of the capitalist state is gussied up with Smiley Face emblems and Hello Kitty stickers. Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research,, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press.

Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Tom Burghardt

© Copyright Tom Burghardt, Antifascist Calling…, 2009

Whats Wrong With Fusion Centers

What’s Wrong With Fusion Centers – Executive Summary (12/5/2007)

A new institution is emerging in American life: Fusion Centers. These state, local and regional institutions were originally created to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different state, local and federal law enforcement agencies. Though they developed independently and remain quite different from one another, for many the scope of their mission has quickly expanded – with the support and encouragement of the federal government – to cover “all crimes and all hazards.” The types of information they seek for analysis has also broadened over time to include not just criminal intelligence, but public and private sector data, and participation in these centers has grown to include not just law enforcement, but other government entities, the military and even select members of the private sector.

These new fusion centers, over 40 of which have been established around the country, raise very serious privacy issues at a time when new technology, government powers and zeal in the “war on terrorism” are combining to threaten Americans’ privacy at an unprecedented level.

Moreover, there are serious questions about whether data fusion is an effective means of preventing terrorism in the first place, and whether funding the development of these centers is a wise investment of finite public safety resources. Yet federal, state and local governments are increasing their investment in fusion centers without properly assessing whether they serve a necessary purpose.

There’s nothing wrong with the government seeking to do a better job of properly sharing legitimately acquired information about law enforcement investigations – indeed, that is one of the things that 9/11 tragically showed is very much needed.

But in a democracy, the collection and sharing of intelligence information – especially information about American citizens and other residents – need to be carried out with the utmost care. That is because more and more, the amount of information available on each one of us is enough to assemble a very detailed portrait of our lives. And because security agencies are moving toward using such portraits to profile how “suspicious” we look.1

New institutions like fusion centers must be planned in a public, open manner, and their implications for privacy and other key values carefully thought out and debated. And like any powerful institution in a democracy, they must be constructed in a carefully bounded and limited manner with sufficient checks and balances to prevent abuse.

Unfortunately, the new fusion centers have not conformed to these vital requirements.

Since no two fusion centers are alike, it is difficult to make generalized statements about them. Clearly not all fusion centers are engaging in improper intelligence activities and not all fusion center operations raise civil liberties or privacy concerns. But some do, and the lack of a proper legal framework to regulate their activities is troublesome. This report is intended to serve as a primer that explains what fusion centers are, and how and why they were created. It details potential problems fusion centers present to the privacy and civil liberties of ordinary Americans, including:

• Ambiguous Lines of Authority. The participation of agencies from multiple jurisdictions in fusion centers allows the authorities to manipulate differences in federal, state and local laws to maximize information collection while evading accountability and oversight through the practice of “policy shopping.”

• Private Sector Participation. Fusion centers are incorporating private-sector corporations into the intelligence process, breaking down the arm’s length relationship that protects the privacy of innocent Americans who are employees or customers of these companies, and increasing the risk of a data breach.

• Military Participation. Fusion centers are involving military personnel in law enforcement activities in troubling ways.

• Data Fusion = Data Mining. Federal fusion center guidelines encourage whole sale data collection and manipulation processes that threaten privacy.

• Excessive Secrecy. Fusion centers are hobbled by excessive secrecy, which limits public oversight, impairs their ability to acquire essential information and impedes their ability to fulfill their stated mission, bringing their ultimate value into doubt.

The lack of proper legal limits on the new fusion centers not only threatens to undermine fundamental American values, but also threatens to turn them into wasteful and misdirected bureaucracies that, like our federal security agencies before 9/11, won’t succeed in their ultimate mission of stopping terrorism and other crime.

The information in this report provides a starting point from which individuals can begin to ask informed questions about the nature and scope of intelligence programs being conducted in their communities. The report concludes with a list of recommendations for Congress and state legislatures.

1 Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt, EVEN BIGGER, EVEN WEAKER: THE EMERGING SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY: WHERE ARE WE NOW? AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION, (Sept. 2007), available at http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/privacy/bigger_weaker. pdf. 

Fusion Centers

Fusion Center locations