Suspicious Activity
By Thom Cincotta
The factual record demonstrates that the main terrorist threat to people living in the United States comes from foreign terrorists linked to Al Qaeda or similar groups. Yet a revived focus on domestic “extremism” appears to have supplanted systematic, sustained investigation of foreign threats as the highest counter-terrorism priority.
The intelligence lapses that failed to prevent the September 11 terrorist attacks prompted an overhaul of U.S. domestic and foreign intelligence systems, including the creation of an expansive new domestic security infrastructure. Every official review of U.S. intelligence failures prior to the attacks concluded that bureaucratic cultures at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) impeded effective information sharing and analysis. However, there is reason to question whether the bewilderingly complex domestic security bureaucracy that has emerged in recent years has solved the government’s persistent information sharing problems. This vast, Byzantine bureaucracy includes new mechanisms for federal, state, and local collaboration.
At the top of the system, federal institutions sift, coordinate, analyze, and direct. At the center of the intelligence matrix, two key organs of inter-agency coordination stand out: 1) state and major metropolitan intelligence Fusion Centers loosely overseen and partly funded by the Department of Homeland Security, and 2) the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces. At the base of the system, local police departments, ranging in size from rural sheriff’s offices to major urban departments, are dedicating resources to form intelligence units.
These agencies are key players in Suspicious Activity Reporting, which is based on a concept called Intelligence-Led Policing, in which local law enforcement officials take on new intelligence-gathering roles. The SAR Initiative takes these agencies’ reporting and funnels it to Fusion Centers, key components of the national security Information-Sharing Environment (ISE) that facilitate the movement and exchange of terrorism-related information within the bureaucracy. Municipal police departments, county sheriffs, transit police, campus security agencies, and other law enforcement agencies lacking their own intelligence capacity have been encouraged to plug into the Information Sharing Environment through the intelligence-gathering Fusion Centers. The SAR Initiative is slated to go nationwide at all 72 Fusion Center sites in the spring of 2010. Before the initiative becomes fully operational, the public has a right to know whether collecting intelligence about non-criminal activity is an effective counter-terrorism tool, how their Constitutional rights will be affected by this major development, and whether the program merits continued and expanded taxpayer investment.
Platform for Prejudice maintains that, rather than fixing the existing problem of insufficient information sharing across intelligence agencies, the U.S. government has created an expanding bureaucracy of agencies whose untested information-gathering and sharing processes are flooding already overburdened intelligence systems with junk data, or “noise.” In data-systems analysis, this is a familiar and well-studied phenomenon known as GIGO, or “garbage in garbage out.” This overabundance of junk data does little to protect us from terrorists and much to threaten our civil liberties. The Christmas Day 2009 attempted bombing in Detroit shows on the one hand that information sharing hurdles have not been fixed, and secondly, part of the problem may be the overwhelming volume of data. Programs that lower the threshold for intelligence gathering and thereby lower the quality of data contribute to this problem.