"Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States." -- Monitoring America, Washington Post 12/20/10

August 25, 2011: DDF, Allies Nudge Obama on PCLOB
DDF, along with a coalition of 18 other organizations and individuals, sent a letter to President Obama urging him to nominate individuals to the remaining three positions on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) without further delay. The board should play a vital, independent role in oversight of privacy and civil liberties for national security programs and policies -- but it has been dormant for years. DDF Board Vice President James Dempsey was nominated to the PCLOB last year. Read the letter here. A Washington Times story and a CBS talk radio show featured commentary about this issue.

August 5, 2011: ICE Announces that Secure Communities is NOT Optional
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) declared today that states and localities are NOT allowed to opt-out of the controversial Secure Communities program. ICE expects the program, which forces local police to share fingerprint information with ICE, to become fully operational in every district of the country by 2013. Read our response (as a member of the Rights Working Group) here

May 6, 2011: DOJ Report Shows Dramatic Increase in Domestic Surveillance in 2010
According to a new Department of Justice report, domestic surveillance activity increased last year. A few numbers: the FBI sought information about over 14,000 U.S. persons using over 24,000 National Security Letters. The Government made over 1,500 requests for surveillance to the FISA court. None of these requests were denied.

Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert at the Federation for American Scientists notes, "While the 2010 figures are below the record high levels of a few years ago, they are considerably higher than they were, say, a decade ago. There is no indication that intelligence oversight activity and capacity have grown at the same rate," (my emphasis).

 

 

Virginia 2009 Threat Assesment
Beware of Boy and Girl Scouts conducting 'get out the vote' drives! The Virginia Fusion Center 2009 Terrorism Threat Assessment warns that they may have links to terrorism1. Scout troops are among the many worrisome features of life in Virginia that folks at the Fusion Center think may present an opportunity for terrorists. There are universities ("recognized as a radicalization node for almost every type of extremist group"), a diverse population ("affords terrorist operatives the opportunity to assimilate easily into society") and politically extreme groups, such as the New Black Panther Party, Nation of Islam, Life & Liberty Ministries, Greenpeace and Blue Ridge Earth First. Strikingly, most of the threats uncovered by the fusion center are based on political ideology or race, religion or country of origin. Read more…

Missouri Report
Another disturbing Fusion Center memo has come to light, this time from the Missouri Information Analysis Center, a fusion center established in 2005. "The Modern Militia Movement" educates Missouri law enforcement agents on the recent history of the militia movement including criminal activities, but goes on to try to help law enforcement to identify members of militias based on political affiliation and advocacy. Read more…

July 2011

National Security Letters:
The National Security Letter provision of the Patriot Act radically expanded the FBI's authority to demand personal customer records from Internet Service Providers, financial institutions and credit companies without prior court approval. Through NSLs the FBI can compile vast dossiers about innocent people and obtain sensitive information such as the websites a person visits, a list of e-mail addresses with which a person has corresponded, or even unmask the identity of a person who has posted anonymous speech on a political website. The provision also allows the FBI to forbid or "gag" anyone who receives an NSL from telling anyone about the record demand. Since the Patriot Act was authorized in 2001, further relaxing restrictions on the FBI's use of the power, the number of NSLs issued has seen an astronomical increase. The Justice Department's Inspector General has reported that between 2003 and 2006, the FBI issued nearly 200,000 NSLs. The inspector General has also found serious FBI abuses of the NSL power. – From the ACLU website