Follow the fusion

On Monday, we yakked it up about fusion centers, coming to a Pennsylvania city near you (if you live near Harrisburg, where the FBI and state police will get cuddly while poring over data).

Yesterday national ACLU updated its report What's Wrong with Fusion Centers and announced it to the press. More info is over at national's blog:

Of course we want law enforcement sharing truly relevant information. But hoarding information like medical records, tax information, credit scores, etc. is effectively throwing more hay onto an already massive stack and that won’t make us safer.

Fusion centers, why do we distrust you so? Let me count the ways:

* Ambiguous lines of authority. Who is the boss of you exactly? So many jurisdictions and no clear lines of authority make us nervous.
* Private Sector Participants. You’re BFF with those guys. Using private-sector companies and corporations to get information about me makes me worry about who has access to that information. And, frankly, it only makes me like you less.
* Military Participation. Ever hear of Posse Comitatus?
* Data Fusion = Data Mining. A lot of hay means a lot of ways to sift through that hay and a lot of hay sifters sifting through that hay. Listen. Bottom line — enough with the hay. You are data mining. Knock it off.
* Excessive Secrecy. You keep telling me to trust you baby, but you’re always keeping secrets. Without oversight and uniform guidelines that means no real rules and that doesn’t work when you’ve got our information at your fingertips.

Amanda from national picked up on this key point:

Here’s the creepiest part. Fusion centers aren’t just a mystery to us, they’re a mystery to the people running them, the people working in them and the people’s whose information is stored within them.

That's what I found Friday while hangin' at PSP headquarters. The communications trooper I spoke with couldn't clarify what the oversight mechanism is at the new PSP-FBI fusion center at PSP HQ. Translation: Abuse our privacy at will.

Andy in Harrisburg

Confusion center

In my almost four years at the ACLU, I've attended numerous press conferences where proposals we oppose were being announced. Because of the proximity of this office to the state capitol, each opponent press conference that I can recall attending has been at the state capitol, and that's basically neutral ground.

But on Friday I attended a press conference outside that comfort zone when I went deep into the lair of the Pennsylvania State Police for an announcement by PSP and the FBI that PSP's intelligence center has been certified by the FBI as a "fusion center." Essentially, this means that PSP officers and civilian workers and FBI agents will work side-by-side at PSP's intelligence center.

Before the press conference began, someone from the FBI asked me where I was from, and to their credit, I wasn't kicked out once I was identified as ACLU. Of course, with a room full of reporters, that would have made for a better story than the announcement of the certification. FYI, I didn't have to lie my way in either. At the security desk, they simply asked for a driver's license. Maybe I should have ID'ed myself as a blogger for Speaking Freely.

So what's wrong with fusion centers? Funny I should ask since that's the name of a report that national published late last year. The mere existence of fusion centers is not a civil liberties concern. Trouble lurks when there are not proper checks-and-balances to ensure that the information gathered by these centers is not abused. Around the country, some fusion centers have brought corporate and/or military personnel into the process. Federal guidelines also encourage the practice of data-mining, and some fusion centers have collected non-criminal information on private citizens.

I had to chuckle when one of the officers from PSP said that they track hits on the feds' terrorism watch list, in light of our announcement earlier this month that the watch list now has over one million people on it, including Nelson Mandela, the late 9/11 hijackers, the late Saddam Hussein, and Senator Ted Kennedy.

After the press conference and tour were over, I was escorted out by a communications officer from PSP. I asked her about oversight, and while she didn't directly answer that question, she said that this is all information they can collect, anyway.

Unfortunately, we know that both the FBI and PSP have conducted surveillance on and infiltrated Pennsylvania residents who were simply exercising their first amendment rights. Before the Iraq War, the FBI watched the Thomas Merton Center, a peace group in Pittsburgh. Before the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, PSP infiltrated an activist street theater group, and a month before that, PSP abused activists at the National Governors' Association meeting in State College.

We'll need to watch the people who are doing the watching.

Andy in Harrisburg