James Powers and the murky world of 'Top Secret America'

James Powers and the murky world of 'Top Secret America'A surveillance scandal in Pennsylvania has lifted the lid on corruption and waste in the US's private intelligence industry


Matthew Harwood guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 September 2010 15.00 BST Article history

In October of 1952, Judge Learned Hand delivered his famous speech at the University of the State of New York passionately denouncing the culture of surveillance and suspicion that had stricken the United States at the onset of the cold war. "I believe that that community is already in process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbour as a possible enemy, where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection," he said.


Almost 60 years later, Pennsylvanians have come to learn how prescient Hand's words remain today, in post-9/11 America. This month, the state's citizens were shocked when they discovered that their Office of Homeland Security had been issuing intelligence bulletins to local law enforcement and private industry that covered the activities of law-abiding activist groups, most prominently those

opposed to natural gas drilling.

The bulletins, however, weren't generated by state law enforcement. Instead they were

produced by the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, a Philadelphia- and Jerusalem-based consulting firm

that received a $103,000 no-bid contract from the state homeland security director James Powers to identify threats to Pennsylvania's critical infrastructure.


Aside from the obvious civil liberties abuses, Powers's decision to outsource his agency's intelligence mission demonstrates that the murky world of "Top Secret America" has trickled down to the states. Or in other words, intelligence is now big business. In an explosive two-year investigation published in July, Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M Arkin described how the federal government has aggressively created a hidden, lucrative industry of private intelligence contractors that help the intelligence community do its job since 9/11. The downside of this system is that it's so secretive and unwieldy that sources told Priest and Arkin that agencies and their contractors do redundant work that has of little or no intelligence value for unknown sums of taxpayers' dollars.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/28/private-surveillance-pennsylvania-scandal


Note: Institute of Terrorism and Response -- !!
http://www.terrorresponse.org/

Judge Learned Hand: http://thinkexist.com/quotes/learned_hand/