Who's Spying in Your Neighborhood?

Who's Spying in Your Neighborhood?

Fusion Centers collect and share information with local, state and federal law enforcement, and increasingly, with the military and the private sector. Although information sharing is legitimate and often necessary for law enforcement, the Fusion Centers are operating with little oversight at a time when new technology, government powers and zeal in the "war on terrorism" are combining to threaten our privacy at an unprecedented level and turn America into a surveillance society.

This page offers information on each of the state fusion centers. For more information, read our report. For key questions to ask your local fusion center, click here.

http://www.aclu.org/node/20415/

Google your state or city followed by "fusion center."


related thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=433&topic_id=336090&mesg_id=336090

I looked up my area and found that there is a fusion center here with local law enforcement agencies, ATF,
Arizona Department of Corrections/Parole and the Maricopa County Probation office. The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office is missing from this. You think if Amurika's tuffest shuriff is really interested in crime he'd be on board. Is it because he can't run this show? Or because he'd rather chase dishwashers and landscapers?

on edit: article I found (from August 2009):

http://www.azcentral.com/community/mesa/articles/2009/08/28/20090828mr-fusion0828.html

per a recent article posted in DU within the past couple of weeks about a lawsuit filed by antiwar activists. Going to the article itself in the link provided, it named a local Fusion Center.

Published on Wednesday, June 9, 2010 by The Seattle Weekly

Watching the Protesters: The Spies Who Know Too Much

by Rick Anderson

SEATTLE - Phil Chinn's Ford Taurus moved along with the traffic on Highway 12, heading west in Grays Harbor County and beneath the Devonshire Overpass, where Washington State Patrol trooper Ben Blankenship was waiting. Blankenship put his cruiser in gear and moved down to the four-lane highway, pulling in behind Chinn's vehicle. Within a few miles, he hit his emergency lights. Chinn pulled over. It was May 6, 2007, early afternoon, the beginning of what the state patrol considers a routine traffic stop, but one that would cost taxpayers a half-million dollars.

<snip>

That's when Chinn noticed, on the trooper's dashboard, a computer printout with a picture of Chinn's car—actually, his parents' vehicle, a Ford Explorer. He'd been driving it the day before. Today he was driving his Taurus. Chinn suddenly realized this was hardly a routine stop: They'd been looking for him, in either car.

Unbeknownst to Chinn and others at the time, Port protesters had a double agent in their ranks. He went by the name John Jacobs and identified himself to fellow demonstrators as a civilian employee at Fort Lewis. When he joined the movement in early 2007, he offered to provide the inside scoop on Fort operations, and over the next two years would prove a trusted, loyal anarchist. He was given access to the activists' confidential communications, and told his new friends he wanted to start his own faction of war resisters.

<snip>

By settling, the agencies did not have to reveal details of the intelligence network that aided the stop. Those details could expose a broader spying operation, says Hildes. He is now trying anew to pry loose those sensitive police and military documents with another federal lawsuit, filed in January on behalf of other protesters. Hildes alleges the Army's infiltration of the Port resistance group and its military intelligence–sharing with local cops violates the federal Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from undertaking any unauthorized role in local law enforcement.

The Army says it is currently investigating whether the actions of its double agent violated the law or military policy. But the service appears to have anticipated and prepared for such lawsuits. A new how-to manual, issued Army-wide to its military police and intelligence operatives, offers advice on how to avoid violating the federal act, citing one of the Western Washington protests as an example. It concludes that such spy activities can be justified.

To Hildes, a Bellingham attorney working with the Seattle office of ACLU of Washington, the arrests of Chinn and others have helped expose the tip of a nationwide effort by police and the military to illegally spy on and preemptively arrest peaceful opponents of America's wars—not unlike the illegal spying on Vietnam-era protesters and (as the ACLU has documented in recent years) similar spying on antiwar groups after the Sept. 11 attacks.

<snip>

What until recently was known—at least in intelligence circles—as the Washington Joint Analytical Center was renamed a year ago the Washington State Fusion Center. It is the state patrol's intelligence nerve center, housed in the Abraham Lincoln Building on Third Avenue in Seattle, on the floor below the FBI's Seattle Field Office. The Center is one of roughly 75 fusion centers across the U.S., the brainchild of the Bush administration and organized by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. The intention was to collect and distribute civilian, industrial, and military intelligence to keep America safe from criminals and terrorists, replacing the older, less-centralized intelligence ops of local communities.

http://www.seattleweekly.com/2010-06-09/news/watching-the-protesters/1

Yikes!

Deputizes the cable guy so he can shoot you in the face if he's called to serve.