Now where have I heard this tune before?
Terror watch uses local eyes
Hundreds of police, firefighters,
paramedics and even utility workers have been trained and recently
dispatched as "Terrorism Liaison Officers" in Colorado and a handful of
other states to hunt for "suspicious activity" — and are reporting
their findings into secret government databases.
It's a tactic intended to feed better data into terrorism
early-warning systems and uncover intelligence that could help fight
anti-U.S. forces. But the vague nature of the TLOs' mission, and their
focus on reporting both legal and illegal activity, has generated
objections from privacy advocates and civil libertarians. "Suspicious activity" is broadly defined in TLO training as
behavior that could lead to terrorism: taking photos of no apparent
aesthetic value, making measurements or notes, espousing extremist
beliefs or conversing in code, according to a draft Department of
Justice/Major Cities Chiefs Association document. All this is anathema to opponents of domestic surveillance.
Yet U.S. intelligence and homeland security officials say they
support the widening use of TLOs — state-run under federal agreements —
as part of a necessary integrated network for preventing attacks. "We're simply providing information on crime-related issues or
suspicious circumstances," said Denver police Lt. Tony Lopez, commander
of Denver's intelligence unit and one of 181 individual TLOs deployed
across Colorado. "We don't snoop into private citizens' lives. We aren't living in a communist state."
Local watchdogs
Among recent activities the Colorado contingent detailed:
Thefts of copper that could be used in bomb-making.
Civilians impersonating police officers and stopping vehicles — of particular concern with the pending Democratic National Convention in Denver.
Graffiti showing a man holding an AK-47 rifle.
Men filming the Dillon dam that holds Denver's water.
Overheard threats.
Widespread thefts of up to 20 propane gas tanks.
Future terrorism "is going to be noticed earliest at the most
local level," said Robert Riegle, director of state and local programs
for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Washington. Civil liberties watchdogs warn of unprecedented new threats to privacy.
"The problem is, you're drafting individuals whose job isn't law
enforcement to spy on ordinary Americans and report their activities to
the government," said John Verdi, director of the open-government
project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. In Colorado, TLOs report not only illegal but legal activity,
such as bulk purchases along Colorado's Front Range of up to 150
disposable cellphones. TLO supervisors said these bulk buys were
suspicious because similar phones are used as remote detonators for
bombs overseas and can be re-sold to fund terrorism. Taking photos or videos can be deemed suspicious because
"surveillance is a precursor to terrorist activity," said Colorado
State Patrol Sgt. Steve Garcia, an analyst in Colorado's intelligence
fusion center south of Denver, which handles TLO-supplied information. Colorado, California and Arizona are among the first to deploy
TLOs after establishing robust state-run fusion centers, which
initially relied on tips from private citizens. Federal security agents
now sit in 25 of those centers, including Colorado's. Florida, Illinois, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.,
also have deployed TLOs, and authorities in dozens of states are
preparing to do so, said Norm Beasley, a retired Arizona trooper who
has popularized the practice. 181 in Colorado
In Colorado, TLO training began last year, with FBI assistance.
A three-day seminar presented material on how to recognize and stop
suicide bombers and included discussion of civil liberties. State officials declined to release the course syllabus or say
specifically how far TLOs are allowed to go in search of information
without a warrant. The 181 TLOs in Colorado were deployed without any
announcement over the past year and are posted widely from Durango in
the mountains to metro Denver to La Junta on the eastern prairie. "The thing that's surprising is how much stuff is out there,"
said Denver West Metro Fire Capt. Mike Kirkpatrick, who declined to
specify observations he has submitted, saying some led to
investigations. National intelligence chiefs who coordinate the CIA and 15
other agencies launched an initiative this month to define "suspicious
activity" for TLOs and develop a process for handling TLO information
so that basic freedoms and privacy are protected, said John Cohen,
information-sharing spokesman in the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence. Training is crucial "because what we don't want is just people
documenting innocent activities. We don't want police officers focusing
on people because of their ethnicity and religion," Cohen said. "What we're advocating for is developing a standardized
process that can be put in place across the country so that frontline
police officers (and others) are trained to recognize behaviors
associated with certain activities related to terrorism," he said. Major city police chiefs are participating.
"You can't profile. So you have to have behavior-based
indicators of criminal activity where it's terrorism or activity that
supports terrorism," said Tom Frazier, executive director of the Major
Cities Chiefs Association. Civil libertarians questioned why firefighters, paramedics and
corporate employees — such as Xcel Energy and railroad officials in
Colorado — are drafted into the effort. They say public trust in
emergency responders will suffer. The emerging TLO system "empowers the police officer to poke
his nose into your business when you're doing absolutely nothing wrong.
It moves the police officer away from his core function, to enforce the
law, into being an intelligence officer gathering information about
people," said Mike German, a 16-year FBI agent now advising the
American Civil Liberties Union. "Where are we going to draw the line?" Source
