Adam Weinstein
·
On Ambassador Road, just off I-695 around the corner from the
FBI, nearly 100 employees sit in a high-tech suite and wait for terrorists to
attack Baltimore. They’ve waited 11 years. But they still have plenty of work
to do, like using the intel community’s toys to target this week’s street protests.
They are the keepers of the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, a
government “fusion center” set up to
share information and coordinate counterterrorist activities between 29 law
enforcement agencies—federal, state, and local, including Baltimore city and
county cops—in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Seeded by a state
anti-terror advisory council whose meetings are closed to the public, nourished
by Republican and Democratic governors alike, MCAC has expanded its access to
spying tools over the past decade and a half. It can pinpoint cellphone users.
It can monitor movements of state motorists through their license plates, as it
has done with an estimated 85 million drivers.
It turns out that Maryland hasn’t been under sustained assault
from international terrorists, despite the wild fears of the homeland security
boosters who seek to justify the center’s budget. So rather than accept the
possibility that MCAC and other fusion centers were guarding against an
overhyped threat, the federal government has expanded the mission to include
threats that have always existed: When your job is to find bad guys, it
makes it easier to define everyone as a bad guy.
The MCAC has adopted what the Department of Homeland Security
calls an “all-crimes approach”—one
focused not just on monitoring gangs and other criminal threats, but all
manners of civil unrest, from Occupy protesters to the Baltimore residents who
have clashed with police on the city streets this week. And it is run by a cop
who has been accused of racism in the past.
“Twelve emergency support functions have been activated” in
Maryland to address the violence in Baltimore, authorities told WBAL
earlier this week, including “the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center,
which provides situational awareness and intelligence.” In fact, as protests
over Freddie Gray’s death in police custody spread to other major cities across
the country, MCAC and other fusion centers set up by DHS will be crucial to how
local law enforcement agencies confront civil dissent.
From terrorism to tax-stamp fraud
Shortly after 9/11, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered
his U.S. Attorneys’ offices to set up district “Anti-Terrorism Advisory
Councils.” The council for Maryland, led by a hard-charging Bush appointee,
wasted no time in creating MCAC to coordinate the region’s terrorism response.
It was given state-of-the-art tools, including “a 15-foot
wide split television screen tuned into CNN, Fox News and a local news
broadcast,” and office space to hold representatives of the FBI, ATF, DHS,
Army, and Baltimore police, among others. In fact, one of the center’s early
directors, Captain Charles Rapp, wore another surprising law enforcement hat, according to a 2007
profile in National Defense Magazine (emphasis added):
While there is no formal
definition of what constitutes a fusion center, and no congressional mandate
directing states to create them, DHS has disbursed $380 million in grants to
help fund them so far, and their numbers are growing.
While the ultimate goal is to
correct the well-documented mistakes that led to the 9/11 attacks, the centers
are increasingly being used to track crimes not typically associated with
terrorism, said Rapp, who also serves as the chief of the Baltimore Police
Department.
By 2006, the greater Baltimore area had been identified by feds
as a major drug-crimes target, and MCAC used its high-tech tools to pivot to
fighting whatever crimes it could jam up under the guise of anti-terror and
counter-narcotics:
A terrorist cell may be
involved in other non-terror crimes to fund its activities. It’s the city cop,
for example, who may enter an apartment on an unrelated call, and notice there
is nothing inside but computers.
MCAC, and other fusion
centers, are branching out to keep tabs on major crimes. Coupon fraud, evasion
of state tax stamps on alcohol or cigarettes and identity theft, for example,
can be used to fund plots. “You can’t really determine what type of crime is
going to be related to terrorism,” Rapp said.
“Geofencing” in evildoers
Nobody can say for sure what all of MCAC’s tech capabilities
are—it exists to “fuse” a wide variety of intelligence collected by its
constituent outfits. But the few that are known have wide applications. In
2012, Baltimore’s director of emergency management confirmed to Congress that
area law enforcement could track suspects using their phones. With the help of
DHS, he said, “We have
developed cell phone tracking capabilities allowing law enforcement the ability
to pinpoint the location of a specific cell phone, enhancing efforts to locate
an individual.”
The most notable of MCAC’s intelligence has been a
state-of-the-art license plate reading (LPR) system that has hoovered up
motorists’ information and alarmed civil libertarians with its unprecedented
speed. Maryland’s transportation chief, Marcus Brown, defends the system with
an out-of-context quote by Thomas Jefferson—“information is the currency
of democracy”—and adds:
In the event of a critical
incident, the MCAC has the ability to enter the critical license plate information
into the LPR central server. By doing this, anyone who is networked to the MCAC
will automatically be notified if the vehicle in question passes by the LPR.
More recently, conservative
libertarians have expressed fears that MCAC is using its LPR technology to
track gun owners traveling through the state. John Filippidis, a Florida man
with a concealed carry permit, was driving, unarmed, with his wife and
daughters in the family SUV to a Christmas gathering in December 2013 when he was stopped by
Maryland transportation police outside the Fort McHenry Tunnel in
Baltimore:
Retreating to the space
between the SUV and the unmarked car, the officer orders John to hook his
thumbs behind his back and spread his feet. “You own a gun,” the officer says. “Where
is it?”
“At home in my safe,” John
answers.
“Don’t move,” says the
officer.
Several hours later, after multiple police had unpacked and
inspected his entire minivan, Filippidis was sent on his way with nothing but a
warning. Maryland authorities have never revealed how they knew he owned a gun.
If you’ve been on I-95 in the Old Line State recently, chances
are MCAC has your license plate on file, too; they keep all their info for a
year, even if it isn’t linked to a crime. A 2013 ACLU study using MCAC
data obtained under a FOIA request found that the fusion center had collected “more
than 85 million license plate records in 2012 alone”:
According to statistics
compiled by the fusion center for that year to date through May:
· ·
Maryland’s system of license plate readers had
over 29 million reads. Only 0.2 percent of those license plates, or about 1 in
500, were hits. That is, only 0.2 percent of reads were associated with any
crime, wrongdoing, minor registration problem, or even suspicion of a problem.
· ·
Of the 0.2 percent that were hits, 97 percent
were for a suspended or revoked registration or a violation of Maryland’s
Vehicle Emissions Inspection Program...
For every one million plates
read in Maryland, only 47 were potentially associated with more serious crimes—a stolen
vehicle or license plate, a wanted person, a violent gang or terrorist
organization, a sex offender, or Maryland’s warrant-flagging program.
Furthermore, even these 47 alerts may not have helped the police catch criminals
or prevent crimes. While people on the violent gang, terrorist, and sex
offender lists are under general suspicion, they are not necessarily wanted for
any present wrongdoing.
Besides the potential chilling effect this kind of data
collecting could have on drivers’ freedom of movement and other behavior, the
report suggested that this license plate data could be used for more insidious “forms
of crime analysis,” specifically geofencing: “Law enforcement or private
companies can construct a virtual fence around a designated geographical area,
to identify each vehicle entering that space.” Such tactics would have obvious
appeal to police agencies seeking to limit the size and scope of street
protests in Baltimore and elsewhere.
Targeting gangs, or something like them
More troubling than MCAC’s controversial license plate program
has been its fuzzy focus on “gang” crime in Baltimore. Led by Rod Rosenstein, the Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney
for Maryland who helped set up MCAC, the effort includes a “proactive component”
that he says “involves
not just waiting for dangerous criminals to get arrested, but actually going
out to investigate them and develop cases against them and prosecute them and
remove them from the community.”
Publicly, MCAC’s efforts show up in a “gang news” column that
reports the latest arrests and rumors from inside Maryland; its most recent
update was the Baltimore PD’s assertion that “they have received a ‘credible
threat’ that rival gangs have teamed up to ‘take out’ law enforcement
officers.”
MCAC’s public-facing intelligence on gang crime is equally
superficial. In its most recent “public
gang threat assessment,” the center reported: “Poverty and despair could
be contributing factors of why juveniles join gangs.” The report added:
Law enforcement in Maryland
has identified the following trends:
· ·
Youth gangs using social media sites like
Facebook®, Instagram®, Kik®, and Twitter® as tools to communicate, recruit, and
threaten...
·
Gang members commuting to other areas to
participate in criminal activity.
The center also puts out alarmist bulletins from its partner
police organizations, such as one describing
criminals’ alleged use of “trash bag bombs” and a 2011 warning that even
bandanas can be used as weapons against officers:
MCAC has also expressed
concerns that suspects are using publicly available police scanner apps
and websites to listen in on law enforcement activities:
Further investigation
revealed that the general public, as well as criminal gang members and
associates, are utilizing the website www.radioreference.com to listen
to law enforcement secure channels streaming via the Internet. Registration and
access to the site is free... This situation presents a concern for officer
safety.
More recently, MCAC has helped cohost an annual intel and law enforcement training
conference with popular sessions like a seminar on “African-American
Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs” and a workshop “on exploiting social media and the
internet revealing the information investigators can obtain from it.”
All of these efforts are overseen by MCAC’s current director, David Engel, who previously ran the Baltimore police department’s intelligence unit—a unit that has been criticized “for sending undercover intelligence officers into public meetings to monitor debates,” the Baltimore Sun reported.
Engel’s time at MCAC has certainly been quieter than his tenure
in the Baltimore PD, when a black female detective sued him for discrimination,
alleging he’d demoted and transferred her because of her race. The 11-year
veteran also charged that Engel had four other black detectives “transferred
out of the unit for frivolous reasons and replaced by Caucasian detectives” in
the half-year before her demotion, and he’d disciplined her for the same minor
infraction that a white detective had committed without consequence. The Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission “determined that there was reasonable cause
to believe that she was discriminated against,” but a federal court dismissed the charges.
Preoccupied with Occupiers
If the Baltimore center is using its assets to track and thwart
protesters, it wouldn’t be the first time DHS’s network of fusion centers have
done so. Last year, the New York Times
documented the centers’ efforts to monitor Occupy protesters
nationwide—surveilling their social media accounts, cracking their
communications codes, and swapping tips to combat the protests, often with
military assistance:
In many cases, law
enforcement officials appeared to simply assemble or copy lists of protests or
related activities, sometimes maintaining tallies of how many people might show
up. They also noted appearances by prominent Occupy supporters and advised
other officials about what — or whom — to watch for, according to the newly
disclosed documents.
One of them, an intelligence
research specialist working in the threat analysis center of the Pentagon Force
Protection Agency, circulated an email describing Google searches as “a very
handy intel gathering tool” to keep tabs on Occupy protests.
Documents obtained by
the Times show that MCAC and the Baltimore city and county police
departments assisted in these efforts to gather intelligence on Occupiers.
If all this sounds like a vast threat to privacy and civil
liberties, the Department of Homeland Security agrees. In 2008, its privacy office
issued a report that “identified a number of risks to privacy presented by the
fusion center program.” Chief among these, it stated, were “threats to privacy
associated with mission creep.”
Absent any terrorists to thwart, how exactly has the Baltimore
fusion cell’s mission creep—from stopping 9/11s to monitoring protesters,
drivers, and suspected gangbangers—extended to the street unrest that racked
Charm City this week? No one’s saying: Emails and calls by Gawker to the
Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center and its director all went unanswered.
[Image by Jim Cooke; photo via AP]
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment