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PRA Exposé: New Domestic Surveillance Program a Platform for Prejudice
Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative set to go nationwide. PRA says: "Not so fast," urges Congressional hearings.

The New PRA Report on the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative sheds light on new forms of inter-agency coordination and explains why wholesale intelligence gathering in the public domain should concern all of us.  In 2008, the Los Angeles Police Department issues Special Order #11 that listed 65 behaviors LAPD officers shall report as suspicious, including taking pictures or video “with no apparent aesthetic value” and persons “espousing extremist views.”  As of March 2010, the federal government is poised to implement nationwide reporting, tracking, and accessing so-called “Suspicious Activities” among 72 intelligence fusion centers and reconstituted police intelligence units.

“If the past decades have taught us anything about police intelligence, it is that an emphasis on information gathering, rather than better analysis techniques, opens the door to constitutional abuses without any measureable security benefit.” – David Cunningham, author of  There’s Something Happening Here:  The New Left, The Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence

PRA’s Report, Platform for Prejudice, explains why Congress should hold hearings and remove non-criminal conduct from suspicious activity criteria.  As it stands today, Suspicious Activity Reporting invites divisive and counter-productive racial, ethnic, and religious profiling, erodes civil liberties, and undermines security by making intelligence analysts’ job harder.

Download the Report!

Suspicious Activity Reporting
A Window into the Domestic Security Infrastructure

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, government responded to perceived deficiencies in the nation’s defense system by re-configuring its domestic security apparatus and marshalling vast resources to implement counterterrorism policies.  This development coincided with a backlash against Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian populations, as well as increased deportations of immigrants of Latin American origin.  Law and policy makers conceptualized the development of the enterprise in structural terms: the establishment of a new “intelligence architecture,” building an “information sharing environment,” and mandating interagency collaboration at all levels of government. Read more...

Torrance, California
A Genesis Fable for Fusion

A string of robberies in southern California in 2005 by two people with an interest in violent jihad has taken on mythic importance in the drive to develop fusion centers; it has become a creation story with ideological force. Counterterrorism professionals retell the tale of the Torrance gas station terrorism investigation, and media outlets uncritically report it as “the most celebrated example” of the success of a fusion center. Read more...

PRA’s recent investigation of the domestic security infrastructure yielded an article in the New Times concerning the FBI’s intimidation of Imam Foad Farahi to spy on his community and mosque for the federal government.  This article describes how the FBI collaborated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pressure Imam Farahi to work as an informant and subsequently punished him for refusing to report on innocent people. Read the article, by Trevor Aaronson.

Intelligence Fusion Centers
A De-Centralized National Intelligence Agency
By Thomas Cincotta
The Public Eye, Winter 09/Spring 10 Edition

In a 2007 article for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Colonel Bart Johnson explained how state-level intelligence “fusion centers” collect data from a range of sources and connect “seemingly unrelated” incidents that could be precursors of terrorist activity. At the time, Colonel Johnson led the New York State (NYS) Intelligence Center in Albany, where officers from a range of federal, state and local police agencies as well as civilian analysts function as a “nerve center” for all calls into a statewide terrorism tip line. He explains how in July 2004, his fusion center received an anonymous call warning of a college senior leading the campus Muslim Student Association, who, the caller claimed, had expressed hatred for America and was only in the country to teach Islam. Read more...

From Movements to Mosques
Informants Endanger Democracy
By Thomas Cincotta
The Public Eye Magazine, Summer 2009

In February, 2009, members of the Islamic Center of Irvine learned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had hired Craig Monteilh, a 46-year-old fitness instructor and convicted con man, to infiltrate their mosque and keep it under surveillance. Members had wondered about Monteilh for a while. Back in 2007, the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), alarmed by his talk of jihad and plans for a terrorist attack, reported him to Irvine police and secured a three-year restraining order against him. Read more...

First Amendment Blues
Police Tactics Suppress Free Speech
By Heidi Boghosian and Abby Scher
The Public Eye magazine, Winter 2007

Miles Swanson was a legal observer at the 2003 protests in Miami against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas when he became victim of a "snatch squad," a new police tactic where officers drag protestors off, having singled them out based on their perceived political ideology. It is unconstitutional to target someone for arrest based on their political views, but snatch squads are only one of many new government tactics that are chilling Americans' free speech rights. These measures are rarely passed by Congress or a state legislature, but are devised and adopted informally through expanding networks of police agencies. Now lawyers are learning from past abuses to try to protect protestors attending the Republican and Democratic conventions next summer. Read more…

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