Excerpt:
“Military, intelligence agency and police work is also coming together in numerous
“fusion centers” around the country in a joint program run by the Department of
Justice and Department of Homeland Security that has received little public
attention. At present, there are 43 current and planned fusion centers in the United
States where information from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private
sector databases and anonymous tipsters is combined and analyzed by counterterrorism
analysts. DHS hopes to create a wide network of such centers that would be tied into
the agency’s day-to-day activities, according to the Electronic Privacy Information
Center. The project, according to EPIC, “inculcates DHS with enormous domestic
surveillance powers and evokes comparisons with the publicly condemned domestic
surveillance program of COINTELPRO,” the 1960s program by the FBI aimed at
destroying groups on the American political left.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see how powerful technologies, when combined
with secretive, growing interagency collaboration, could be misused in a domestic
context. In recent years many U.S. cities have deployed sophisticated video cameras
throughout their downtown areas that track activity 24 hours a day. And U.S.
intelligence and law enforcement agencies now have at their disposal facial
recognition software that can identify one person among thousands in a large crowd.
Combine that with the awesome eavesdropping power of the NSA and the ability of the
NGA to capture live imagery from satellites and UAVs, and the result could be an
ability to track any individual, in real time, as he or she moves around.”