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Tri-Valley HeraldActivists:
Intelligence reforms not enough
Sunday,
August 03, 2003 - Although civil libertarians praise Attorney General
Bill Lockyer for denouncing spying on political protest groups, activists
now say his reforms don't go far enough.
Lockyer pledged to remind California's
80,000 law enforcement officers that civil disobedience is not terrorism
and only a "reasonable suspicion" of criminal activity justifies gathering
information about political or religious groups.
Yet Lockyer still allows his
intelligence analysts to issue warnings under the letterhead of his Justice
Department, if no longer under the insignia of the California Anti-Terrorism
Information Center, or CATIC, as they have for almost two years. Analysis
of hundreds of CATIC documents obtained by the California Public Records
Act shows a pattern of keeping tabs on protest groups and frequently portraying
them as threats to the public.
Political activists and civil
liberties advocates who have seen the state terrorism bulletins are skeptical
that anything has changed.
"They changed the name of Total
Information Awareness, too," said James X. Dempsey, executive director
of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, referring
to the Pentagon's controversial research on mining personal data for clues
to terrorist plans.
"What you call it isn't the
issue. The issue is are you engaged in monitoring political activity?
Then you are infringing on the constitution and you are detracting resources
from the deadly serious threat of terrorism," Dempsey said.
Protest organizers were especially
irate after seeing the anti-terrorism center's bulletins about their groups.
"He has not taken action,"
said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a Washington-based attorney for several
national protest groups. "He hasn't taken measures to punish people who
were doing this and he hasn't taken responsibility himself."
Before the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks, state criminal intelligence analysts rarely warned local police
and sheriffs about protests.
But the state's anti-terror
center, created two weeks after the attacks, began sending out protest
warnings within 45 days, tapping the Web, the FBI and colleagues in other
states for information about protesters. They sometimes suggested that
police spy on activists and report back.
They sent bulletins, "strategic
analysis" and "threat assessments" to the more than 700 law enforcement
agencies in California, then posted them on national law enforcement chat
groups and a national electronic bulletin board known as RISSLeads, designed
as a virtual trading post for clues to crimes.
The bulletins suggest state
anti-terror analysts often veered from state and federal intelligence-gathering
policies that are designed to prevent political spying.
CATIC routinely gathered information
about political protests without evidence that protesters committed or
planned crimes. Federal regulations, which Lockyer contends his analysts
meet, require a "reasonable suspicion" that people are engaged in crime
before law enforcement officers may collect intelligence on their political
or religious activities.
The center issued analyses
of anti-war protesters and threat assessments on radical environmental
groups that fell short of internal state guidelines. Those guidelines,
also obtained under the California Public Records Act, require detailed
information on intent, commitment and capabilities to commit violence,
such as acquiring weapons.
Protest organizers are calling
for an investigation.
"It's disturbing really that
they're so sloppy," said Jackie Cabasso, executive director of the Western
States Legal Foundation.
Verheyden-Hilliard, co-founder
of the Partnership for Civil Justice, takes a darker view.
"It's not the general accuracy
or the quality of the intelligence," she charges. "It's that they're intentionally
falsifying their reporting to justify their spying."
CATIC chief Ed Manavian said
he has confidence in his analysts' reporting, as does Los Angeles County
Sheriff Lee Baca, chairman of the center's executive advisory board.
"I haven't seen the analyses
that they do. And in fact I could," Baca acknowledged. But "I'm satisfied
that what is being reported is pretty good."
Here are a few examples of
state protest bulletins that state authorities expect to continue:
Nuclear disarmament activists
planned a mock weapons inspection last November at Lawrence Livermore
nuclear weapons lab and their e-mail notices explicitly rejected civil
disobedience and participants made a nonviolence pledge.
But CATIC's advisory described
the event was a "civil disobedience rally" and urged law officers with
information about it or "any similar situations" to contact the state
anti-terrorism center or the local FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Later in November, CATIC issued
an intelligence bulletin labeled "Iraqi Threat Assessment." It mentions
"a potential for retaliatory terrorist activity" sponsored by Iraq.
"An attack against the government
of Iraq may have an effect on law-enforcement authorities in California
mainly in the form of civil disobedience via anti-war activists, and an
increase in recruitment efforts by criminal extremist organizations."
More than half of the document
is blacked out, apparently to conceal what the state Justice Department
considers criminal intelligence.
For nearly half of December,
CATIC warned that U.S. anti-war groups were planning a "week of action
against warmongering." Organizers "are advocating attacks on DOD government
and private sector assets."
But center analysts failed
to note that the "intelligence" came from a United Kingdom Web site and
that the CATIC's own analysts had already determined a month earlier that
"there is no indication that groups in California are calling for action
against government entities."
On Dec. 17, the center's Group
Analysis Unit issued a two-page analysis on the growing anti-war movement,
suggesting potential ties to anarchist groups that "may strive to create
civil disobedience" which could make protests "more destructive."
"It's completely intolerable,
and it should be for everyone. They're acting as political police," said
Richard Becker, West Coast coordinator for the International Action Center.
On April 2, CATIC warned of
"potential violence" at a Direct Action to Stop the War protest at the
Port of Oakland. Notices for the April 7 protest specifically said "this
is not a civil disobedience action."
CATIC chief Ed Manavian later
defended the center's warning, saying his analysts knew a protester had
been arrested that day on suspicion of possessing Molotov cocktails at
an earlier San Francisco protest. But they never mentioned it, he said,
because "we didn't want people to think we knew more than we did."
That doesn't make sense to
some terrorism experts.
"They should have said something
about the Molotov cocktails. That's like saying we expect bank robbers,
but not telling them the robbers are armed," said Walter Purdy, director
at the Terrorism Research Center in Virginia.
In early April, CATIC quoted
threatening statements purportedly by a former spokesman for the Earth
Liberation Front, an underground eco-sabotage group that the FBI classifies
as a domestic terrorist organization. The former ELF spokesman called
for attacks on government, military and corporate interests by "any means
necessary."
CATIC analysts concluded that
"protesters at past demonstrations with causes similar to those expressed
by ELF, ALF (the Animal Liberation Front) and anti-war adherents have
committed violent crimes to further their beliefs," and warned law enforcement
to expect activists and "anarchists willing to commit acts of violence."
Three days later, CATIC again
blended the former ELF spokesman's talk of military targets into a warning
about a Direct Action to Stop the War protest at the Concord Naval Weapons
Station. CATIC warned the U.S. Coast Guard and the Contra Costa County
Sheriff's Department of "potential violence" at the Concord weapons station.
Direct Action organizer David
Solnit called the bulletin "a hit piece" and "a waste of taxpayer dollars."
ELF experts such as Skidmore
College sociology professor Rik Scarce said the analysis shows a fundamental
misunderstanding of such groups.
"To lump together public protesters
who don't violate the law at all with folks whose entire tactical approach
is stealth, to get in underneath any sort of surveillance, do damage and
get out, is just beyond belief," said Scarce, author of "Eco Warriors:
Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement."
"It's very, very bad intelligence,"
Scarce said. "It's as though 'We can't paint them as al-Qaida, but we
can paint them with what they consider the closest we can get in the United
States, which is ELF and ALF."'
On Feb. 7, as the nation went
on a heightened terrorism alert, CATIC warned an upcoming symposium at
Fresno State University was "expected to attract members from criminal
extremist groups," such as ALF and ELF.
The same day, CATIC issued
a Terrorism BOLO (for Be On the Lookout) Alert: NASA was asking the California
Highway Patrol to look for debris from the recent Space Shuttle Columbia
accident.
The Feb. 7 communiques typify
the scattershot focus in the 16-page midday reports issued by CATIC and
disclosed under the California Public Records Act.
An analysis of 195 such reports
issued between September 2002 and June 2003, suggests that at least one
CATIC analyst charged with assembling the reports spent almost as much
time relaying information about mass protests as terrorist plots.
During the nine-month period,
CATIC included 526 articles in a section devoted to California activity.
In all, 70 items dealt with obvious terrorism, mostly involving suspects
in custody, old plots or attacks overseas. At the same time, CATIC relayed
59 items about protests or activist groups in California.
During the heightened terror
alerts -- when the nation both was at war and protesting against it --
CATIC's offering of protest news climbed while its reports of actual terrorism
news dropped.
A quarter of their California-oriented
news dealt with gaps in security at airports or ports, technology or funding,
while other reports dealt with false alarms, anthrax scares and airport
evacuations. Immigration stories and narcotics items were also routinely
e-mailed to law enforcement.
A full 69 articles dealt with
miscellaneous crimes, typically hate crimes or violent incidents involving
police officers, while 90 items were a grab bag of political news, Sacramento
press releases and news about local law enforcement budgets.
"The midday report has nothing
to do with our emphasis on a daily basis of what our analysts are doing,"
Manavian said. "It's just an educational tool for law enforcement."
But the sheer volume of information
overwhelmed them.
The Alameda County Sheriff's
Department said it threw the bulletins out every two days and purged the
computers of CATIC advisories every five days.
"By itself, the bulletin is
not that useful," Sheriff Lt. Jim Knudsen said in a recent interview.
Similarly, the California Highway
Patrol and the San Francisco Police Department reported they kept no CATIC
documents. Some experts also question the value of CATIC's advisories.
"We see this all the time --
agencies putting out these broad-brushed bulletins. I hear in Iowa or
Minnesota that they're not seeing things that are applicable to the war
on terrorism or al-Qaida so they look broadly at domestic terrorism,"
said Purdy of the Terrorism Research Center.
"It's common that law enforcement
puts these things out about protests," he added.
Former FBI executive Terry
Turchie, a domestic terror expert who is now chief of counterintelligence
and counterterrorism at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said law
enforcement should keep an eye on protests because small numbers of people
may use the crowd as cover for vandalism or violence.
"Any group of the protest movement
can be hijacked by people who have a totally different agenda," said Turchie.
"You can prevent that by having a strong law enforcement showing."
Intelligence is useful to identify
people bent on violence, he said.
"You can't just go around opening
cases on people just because they talk big," he said. "So you're looking
for something that changes talk to action. That's what people look for
on the federal level and what tells something criminal apart from free
speech activity."
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