Fusion centers gather terrorism intelligence – and much more

About a year ago, a police officer in Maryland noticed a truck loaded with plastic pallets driving down a main road in the early morning. He normally wouldn't have given it a second look, but the officer had seen a bulletin from the state's "coordination and analysis center" advising that such thefts were costing bakeries and grocers hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sure enough, the pallets were stolen. Cracking down on pallet thieves wasn't quite the mission envisioned for "fusion centers," 72 facilities across the country that were started after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks to improve information-sharing and threat analysis among local law enforcement.

The centers, which have received $426 million in federal funding since 2004, were designed as an early warning system against the next attack. Lately, amid the recent uptick in homegrown plots, the Homeland Security Department has been touting fusion centers as a means of thwarting domestic terrorism. But it turns out that homegrown terrorism pales in frequency and fatalities compared with typical street crime, so many of the centers have begun collecting and distributing criminal intelligence, even of the most mundane kind.

In the process, Homeland Security Department officials say, the centers are developing a system to receive, sort and share crucial information. And they say it's too soon to judge the program, which is likely to grow in importance as a tool in detecting terrorism before it erupts. "I'm a big supporter because of their potential," said Mohamed Elibiary, a Texas-based Muslim activist who advises the Homeland Security Department, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. "If you want the government to function effectively, you need proper information sharing and analysis."

Critics argue that the centers are another potential intrusion on citizens' rights, and that having 72 of them guarantees bureaucratic overkill. Many centers make extensive use of private contractors. And the methods used are inconsistent from one to the next, raising questions about whether some of them are performing vital work. "We thought if we just threw the name out there, built a bunch of them, we'd feel a lot better," former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said this month at George Washington University. "And I frankly think there's too many of them. We still don't have quite the protocol we need to make sure that they're effective."

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Parking attendants trained to watch for terrorists

While recently attending a course in the "Entertainment Capital of the World", a colleague in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, told me that 17 of the 20 largest hotels in the world are located in Las Vegas. That is a truly significant statistic, with many implications. One of those implications is that large numbers of people congregate in, and move around, "The Strip" and other major attractions in the city. A second implication is that with such large assemblies and its iconic status, that "Sin City" is a target for terrorist attacks, maybe as much as New York City is.

However, Las Vegas and other cities are fighting back with parking attendants and meter maids being drafted into the nation's latest line of defense against terrorist attacks. A new government program aims to train thousands of parking industry employees nationwide to watch for and report anything suspicious — abandoned cars, for example, or people hanging around garages, taking photographs or asking unusual questions. Organizers say parking attendants and enforcement officers are as important to thwarting attacks as the two Times Square street vendors who alerted police to a smoking SUV that was found to contain a gasoline-and-propane bomb.

“We can no longer afford as a nation to say, `It doesn't impact me or my family, so therefore I'm not getting involved,'" Bill Arrington of the Transportation Security Administration told parking industry professionals at a convention this week in Las Vegas. "We're saying, 'Please, sir, get involved.'" The program has been in the works for about a year and gave its first presentation at the convention, attended by hundreds of people who run parking operations for cities, universities, stadiums and other places around the country.

• "City of London security guards told to report 'suspicious' photographers", The Guardian, 5/13/10.
  

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Two plead not guilty in foiled NYC terror plot

Two high school classmates of admitted terrorist Najibullah Zazi were indicted Thursday in a foiled scheme to bomb New York City subways that a prosecutor said was directed by "al-Qaeda leadership." Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin, both 25, pleaded not guilty in federal court in Brooklyn to charges of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country and providing material support to the al-Qaeda terrorist network. Zazi, a former Colorado air shuttle driver who attended high school in Queens, pleaded guilty to similar charges this week. Zazi was arrested in September 2008 after he drove cross-country from Denver to New York, where authorities said he abandoned the bombing plan after realizing authorities were trailing him.

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Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel July 2009 Issue.

The Combating Terrorism Center is an independent educational and research institution based in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy, West Point. The CTC Sentinel harnesses the Center’s global network of scholars and practitioners to understand and confront contemporary threats posed by terrorism and other forms of political violence.

CTC Sentinel Volume 2, Issue 7, July 2009.

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