Something that caught my eye in terms of national coordination against OWS was the comment below from an interview with Dan Siegel that coordination with fusion centers was possible.
I posted this elsewhere and sabrina encouraged me to make this a thread so am doing so now.
Dan Siegel is the Oakland mayoral legal adviser who resigned in protest of how OWS is being treated in Oakland.
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/15/top_aide_to_oakland_mayor_resignsAMY GOODMAN: And what do you think of what has taken place in New York, as you observe from afar following the Oakland raid, right here in New York, just this—in the last hours, the clearing out of Zuccotti Park?
DAN SIEGEL: Well, you know, it’s people around the country have made a decision to crack down on the Occupy movement. We’ve seen it, as you say, today in New York, yesterday in Oakland, over the weekend in Portland and Denver and other places. And clearly, this movement is striking a nerve, because it is so powerful. And it seems like there must be some coordination, perhaps at the level of national security and the fusion centers and so on, to put the word out to local police and politicians that it’s time to move against us. But, you know, at the same time, I think this will be a losing strategy. Every time they hit us, our movement grows stronger.
Fusion Centers?
Looked that up and found some info here:
http://epic.org/privacy/fusion /
The more info I've looked up about them, the more they share with COINTELPRO, from being a combo of local, state, federal, private, public and military agencies with blurred jurisdiction and oversight.
More background here from 2009, in discussing them in light of the discovery of a military operative who had infilitrated WA peace groups:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/28/broadcast_exclusive_declassified_docs_reveal_militaryMIKE GERMAN: Well, I think his analysis is exactly right. This is a pretty clear violation of Posse Comitatus. Now, what the military would argue, and has argued, is that they have a right to engage in force protection, which obviously, in its normal understanding of that term, is a defensive sort of capability, i.e. they can put guards at the gates of military bases and protect from threats from without. But they seem to have been, since 2002, considering that as an offensive capability, where they’re actually sending operatives out to spy on community activists, which is, of course, prohibited and something that, you know, the First and the Fourth Amendment become engaged.
And, you know, this is something that we found out through a FOIA back in 2005 the military was engaged in through a group called the Counterintelligence Field Activity. And they had a database of activists called TALON that, again, collected this US person information that the military has no business collecting. And that was shut down. But unfortunately, you know, they just created a new mechanism. This appears to be the fusion centers and these fusion cells that they’re using that, they seem to think, give them a method of circumventing Posse Comitatus and the restrictions on military intelligence gathering in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean, Mike, by fusion centers.
MIKE GERMAN: About two years ago, me and a colleague at the ACLU started investigating a lot of federal money going to what were called intelligence fusion centers. And I was only two years out of federal law enforcement at that point, and I had never heard this term, so I became concerned. And what these centers are is multi-jurisdictional intelligence centers that involve state, local and federal law enforcement, as well as other government entities — you know, a lot of times there are emergency services type of entities, but actually can’t involve any government entity — but also involve oftentimes the military and private companies.
So we produced a report in November of 2007 warning of the potential dangers that these multi-jurisdictional centers had, because it was unclear whose rules applied. Were we using federal rules? Were we using state rules? Local rules? And what was military and private company — what rules govern their conduct? So we put out this report in November of 2007. At that point, there were forty-two fusion centers. By July of 2008, we had found so many instances of abuse, we put out an updated report. At that point, there were fifty-eight fusion centers. Today, the DHS recognizes at least seventy-two fusion centers. So these things are rapidly growing, without any sort of proper boundaries on what activities happen within them and without really any idea of what it is the military is doing in these fusion centers and what type of access they have to US person information.
And much more here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/are-we-safer/interviews/michael-german.htmlLet's start with the fusion centers. What is the purpose of them, and who pays for them?
Good questions. The difficulty with fusion centers is that no two are alike. ...
But essentially, a fusion center is a multijurisdictional intelligence information and analysis collection and dissemination point. Typically, they involve a number of government agencies from different levels -- from federal government, from state and local government. They can also involve private companies. They can involve the U.S. military, in some instances.
But there is very little regulation that mandates any particular form, so they can really adapt to whatever environment they're in.
Some aspects of this that I've been thinking of more since first posting this in a thread are:
Given the blended/fused nature of these centers, they are a way to have federal involvement while still stating that this is being done at a local level.
Since they don't use the term "fusion center" in their names, it's a multi-step process to identify their involvement. For example, stockholmer has a thread about "Breaking: Goldman Sachs And Other Wall Street Firms Spy on Protesters In Taxpayer-Funded Center." I looked up more the name "Lower Manhattan Security Initiative" and found it listed in an article in Washington Post as a fusion center. I added the bolding below:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2337714http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/states/new-york/FUSION
New York state operates six fusion centers: The New York State Intelligence Center (NYSIC), established in 2003 by the New York State Police and the New York State Office of Homeland Security, is a multiagency intelligence center designed to collect and analyze information and to disseminate terrorist and criminal intelligence. The NYSIC has been designated the state-level fusion center and has developed a Field Intelligence Officer program consisting of 1,600 officers representing 85 percent of the state's law enforcement agencies. In 2010, the NYSIC was designated as one of 12 state agencies to be part of the new Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative. The NYPD Intelligence Division's fusion center, officially established in March 2002, is the all-crimes and counterterrorism component of the New York City Urban Area Security Initiative. The NYPD Terrorism Threat Analysis Group (TTAG) performs intelligence analysis for the fusion center and disseminates open-source and classified intelligence to government and private-sector partners, as well as the U.S. intelligence community.
The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, focused on protecting the financial infrastructure, operates a network of cameras, radiation detectors and license plate readers. A similar security zone is being developed around Midtown Manhattan. The all-crimes Rockland County Intelligence Center, originally established in 1995 and operated by Rockland County law enforcement agencies, shifted its emphasis after 9/11 to homeland security and counterterrorism as well as crime. The Suffolk County Police Department operates an Intelligence Center. The Upstate New York Regional Intelligence Center (UNYRIC), based in Latham, was established in 2003 and is operated by the New York State Police to facilitate the collection, analysis and dissemination of criminal intelligence, including drug intelligence, in Upstate areas. The Westchester County Crime Analysis Unit, a component of the Westchester County Police Department of Public Safety, operates as an all-crimes fusion center.
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