September 2009 Archives

To what degree do post 9/11 counter terror strategies govern the purchases by US law enforcement agencies outside New York City? Criminologist Peter Manning says that in 2009 the police are happy to receive Washington's money for whatever purposes but that their priorities remain entirely local and even parochial.

Others like Eli Clifton and Daniel Luban at Inter Press Service's LobeLog.com blog recently expressed strong reservations about the participation of members of more than 700 US law enforcement agencies and first responder organizations in one week counter terror security briefings in Israel, which incidentally will be held for the last time in November.

The two writers stress the role that the department of Homeland Security has played in paying for the course fees which run to $4,200 a student, as well as the affiliation of the actual trainers - the Miami based Security Solutions International - with "Islamophic propaganda groups."

SSI (www.homelandsecurityssi.com) promotes itself as "the world class provider of international counter terrorism and law enforcement security solutions" and is headed by an advisory board made up people with a law enforcement background.

Clifton and Luban in their article question the value of this sort of training backed by federal subsidies.

"Critics have pointed out that the most likely effect of such training - particularly for law enforcement who have never had significant contact with Muslims before - is to drum up hysteria, and increase the likelihood of a potentially tragic overreaction when they actually do encounter someone they presume to be Muslim."

Packed into the course's one week itinerary are meetings with Israeli security personnel, martial arts demonstrations including how to take down a suicide bomber, visits to the controversial West Bank security wall and towns experiencing rocket attacks from Gaza, as well as trips to Christian holy sites -- designed to appeal to US Christian Zionist sympathies with hard-liners within Israel, hint Clifton and Luban.

IT is not stressed on the trip but participants gain a picture of Israel's prowess in high tech and low tech solutions in terms of the securing and protecting key infrastructure points including government buildings, universities, power plants and ports.

"If someone wants real risk assessment, we go into surveillance, counter surveillance, of course," states SSI chief executive officer, Solomon Bradman, in a recent interview with Digital Communities.

"The technology is always available in counter surveillance and may include CCTV. But it includes a lot of other stuff -- explosive detection, through wall cameras, under floor cameras, all kinds of weird, stuff."

At the same time, the question can be posed -- what does Israel's 100 year old political struggle with the Palestinians for the same territory have anything to do with America's need to avoid another spate of 9/11 attacks -- which appear less probable as time goes along but that's another story.

Bradman maintains that although not all of Israel's security practices are easily transferable to the US, the students come away with fresh new ideas.

"A lot of these law enforcement agencies, have changed the way they provide security, or do security for things like courthouses."

It also appears that some of the blistering criticism of the SSI's program in the US Muslim community has altered the tone somewhat at SSI.

Solomon Bradman is downplaying the overtly "political" nature of the course, with his revelation that the controversial film "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West "has been withdrawn" after initialing giving it away in some training sessions.

"We are trying to stay as non political as possible, which is very difficult to do but we are trying to stay on balance as much as we can."

But he refuses to back away from the program's session on Islamic culture where the leading theme is, "where does the hatred come from?"

Bradman explains that the instruction is led by a law enforcement officer who happens to be a practicing Muslim.

What makes the SSI's message highly problematic that we know in retrospect how many western governments and their security services connived in the jailed and torturing of innocent Muslims, including Canada's own Maher Arar, as part of the overreaction following 9/11.

Also, one should be wary of the line coming out of Israel and promoted by the SSI that the conflict with the Palestinians is existential and intractable rather than something that can be resolved through vigorous diplomacy and generally non-military means-- which the US president Barack Obama is attempting to do right now with a great deal of difficulty in face of the intransigence of Benjamin Netanyahu's settler influenced coalition government in Jerusalem.

More news on the growing convergence of the military and police in the U.S. has come my way from Boston criminologist, author and professor, Peter Manning, whose skepticism about the ability of police to take full advantage of IT was reported in a previous blog.

First of all, Manning says that the efforts to merge proprietary military and policing databases have failed and he has seen press reports that efforts to continue research in this area have been abandoned by the parties involved.

Also, this is a problem across the board in the U.S. federal government where agencies like the department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon, Immigration and Customs and the FBI have their own unique database systems.

Manning reminds us that this is a common problem facing public and private organizations which seek to internally or externally share database information sitting on different software or various platforms.

"It is the way that the data is encoded and the way that the encoding can't be erased when it is dropped into another database. There are intrinsic limitations to collapsing these large databases."

It is apparently not uncommon for separate databases to be kept after a corporate merger. The professor cites the example of how Delta and Northwest Airline passenger lists were kept separately out of technical necessity after the two airlines were combined.

Manning believes that the major defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin have not given up working to solve the problem of marrying military and police databases for their clients in the Department of Defense in Washington. But he doubts that we will hear about a software solution anytime soon.

"Defense contractors want to be able to merge various databases including commercial and alike for monitoring and tracking because it is a fundamental problem in the military world."
In the post-9/11 hysteria of the Bush administration, all sorts of information has been collected by U.S. government agencies on airline passengers, bank records, donations to Islamic charities and political activity.

A number of media outlets reported back in 2005 that something called the Counter-Intelligence Field Activity had been conducting surveillance and generating reports on more than 20 legitimate activist and anti-war groups around the US.

The revelations called into question the usefulness of the CIFA data mining tools which had been developed to allow intelligence experts to search vast troves of information, including reports of investigation, collection reports, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence and other documentation for possible illegal and criminal acts
Originally, CIFA was established in 2002 by former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, to consolidate databases on suspicious activity around and inside military installations by the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps.

Since then, we have been told by U.S. government officials that the surveillance of peaceful dissenters by the U.S. military has ended and the CFIA itself was closed down last year.
However, some criminologists have pointed to a deeper issue of law enforcement organizations being given money by the U.S. government to invest in technologies like new databases or programs that have little to do with the solving of local crimes and more to do with the growing militarization of the police since Ronald Reagan.

Of the $4-billion which the Obama administration has invested in stimulus money going to police, what percentage of the purchases being made on new guns, computers, cruisers and new hires are entirely justified?

That's a difficult question but one that I will be exploring in further details in my upcoming blogs. 

University of Alberta sociologist Kevin Haggerty peaks through the blinds in a photo on his web page  (www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/sociology2/haggerty.cfm), just to emphasize the point that he is into surveillance.

Earlier this year, he produced a report for the privacy commissioner of his province that detailed how military style visualization technologies involving cameras, sensors and unmanned vehicles have filtered into the policing of mega events such as the Olympics, the World Cup and the Super Bowl.

The centrality of such sports events in terms of national pride and as vehicles for economic generation makes them an ideal setting for potential violence of some sort, whether it involves rogue political attacks or fights in the crowd in attendance.

Haggerty's central point is that the military style precision by which systems hardware and software have been applied by soldiers in information gathering to secure a battlefield or an urban population centre were replicated in recent Olympics' events in Athens, Sydney and Beijing. "These are being conceived as almost military type operations, in terms of the control of space, the flow of people, the use of documents and the control of documents."

He says the process began before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in New York and Washington and has intensified since then.

Security experts routinely gather at international conferences to share best practices and innovation for safety and protection at mega events, Haggerty states.

He spent time interviewing officials and investigating arrangements about security for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Here,  surveillance which involves all levels of policing in Canada will probably cost about $1-billion which is well beyond the originally estimated $175 million for the project. In addition, state US enforcement bodies on the other side of the international border will be actively consulted and involved because of their own security concerns.

Haggerty points to a raft of security measures that are designed "to make people, places and processes visible in new ways using diverse tactics and technologies."

The list is exhaustive but they include biometric identification cards, toxic material scanners and detectors, computerized background checks, CCTV cameras, magnetometers, satellite monitoring, cellular telephone monitoring (both legal and illegal), overhead communications/monitoring blimps, traveler profiling and the increased integration of artificial intelligence into a host of private and public sector databases.
 
Haggerty suggests that public officials may use the pretext of potential mega event security problems to introduce controversial or expensive surveillance technology that in normal times would not be adopted.  "[Authorities are] capitalizing on the fact that in anticipation of the Games citizens tend to be more tolerant of intrusive security measures."
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He cites the example of Chicago which is seeking to bolster its 2016 summer Olympics bid by investing in an elaborate network of integrated law enforcement and private sector surveillance cameras to potentially blanket everything inside the historical Loop city center and employ face recognition technology -- first developed by IBM for the 2008 summer Beijing Games.

Peter Ryan, a former chief of the New South Wales police force during the 2000 summer Sydney Games and current senior security advisor for the International Olympic Committee, has stated that Olympic security efforts can have a "huge and lasting impact on national security" and should be "preserved and absorbed and developed further."

However, Haggerty warns of surveillance overkill where Olympic style security can percolate into more mundane contexts in a relatively peaceful city like Vancouver. "The [Olympic] Games themselves provide a glimpse of a possible militarized surveilled urban future."

In interviews with officials organizing the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games, he faced an insurmountable brick wall in terms of getting a handle on security and surveillance strategies.

One item that Haggerty can confirm is that Winter Olympic officials plan to photograph Vancouver neighborhoods with high resolution satellite mounted cameras.

"Satellite imaging is a fairly new and intensive way for physically dispersed audiences to view phenomena that were previously more difficult to monitor," says Haggerty.

Also, the Vancouver Police Department is training its own counter terror unit, following in the path of other cities that have sponsored Olympic events including Beijing and Athens (Summer 2004)

At the same time Haggerty stresses that the security patterns in other Olympic venues will not necessarily be adopted in the same exact manner in Vancouver. 

We will probably not see the scale of intrusion attempted in Beijing where about 300,000 CCTV cameras were installed in the Chinese city for its Olympics in what was described as the largest CCTV network in existence.  These cameras were used to scan vehicles entering certain city areas for chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear substances. Also, taxis were individually fitted with listening devices and integrated global positioning locating systems in order that the authorities could monitor them from central command locations. Furthermore, suspicions remain that hotels were bugged by audio and video feeds.
 
London will be the place to follow by other Olympic venues because the Metropolitan Police plans to integrate the city's existing patchwork of public and privately operated CCTV systems for its 2012 Summer Olympics. Haggerty says that face and hand scanning technology is being used to identify construction workers entering and leaving the Docklands Olympics site. Also, if proven successful in testing this technology could be used to identify ticket holders coming into Games' venues.

The sociologist warns that total integration of surveillance systems "remains the stuff of Hollywood fiction." He points to two factors -- the proprietary nature of the existing products on the market and the fact that the amount of data collected at such events as mega sports could outpace the ability of systems to effectively integrate them.

"Ultimately, the only solution to the problem of system complexity is modularity. [That is] breaking down complex systems into manageable, fire walled parts [and] thereby reducing the complexity of the whole. Modularity is the exact opposite of where contemporary technologically‐driven security solutions are going."