Washington Post: Monitoring America
Monitoring America, by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. The Washington Post, 20 December 2010.
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Today's story, along with related material on The Post's Web site, examines how Top Secret America plays out at the local level. It describes a web of 4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 935 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11.
(Search our
database for your state to find a detailed profile of counterterrorism efforts in your community.)
The months-long investigation, based on nearly 100 interviews and 1,000 documents, found that:
* Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.
* The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators, increasing concerns that it could somehow end up in the public domain.
* Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies.
* The Department of Homeland Security sends its state and local partners intelligence reports with little meaningful guidance, and state reports have sometimes inappropriately reported on lawful meetings.
"When everything is intelligence - nothing is intelligence"
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The fact that there has not been much terrorism to worry about is not evident on the Tennessee fusion center's Web site. Click on the incident map, and the state appears to be under attack.
Red icons of explosions dot Tennessee, along with blinking exclamation marks and flashing skulls. The map is labeled: "Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity.
But if you roll over the icons, the explanations that pop up have nothing to do with major terrorist plots: "Johnson City police are investigating three 'bottle bombs' found at homes over the past three days," one description read recently. ". . . The explosives were made from plastic bottles with something inside that reacted chemically and caused the bottles to burst."
Let me guess, it was either dry ice or Diet Coke and Mentos.
A very good point Bourbon
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Originally Posted by
bourbon
Let me guess, it was either dry ice or Diet Coke and Mentos.
The problem with most of these reports is they do not specify if the "explosion or detonation" actually contained explosives or even had anything to do with explosives. There was a point in 2003 where power lines had burst and the call in to 911 was immediately labeled "explosion".
Public awareness and State funding. The public is blind and the LEOs are counting on terror to retain funding.
