In the world, just like r/K, things ebb and things flow. Presently the Intelligence-izing of law enforcement (creating domestic intelligence agencies within law enforcement to spy on American citizens) in in a period of flow. As r turns to K, I’d expect at some point these efforts will result in Church committee-like hearings, which will roll back this trend.
To aid in that effort, this site will periodically document items of interest, lest this site ever gain greater popularity.
I suspect the intelligence-izing of law enforcement is primarily the result of three different factors. First is the massive budgetary increases following 9/11. The second factor is the ease and lack of pushback with which these types of operations were launched against Muslims. Given that ease it was inevitable that they would begin to be waged more widely, on the rest of the civilian populace. Finally, there is the technology factor. A hidden 1080p body camera that would have required a bulky battery, tape recording device, and large lens could have cost $40,000-$50,000 dollars thirty-forty years ago. Today they can be bought on Ebay for forty bucks and will offer longer recording time, higher quality video, and they are literally thinner than a wallet. All surveillance, from car-cameras, to pole microphones, to watch cameras, has undergone a similar price reduction and proliferation, making it’s widespread deployment far more economically feasible.
So where did the surveillance begin? It seems to have come to light most at the NYPD after 9/11, though that is just because the NYPD, in coming up to speed, didn’t cover its tracks as well as the FBI would have. The FBI has been doing for a long, long time, though not nearly as prolifically.
Those documents offer the first glimpse of what the NYPD’s informants — known informally as “mosque crawlers” — gleaned from inside the houses of worship. And, along with hundreds of pages of other secret NYPD documents obtained by The Associated Press, they show police targeting mosques and their congregations with tactics normally reserved for criminal organizations.
They did so in ways that brushed against — and civil rights lawyers say at times violated — a federal court order restricting how police can gather intelligence.
The NYPD Intelligence Division snapped pictures and collected license plate numbers of congregants as they arrived to pray. Police mounted cameras on light poles and aimed them at mosques. Plainclothes detectives mapped and photographed mosques and listed the ethnic makeup of those who prayed there…
…the NYPD is not following a court order that prohibits police from compiling records on people who are simply exercising their First Amendment rights.
“This is a flat-out violation,” Eisenstein said. “This is a smoking gun…”
“Take a big net, throw it out, catch as many fish as you can and see what we get,” one investigator recalled Cohen saying…
Cohen wanted a source inside every mosque within a 250-mile radius of New York, current and former officials said…
Interestingly, the NYPD’s Intelligence activities post 9/11 involved illegally embedding a CIA officer at the top of the operation, to bring the NYPD up to speed with CIA techniques for spying. Not that it changed anything – the FBI had brought itself up to date with CIA technologies and techniques decades ago, to do the exact same things. It raises the question, why do we oppose letting the CIA spy domestically, if we are going to create a series of duplicate agencies which will use exactly the same techniques and technologies to do exactly the same thing?
The CIA’s top lawyer never approved sending a veteran agency officer to New York, where he helped set up police spying programs, The Associated Press has learned. Such approval would have been required under the presidential order that Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said authorized the unusual assignment…
Neither of those things happened in 2002, when CIA Director George Tenet sent veteran agency officer Lawrence Sanchez to New York, former U.S. intelligence officials told the AP. While on the CIA’s payroll, Sanchez was the architect of spying programs that transformed the NYPD into one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies…
Sanchez left the department in late 2010 but was followed last summer by a senior clandestine operative who holds the title of special assistant to David Cohen, a former CIA officer who runs the intelligence division…
Officially, he is there on a sabbatical to observe the NYPD’s management. Kelly said the operative provides the NYPD with foreign intelligence. CIA Director David Petraeus described him as an adviser. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described him to Congress as an analyst, then Clapper’s office acknowledged that was incorrect…
Clapper also said it did not look good for the CIA to be involved in any city police department.
So basically we created a mini-CIA dedicated solely to spying on American citizens using CIA techniques, outside the boundaries of the law, by police officers who claim they are not doing police work, though they are receiving a salary for whatever work they are doing, and we created it in a place where it will be run exclusively by liberal politicians. Bush’s CIA gave liberals their own little mini-CIA to harass innocent Americans with. It gets better than that.
Sometimes, officials said, intelligence collected from NYPD’s operations was passed informally to the CIA.
Sanchez also hand-picked an NYPD detective to attend the “Farm,” the CIA’s training facility where its officers are turned into operatives. The detective, who completed the course but failed to graduate, returned to the police department where he works today armed with the agency’s famed espionage skills.
Interestingly, these Intelligence Division agents do not view themselves as police, nor do they feel any hesitancy about lying to other Law Enforcement to achieve their illegal ends. Once they begin launching illegal operations, it becomes inevitable view themselves as above the law.
In a few instances, NYPD detectives approached campus police for help, saying they were working narcotics or gang cases to win their cooperation and sometimes even access to records, the official said. Police used the records to identify students they were observing and get contact information, the official said.
The colleges may have broken the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal statute, if they handed over student records without the students’ consent, said Richard Rainsberger, a consultant on college privacy laws.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said the department only follows leads and does not simply trawl communities. “We do not employ undercovers or confidential informants unless there is information indicating the possibility of unlawful activity,” Browne wrote in an email to the AP.
That issue has legal significance. The NYPD says it follows the same guidelines as the FBI, which cannot use undercover agents to monitor communities without first receiving an allegation or indication of criminal activity.
Before The Associated Press revealed the existence of the Demographics Unit last week, Browne said neither the Demographics Unit nor the term “rakers” exist. Both are contained in the documents obtained by the AP.
The difference between the NYPD and other domestic intelligence agencies is they are not as skilled in keeping their secrets so they can’t be caught lying. But as the article above shows, they are taking some measures to fix that.
At least one lawyer inside the police department has raised concerns about the Demographics Unit, current and former officials told the AP. Because of those concerns, the officials said, the information gathered from the unit is kept on a computer at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, not in the department’s normal intelligence database. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the intelligence programs.
Most disturbingly, such organizations free criminals, using their criminality for leverage to control them, provide them with technology to record and photograph innocent citizens, and then provide them with cash which they often put to use in criminal enterprises, which they are allowed to engage in absent criminal penalty. If you are going to employ spies to invade the privacy of private citizens, and possibly uncover vulnerabilities that could allow a criminal attack, the spies should at least not have a history of criminality. Even worse, the Police act like criminals when their actions are revealed, desperately covering their tracks.
Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bangladeshi descent who has now denounced his work as an informant… For his work, he earned as much as $1,000 a month and goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests…
After he disclosed to friends details about his work for the police — and after he told the police that he had been contacted by the AP — he stopped receiving text messages from his NYPD handler, “Steve,” and his handler’s NYPD phone number was disconnected.
The AP corroborated Rahman’s account through arrest records and weeks of text messages between Rahman and his police handler. The AP also reviewed the photos Rahman sent to police…
Police officers have eavesdropped inside Muslim businesses, trained video cameras on mosques and collected license plates of worshippers. Informants who trawl the mosques — known informally as “mosque crawlers” — tell police what the imam says at sermons and provide police lists of attendees, even when there’s no evidence they committed a crime.
The programs were built with unprecedented help from the CIA.
Police recruited Rahman in late January, after his third arrest on misdemeanor drug charges, which Rahman believed would lead to serious legal consequences. An NYPD plainclothes officer approached him in a Queens jail and asked whether he wanted to turn his life around.
The next month, Rahman said, he was on the NYPD’s payroll.
Now, even though you’ve done nothing remotely criminal, you’ve got a criminal trained in spy-craft, paid and supported by a law enforcement agency, and immune to the law itself, invading your life. Why does this feel un-American?
It gets better. As these agencies got no pushback in their initial forays into spying, they began to move their spy operations into the realm of harmless political advocacy. Don’t like immigration policy? Now they have ears inside your house, follow you everywhere you go, videotape you in the grocery store (or a public bathroom), and are placing ex-criminal informants into your social, work, and service circles, taking in your medical records, pulling your employment file, and grabbing your bank statements. Now they have a file on you.
When the undercover effort was summarized for supervisors, it identified groups opposed to U.S. immigration policy, labor laws and racial profiling. Two activists — Jordan Flaherty, a journalist, and Marisa Franco, a labor organizer for housekeepers and nannies — were mentioned by name in one of the police intelligence reports obtained by the AP.
“One workshop was led by Jordan Flaherty, former member of the International Solidarity Movement Chapter in New York City,” officers wrote in an April 25, 2008, memo to David Cohen, the NYPD’s top intelligence officer. “Mr. Flaherty is an editor and journalist of the Left Turn Magazine and was one of the main organizers of the conference. Mr. Flaherty held a discussion calling for the increase of the divestment campaign of Israel and mentioned two events related to Palestine…”
The document provides the latest example of how, in the name of fighting terrorism, law enforcement agencies around the country have scrutinized groups that legally oppose government policies. The FBI, for instance, has collected information on anti-war demonstrators. The Maryland state police infiltrated meetings of anti-death penalty groups. Missouri counterterrorism analysts suggested that support for Republican Rep. Ron Paul might indicate support for violent militias — an assertion for which state officials later apologized. And Texas officials urged authorities to monitor lobbying efforts by pro Muslim-groups…
The result of those efforts, however, was that people and organizations can be cataloged in police files for discussing political topics or advocating even legal protests, not violence or criminal activity.
These are the leftist groups they are looking at. The politicians who run things hate conservatives. Still think Heartiste, or Matt Forney, or Roosh haven’t been looked at? Wonder why Wayne Allen Root thinks most of DC must be being blackmailed?
From there, every word you speak needs to be carefully watched, since conspiracy charges don’t require you actually perform a crime, only that you talk in a way that could be construed as furthering the approach of one.
In this case a child molester with kiddie porn on his computer was rotting in jail when he called the FBI to say a guy was going to blow up a building. They bailed him out and put his charges all on hold. He failed a polygraph on the bomb accusation, so he said another guy was running guns. That investigation was going nowhere since the accusation was a lie. However, in the ensuing investigation he was able to find four decrepit senior citizens with endless medical problems and a slight amount of dementia, and record their fantasizing about an armed revolution against corrupt politicians.
Now surveillance rolled in on them. With a little fed help, the molester managed to get them charged as terrorists because one touched a roll of fed money being used by the informant to buy a fake IED and a silencer supplied by another fed undercover posing as a weapons dealer. The informant’s child molestation and kiddie porn charges still have not been prosecuted, and he is out there, floating around waiting to molest another young girl, and probably collecting a fed check as he breaks other laws. Meanwhile four old geezers, some vets, are spending their precious last days locked up fighting federal charges over the informant’s scheme.
This is the type of guy who is paid by the government to peer into innocent citizen’s lives:
Unlike his first wife, Leann was a grown woman, and she had two daughters. One of them was around eleven when Joe and Leann got married in 2000. In early 2010, the younger daughter went to the Anderson County sheriff with a complaint that Joe Sims had molested her. After his home was searched and his computers impounded, Sims called the sheriff’s detective. He said, “You can take anything you want, you ain’t going to find nothing.” The search of his computers revealed what the arrest warrant describes as “multiple photographic images … which depicts minors in various stages of undress and also engaged in sexual activity.” In March, the sheriff’s detective called him and told him that he had twenty-four hours to report and face arrest. He didn’t show. A day later, he was stopped in Maryland, on Interstate 95, for a missing tag light, and brought back to Anderson. On March 25, 2010, he was charged with six counts of sexual crimes starting in 2002. They included the molestation of minors and the dissemination of child pornography to minors, as well as having “carnal intercourse” with his stepdaughter: incest.
Sims’s bond was set at $46,000. He couldn’t make bond. He went to jail and stayed in jail for seven months. He says that he started trying to contact the FBI almost as soon as he was incarcerated but that the Anderson County Sheriff’s Department blocked his every attempt for more than three months. It was July 2010 before a letter from Joseph Sims reached the FBI office in Greenville, South Carolina. Although he had been in jail since March, Sims said that he knew of a plot to blow up buildings in downtown Atlanta. A month later, Scott Matthewson, an agent for the Department of Homeland Security assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Atlanta, called Gregg Hayden, the sheriff’s investigator who had signed the warrants for Sims’s arrest. Matthewson told Hayden that a militiaman was in his jail and that Matthewson wanted to interview him. He did, several times — Hayden remembers four — and arranged for Sims to be polygraphed. Sims took the polygraph in August 2010, and failed. Matthewson thanked him for his time and didn’t come back. But two months later, Sims still got out of jail. Despite his being unable to make bail since his arrest, he — or, he says, his sister — was able to find a bail bondsman willing to take out a surety bond on him, despite the bondsman’s personal policy against bonding out sex offenders. Joe Sims had been considered a fugitive; he was jobless; his ex-wife Leann filed for a protective order against him the day after he got out of jail; he began engaging in regular traffic across the border between South Carolina and Georgia — and yet his bail bondsman says, “I consider him a minimal flight risk. One of the best risks I have, as a matter of fact. I know where he is every second of every single day, and there’s only one other person in the world that can say that…”
But the fact remains that as soon as he got out of jail, he went back to Scott Matthewson. This time he didn’t tell Matthewson about a plot; he told him about an individual, and Matthewson decided the individual was worth watching — so worth watching that it was worth having Joe Sims watch him. Sims signed on as a source with the FBI in December 2010. Around the same time, he was supposed to report to a meeting with the public defender. He never showed. He was a free man. He remains a free man, with a case still pending almost two years after his arrest and no court date set, and so I called the former Leann Sims for comment. This is what she said, pretty much in its entirety:
“He’s my ex-husband and he molested both my daughters. That’s all I’m gonna say. He’s a bad man and he’s done very bad stuff.”
As these domestic Intelligence agencies proliferate with no rules to govern their activities, objectives, or jurisdictions, they are inevitably beginning to clash with each other, like criminals fighting over territory:
The relationship between the FBI and the NYPD — particularly the NYPD Intelligence Division — is among the most studied collaborations in all law enforcement. In the New York media, the fighting and personalities are frequently covered like a dysfunctional celebrity marriage, with perceived betrayal and reconciliation spilling into the news.
The dispute is not trivial. At its core, it is based on fundamental disagreements between the nation’s largest police force and the nation’s premier counterterrorism agency. As the NYPD has transformed itself into one of the nation’s most aggressive intelligence agencies and has spied on Muslims in ways that would be prohibited for the FBI, the rift has widened.
The result is that, in the United States’ largest city, the NYPD and FBI are at times working at cross-purposes. Documents show that the NYPD conducted surveillance on mosques outside its jurisdiction, recording license plates of worshippers as they came and went. On its own, the NYPD has tried its hand at counterintelligence, the clandestine world that within the United States is run by the FBI under a presidential order.
The issue is especially relevant now following criticism from the top FBI agent in New Jersey, who said the NYPD’s spying in his state had jeopardized national security because it made people afraid to cooperate with law enforcement…
But the intelligence division often operates independently. The FBI, for example, says it was neither involved with nor aware of a 2007 NYPD intelligence operation that photographed and catalogued every mosque in Newark, N.J., and eavesdropped inside Muslim-owned businesses there. The FBI also did not know that the NYPD was in Paterson, N.J., collecting license plates outside a mosque and taking pictures as people arrived for Friday prayers…
The NYPD’s top lawyer, Andrew Schaffer, said New York police were not acting as police officers outside the city.
Police said they don’t have to notify anyone of such operations.
“They don’t exercise police power, they don’t make arrests, they don’t conduct searches, they don’t execute search warrants,” Schaffer told reporters recently. “That is beyond our power outside of our defined jurisdiction. But there’s no prohibition on traveling to, residing in or investigating within the United States.”
Notice, they are not operating as police officers, yet they are eavesdropping inside buildings. Out of their jurisdiction, clearly they could not have acquired a warrant. I wonder how that works…
Mind you, all of that ignores the agencies which are really off the reservation, such as the one which performed the operation on Sharyl Attkisson. Sharyl doesn’t realize it yet, but they never just hack your computer, without giving you technical on your poles, vehicle, and foot wherever you go. As a source in her book noted, “The average American would be shocked at the extent to which this administration is conducting surveillance on private citizens.” He wasn’t kidding.
There is a reason we don’t want the CIA operating on American soil, spying on American citizens. We’ve developed a very strong, and wisely formed amygdala pathway that tells us that is bad. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Yet we are creating multiple, redundant copies of the CIA for use one Americans, only these agencies are devoted entirely to this domestic surveillance work – they have no other responsibilities to distract them. They lie prodigiously, to reporters, targets, even to other law enforcement officers. They hide their operational databases in other unrelated agencies so FOIA requests can’t locate them. They not only violate the spirit of our laws, they actually break laws, and then hide behind their status as law enforcement agencies to justify this. They recruit criminals, grant them immunity from regular law enforcement, pay them a salary, and then provide them with agency support and resources as they direct them into the lives of innocent citizens, to acquire information no court would ever grant them an order to obtain. They create networks of private citizens to call up on a moment’s notice to perform surveillance in the course of their normal activities. They install technical surveillance designed to acquire information which any court would never approve the acquisition of. In short, we are creating criminal agencies designed to break all the laws law enforcement is supposed to uphold.
This all, in a word, is ridiculous.
I know how this ends. It is Yin into Yang. r into K. The high tide giving way to the low. As they push forward with little push back their amygdala learns there are no boundaries, and they will grow bolder until they push so far that they precipitate a backlash. It is the way of government. If the timing is right, you will get Church hearings (Paul hearings?) for the domestic surveillance state, and hopefully those hearings will be as neutering as the original Church hearings were for foreign intelligence.
We are just waiting on the apocalypse.
Apocalypse cometh™