A Coast Guard helicopter refuels during the response to Haiti’s January earthquake. Image by Petty Officer 2nd Class Etta Smith.

The Coast Guard since 2005 has dedicated fewer and fewer resources to environmental protection, one of its myriad responsibilities that includes preventing oil spills like the BP catastrophe now making history in the Gulf of Mexico.

A new report from the Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog inspector general says the number of resource hours committed annually by the Coast Guard to stopping perpetrators from dumping illegally into the ocean and otherwise halting the discharge of dangerous substances dropped in 2009, continuing a trend that’s lasted now for five years.

Lawmakers mounted ever-increasing pressure on the Coast Guard to fight terrorism after Sept. 11 while also insisting that it maintain traditional duties the public is more familiar with, among them plucking citizens from raging floodwaters and rescuing boaters stranded at sea. Resource hours dedicated to search and rescue have also dipped since 2001, although that particular mission depends on how many people actually need help.

Energy devoted to the Coast Guard’s so-called “homeland security missions,” which include things like securing the nation’s ports and stopping undocumented migrants from entering the United States, have increased markedly since the 9/11 hijackings. The federal government defines “resource hours” as the amount of time aircraft are in flight and ships are in the water carrying out specific missions.

More of those hours were spent by the Coast Guard in 2009 protecting the nation’s ports, waterways and coastlines from “maritime security threats” than anything else. Marine environmental protection has been at the bottom of the Coast Guard’s several missions for at least four years when using resource hours as a measurement. The IG is required by Congress to report on the division of resource hours annually.

Actual incidents involving the spillage of oil and other dangerous chemicals were declining prior to the BP disaster, which may account at least in part for the fact that such environmental hazards were “not at the top of the list,” as a retired Coast Guard captain described it to the Washington Post recently.

The Post published an assessment of the Coast Guard Aug. 13 and pointed out that its inspectors relied on decades-old regulations when they visited offshore drilling rigs to ensure workers were adequately protected and units were seaworthy:

Since the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, investigations into oversight gaps have focused on systemic problems within the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, which in recent weeks has been renamed and revamped. But the Coast Guard, which shared oversight with MMS, has largely escaped scrutiny. … Some analysts said the spill highlights the need to rethink Coast Guard priorities. In the past 35 years, Congress has handed the agency at least 27 new responsibilities, according to a tally by Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. ‘They just don’t have enough personnel to carry out all those missions,’ said Oberstar, who favors severing the Coast Guard from the Homeland Security Department. ‘That’s just not possible.’

Elevated Risk reported in May that budget plans by the Obama administration called for cutting $75 million and hundreds of personnel from the Coast Guard. That included decommissioning a strike force coordination center in North Carolina, which provides support to specialized teams in charge of handling oil spills and the release of other hazardous materials. Coast Guard officials promise the center’s responsibilities will be taken over by offices elsewhere and not abandoned.

Members of a key Senate subcommittee that controls the federal government’s purse strings nonetheless complained in a July report that the Coast Guard’s obligation to protect the environment “has been diluted by the increased demands of other homeland security missions.” The panel noted a 45 percent drop overall in mission hours dedicated to marine environmental responses since Sept. 11.

Obama’s proposed 2011 budget also sought an increase in funding of more than $45 million for the Coast Guard to battle drug traffickers, a homeland security mission, while its search-and-rescue functions, considered a “non-homeland security mission,” was scheduled to lose almost $50 million over the previous year.

But many of the Coast Guard’s high-profile response missions in recent months had nothing to do with the drug war. Coast Guard men and women were among the earliest to arrive in January when a colossal earthquake turned Haiti’s Port-au-Prince into near rubble. Its personnel were there to free motorists and homeowners trapped during torrential May floods in Tennessee. It remains the face of Washington’s response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 people before launching an unforgettable environmental tragedy.

Recently retired Adm. Thad Allen likes to remind the public that all of these doubtlessly heroic episodes were carried out despite the Coast Guard having one of the oldest fleets in the world. He said during a February speech that two water vessels were forced to abandon the Haiti relief effort for emergency repairs and aircraft were diverted to help supply repair parts rather than participate in evacuations.

One of the Coast Guard’s leading preoccupations for several years now has been a gigantic, multibillion-dollar campaign to modernize its aging ships and aircraft and purchase advanced technologies. Known as Deepwater, Allen doesn’t always emphasize publicly for obvious reasons that the program has suffered from serious allegations of poor contractor oversight, mismanagement and waste.

The bungled handling of Deepwater has since made pleas from senior leaders for more money a tougher sell even as many acknowledge that the rank-and-file are being asked to do too much. Allen himself eventually conceded that the Coast Guard relied excessively on large defense contractors to direct Deepwater, but not before the program endured costly setbacks.

Martha Garnica was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Photo: Department of Homeland Security

EL PASO — A veteran customs employee who pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, human smuggling and bribery charges was sentenced today to 20 years in prison by a Federal District Judge.

Martha Alicia Garnica, 43, was also ordered to pay a fine of $5,000 and supervised release for four years once released from prison. Judge David Briones denied prosecutors' request for Garnica to forfeit $1 million.

Garnica, who pleaded guilty in May, choked back tears in the courtroom as she apologized to several family members in attendance, the government and the judge. About two dozen federal agents sat in the courtroom as the sentence was handed down.

Garnica conspired with drug traffickers to import more than 200 pounds of marijuana between April and November 2009. Garnica and a co-defendant also paid bribes totaling $5,500 to a Customs and Border Protection officer to allow drugs and an illegal immigrant into the country. The inspector, in turn, cooperated with federal internal affairs agents in the investigation.

Hired as customs inspector in February 1997, Garnica became a CBP officer when DHS formed in 2003. Since March 2008 she had been a technician assigned to an El Paso-area border crossing.

Three other defendants received prison sentences, ranging from two years to a little more than five years. A fourth defendant was murdered in February in Juarez.

In journalism school, our professors were fond of reminding us that perspective is essential. It’s not always enough to simply report that tens of thousands of people had their lives upended by a tornado in south-central Oklahoma.

How many is 15,000 or 26,000 or 367,000 people? Maybe there’s a sports stadium in the newspaper’s coverage area and readers would better understand the story if they knew the storm’s survivors could fill every seat plus the skyboxes.

Take the recent catastrophe that hammered Pakistan. Authorities from the United Nations and the Pakistani government say floodwaters have left as many as six million people without homes. If true, that’s nearly enough disaster victims to replace every single resident in the U.S. cities of Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Diego. Combined. Have you ever been to San Francisco? There are people everywhere. You can’t escape them.

The BBC of London has taken this valuable journalism exercise and turned it into an online public-service tool driven not by reporters but readers themselves. Found at Howbigreally.com, the Dimensions project allows you to take the geographic breadth of a major event and place it over a map of where you live or work with the help of satellite images.

The best example there now is the segment of Pakistan believed to be affected by the deluge. We overlayed it with the San Francisco Bay Area where the Center for Investigative Reporting is located (see first image).

By typing in our main office’s zip code, we could instantly see that the flooding reached far into Oregon at its northern tip and well past California’s southern border with Mexico at the base. Or, to look at it another way, driving the length of the damage would take roughly 13 hours.

“We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history,” the project’s site says. “Dimensions is part of the BBC’s continual experimentation in trying to find new ways to communicate history.”

Unfortunately, there’s no embed option, so we had to use screen shots here instead of interactive versions you could play with. But check out the numerous other events they’re making available for you to visualize in entirely new ways. How big are the footprints of the Twin Towers in your neighborhood? Is a deep-sea trawler net used by commercial fishermen and banned in some parts of the world big enough to drag away your local corner store and maybe a few neighbors or a rec center?

An extraordinarily giant mass of trash swirling endlessly in the Pacific Ocean is big enough to cover the entire southwestern United States with plenty of room to spare. Of course, there’s a Gulf oil spill mapping option, too.

A service like this could potentially contain all kinds of accuracy issues. We’re not professional cartographers to begin with, and debate continues over how far oil in the Gulf has actually spread. But Dimensions at least begins to help anyone interested develop a stronger grasp of one moment in time that may otherwise seem worlds removed from the average American.

Image credits: British Broadcasting Corporation

It wasn't a lead story when scientists from the University of California at San Francisco first publicly expressed their unease earlier this year about the possible negative health effects caused by full-body airport scanners now being used across the United States to stop explosives from making it onto jet airliners.

By then the Transportation Security Administration had largely managed to remove itself from headlines announcing privacy complaints some were making about the devices, which allow security screeners to see underneath the clothing of passengers unlike traditional metal detectors.

Powerful members of Congress have since begun to throw their weight behind the issue, however, threatening to place whole-body imagers back in the spotlight as the federal government continues to spend tens of millions on them, much of it from economic stimulus dollars.

This month Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, ranking member of a key committee that oversees the Department of Homeland Security, sent a letter to Secretary Janet Napolitano raising questions about the federal government’s decision in May to purchase 100 more scanning devices, particularly those using so-called “backscatter X-ray” technology.

Joined by fellow GOP senators Tom Coburn (Okla.) and Richard Burr (N.C.), Collins requested that the department’s chief medical officer and a group of independent experts review the health impacts of full-body scanners on airline travelers, employees of the Transportation Security Administration and other airport personnel. The trio wants homeland security officials to find out what happens as a result of repeated exposure to radiation from the machines.

“Please explain why the department continues to purchase this technology when legitimate concerns about its safety appear to remain unanswered,” they wrote.

The four medical experts at UCSF warn that whole-body imagers could subject the skin to “dangerously high” doses of radiation because of the unique technology used. They’re worried certain travelers may be particularly vulnerable to emissions from the scanners including seniors, women prone to breast cancer, expectant mothers and children for which the impact hasn’t been fully evaluated.

Their own April 6 letter to President Obama’s top science advisor says independent safety data on the devices do not exist to determine if radiation damage is occurring. The UCSF scientists are hardly first-year med students. One is a biophysicist, while another is an internationally known cancer expert. Three are members of the National Academy of Sciences. According to their letter:

Crises create a sense of urgency that frequently leads to hasty decisions where unintended consequences are not recognized. Examples include the failure of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to recognize the risk of blood transfusions in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic, approval of drugs and devices by the [Food and Drug Administration] without sufficient review, and improper standards set by the [Environmental Protection Agency], to name a few.

The more recent crisis they’re referring to is the failed Christmas Day bombing when would-be radical Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on its way to Detroit. That set off a campaign to more rapidly implement full-body scanning at airports around the globe, including several in the United States and those in the Netherlands and Nigeria where Abdumutallab reportedly boarded connecting flights with explosives hidden in his underwear.

One maker of whole-body imagers, California-based OSI Systems, has since begun boasting to investors about the surge in demand reporting that total orders stood at $50 million worth as of mid-May. Authorities in Great Britain also announced this year following the attempted attack that they would be purchasing scanners from the company.

Meanwhile, federal officials have been able to quell some grievances over privacy associated with the machines by promising the flying public that images generated from them would not be stored or transmitted. Security officers also review the images in a separate room preventing workers from seeing the actual passenger, TSA says. Those assurances haven’t stopped some briefly high-profile and even bizarre incidents from occurring.

A whole-body imager in May led to one situation seemingly worse than any dreadful scenario a privacy advocate could dream up as evidence against their use. The Smoking Gun obtained a police report showing that an airport screener had beat his co-worker with a baton causing “bruises and abrasions” after he was teased relentlessly by fellow security officers for having a small penis.

How were they familiar with the size of his genitals? It was revealed during a training session involving an X-ray scanner. The man “stated he could not take the jokes anymore and lost his mind,” according to the report.

Sen. Collins had already been asking the Department of Homeland Security why it wasn’t using whole-body scanners like those deployed in Amsterdam that rely on software to automatically detect the presence of dangerous items on flyers as they pass through security gates. That way screeners don’t need to review detailed images or conduct further inspection unless the program alerts them to a possible threat.

She wrote in a separate mid-April letter to the department that Amsterdam’s scanning machines are faster at moving travelers past security and they also prevent passengers and screeners from being exposed to radiation.

While no technology is 100 percent effective at detecting dangerous items, the Dutch officials we talked to expressed confidence that there was a high probability that this technology would have detected Abdulmutallab’s concealed explosives. We wanted to bring this technology to your attention because it appears to offer a solution to the significant privacy concerns that have been raised about DHS’s deployment of whole-body imaging machines in the United States.

The letter was co-signed by senators Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.).

Flickr image courtesy Mad House Photography.

Flickr image of St. John in the Virgin Islands courtesy Snap Man.

Virtually everything today is in one way or another a potential danger to U.S. national security. There are foreign terrorists, of course. Beyond that authorities cite drug cartels, downturns in the economy, espionage, street gangs, counterfeit goods, right-wing militias, left-wing environmentalists and the multiple personalities of Mother Nature.

Beautiful Caribbean locales, on the other hand, face their own hazards. For the Virgin Islands, one of several U.S. territories many Americans forget have deep historical, political and economic ties to the mainland, it’s apparently adult beverages and “Puerto Rican terrorists” that together form a feasible threat.

First, background. The story begins with daiquiri-addicted Americans who love the taste of sweet rum at home and while away visiting sun-drenched vacation resorts. More specifically, it’s the Spring Break love potion known as Captain Morgan, manufactured by a company called Diageo PLC, the U.K.-based conglomerate behind such intoxicating substances as Guinness beer and Smirnoff vodka. Certain rums like Captain Morgan are produced in vast Caribbean distilleries.

From there the story leads to a monthly magazine called Homeland Security Today, which, at the risk of offending those fine folks, would not be easily mistaken for the New Yorker and certainly won’t be appearing next to Cosmo at the check-out stand anytime soon. Its readers are narrowly focused, many of them government contractors and bureaucrats, so an intriguing revelation within its pages could slip by without much notice.

The June issue of Homeland Security Today contained a feature from its editor, David Silverberg, who described changes the Virgin Islands have been making to better prepare for catastrophes and build a stronger culture of emergency management.

Established as a U.S. territory in 1917, the cluster of stunning beaches and seaside hills is by no means free from peril, despite what travel brochures suggest. Droughts can occur on the Virgin Islands due to a dependence on limited rainwater, in addition to the possibility of hurricanes, tropical storms, earthquakes and tsunamis. Plus, hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil are refined on the island of Saint Croix every day, Silverberg writes.

But emergency managers in the Virgin Islands didn’t emphasize any of these scenarios when they developed a response exercise last year to challenge the area’s preparedness capabilities. Instead, according to a brief sidebar from Silverberg headlined “Rum and radicals,” they came up with a narrative seemingly capable of causing diplomatic problems by pretending that a group of Puerto Rican terrorists called “The People’s Hope” planned to attack facilities on the islands with improvised explosive devices.

Puerto Rico is also a U.S. territory located not far west in the Caribbean.

Why Puerto Rico?

The response exercise leads back to rum, Silverberg implies. An ambitious governor of the Virgin Islands who took office in 2007 but went to school in Ohio, John deJongh, persuaded Diageo, parent of Captain Morgan, to move its rum-making operations from Puerto Rico to his tropical destination. DeJongh did so by promising massive subsidies to Diageo, but the departure would also cost Puerto Rico jobs and tens of millions in tax revenue.

View Trouble in paradise in a larger map

Officials in the Virgin Islands argue that Diageo planned to head elsewhere with Captain Morgan anyway, but the perception of a coup enraged the Puerto Rican community, both on the island and the mainland. This summer a group that coordinates New York City’s annual Puerto Rican Day Parade rejected Diageo as a sponsor following a years-long relationship between the two.

Rum taxes collected from the drink’s sale to consumers in the United States are administered by the federal government, so Washington found itself at the center of an ugly political clash over the fate of Captain Morgan. Leaders in the Virgin Islands planned to use those rum taxes to lure Diageo eastward, while advocates for Puerto Rico sought to stop what they characterized as a bailout for the company and keep production where it’s been for more than two decades. The whole thing is now known as the “rum wars.”

There are reported racial tensions as well. The Congressional Black Caucus has actively defended deJongh’s campaign in Washington, while Puerto Rico is linked politically with Hispanic lawmakers.

So now consider in that context not only what’s regarded by one side as a drive to “poach” jobs and income needed for public services, but also an exercise for emergency responders in which one government refers to the citizens of a nearby government as terrorists. According to Homeland Security Today:

The scenario was fictional and intended mainly to test areas of responsibility and jurisdiction among island responders – but the real resentment continues. As recently as April, deJongh was fighting legislative efforts in Congress to nullify the deal and keep Captain Morgan rum in Puerto Rico.

Aggressive lobbying under the capitol dome is one thing. But are Puerto Ricans aware that the folks next door have imagined them as something far worse? The rum wars may in the end serve as a larger commentary about the use of labels in the global war on terror.

The United States has again broken its previous record for the number of immigration cases waiting to be resolved by a federal court judge. There were nearly 248,000 cases pending by the middle of June this year, a whopping 33 percent higher than where the figure stood at the end of fiscal year 2008. The latest numbers come courtesy of researchers at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which specializes in federal law enforcement statistics.

TRAC also found that the average length of time it’s taken to conclude immigration cases during 2010 reached 459 days, a number higher than any year since at least 1998. By state, California remains the leader in average wait times with more than 640 days. One hearing location in San Diego posted an extraordinary average wait time of nearly 1,300 days, or to put it another way, more than three years.

Experts attribute the enormous backlog of immigration cases to a list of possible factors. First, the number of judges available to hear immigration cases is declining, and as of March, one out of every six such positions was unfilled. Just five immigration judges have been sworn in since that time. “[The federal government] still has a very long way to go to fill existing judge vacancies,” according to TRAC.

Second, immigration enforcement in one region of the country over another may be changing, which could lead to a greater number of cases that judges are suddenly required to contend with. New proceedings have actually gone down somewhat during the 2010 fiscal year nationwide. But new matters that required attention from an immigration court reached all-time highs in 2009.

Individual courts in Texas, Nevada, Illinois and Arizona, meanwhile, saw the number of pending cases accumulate rapidly during the first none months of this year, from 37 percent in Phoenix to as high as 67 percent in Harlingen, Texas.

Illustrating the amount of pressure faced by politicians in Washington on the issue of illegal immigration, a bill pumping $600 million into increased border security easily passed both the House and Senate last week before Obama signed it Aug. 13.

The White House first requested more money for border security from Congress earlier this summer when Obama committed to sending 1,200 National Guard troops to the southwest following complaints by high-profile elected officials that the federal government wasn’t doing enough there. The money will also be used to build new Border Patrol stations and acquire unmanned surveillance aircraft.

But as we’ve noted before, hiring personnel to fight drug traffickers and illegal border crossers costs taxpayers a fortune. After factoring in background checks, fitness evaluations, night-vision goggles, uniforms, mobile radios and more, Customs and Border Protection estimated last year that the cost of each new hire is about $160,000. If correct, that would put the price tag of taking on 1,000 new border-patrol agents at $160 million.

Under former President Bush, the number of law-enforcement officers carrying out patrol activities on the border grew to nearly 19,000 nationally by April 2009 from about 12,000 just a few years before. Bush also sought to dramatically scale back the federal government’s policy of releasing people charged with immigration violations until a court hearing could be held. That led to a jump in the expense needed to keep them in detention.

The Department of Homeland Security has in addition already spent $800 million on the troubled SBInet program, an attempt to line the nation’s border with surveillance devices capable of alerting authorities to the presence of border crossers. But SBInet has so far failed to meet expectations and is under review.

Senior homeland security officials will face the difficulty of finding reliable border agents as they embark on a new recruitment drive. The department’s watchdog inspector general had 230 corruption cases under its purview last year, in part because drug traffickers have succeeded at bribing some border agents. The FBI had more than 110 border-related cases during that time. Customs and Border Protection has added over 200 internal affairs agents since 2006.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano spoke with NewsHour on PBS last week about border security. During the interview she was asked to comment on a statement made by Arizona’s two GOP senators, John McCain and Jon Kyl, who said the latest measure from Congress “is a start.” They complained nonetheless that it still didn’t include enough for more customs inspectors in some parts of their home state. Her response:

What we want to make sure that we do is, don’t just throw money at the border, but do things that make sense, do things that are efficient, and establish control along that whole 2,000-mile-long border. And as we do that, let’s make sure that we’ve got the right mix – the right mix of manpower, the right mix of technology, the right mix of infrastructure.

Figures in chart courtesy Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Image: North American Aerospace Defense Command

It’s one of the most powerful addictions formed by government since the Sept. 11 hijackings. Blooming in every corner of the country are high-tech command facilities for fighting terrorism, battling crime linked to national security, coordinating disaster responses, enhancing infrastructure protection and more. The desire for them is insatiable, and Congress seems ever the enabler.

Some existed prior to the attacks and received an injection of cash when new, massive spending on homeland security by Washington exploded. Others were created following 9/11 to address every hazard imaginable.

Many of these coordination and intelligence centers are not unlike how action-film directors portray them. There are banks of monitors with analysts working behind three or four panels each, large screens on the wall tuned to cable news networks or weather feeds, lights bleeping from server racks and, of course, lots of maps. Always lots of maps. The only thing missing is a chain-smoking character actor determinedly leading the response to total pandemonium as it rages outside.

Keeping track of the centers turns out to be extraordinarily difficult. It’s never clear where one overlaps with or replaces another. There’s the National Response Coordination Center, the National Operations Center, the Terrorist Screening Center, the National Counterterrorism Center, the Transportation Security Operations Center (aka the “Freedom Center”), the Transportation Security Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, the Coast Guard Intelligence Coordination Center, the National Maritime Intelligence Center, the National Vessel Movement Center, the National Hazardous Materials Fusion Center, the Human Smuggling and Trafficking Center, the Bulk Cash Smuggling Center, the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, the International Organized Crime Intelligence and Operations Center and the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center. That’s a partial list.

View Center of the world in a larger map
A sample array of intelligence and coordination centers located in or around the nation’s capital. Click on the tabs to learn more.

The Department of Homeland Security also spent more than $250 million over a three-year period helping to build 70 local police fusion centers where authorities trade information about terrorists, natural disasters, threats to public health and everyday crime (it used to be just terrorists, but the expense proved difficult to justify).

Last year’s homeland security appropriations bill contained over 80 earmarks totaling almost $52 million for so-called emergency operations centers located in dozens of communities across the country, from the city of Green Cove Springs in Florida to the city of White Fish in Montana (estimated combined population – about 15,000). Officials say EOCs are necessary for coordinating disaster response and recovery.

Then there’s the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, not to be confused with the National Biosurveillance Integration Center. The first determines what dangers we face if biological agents fall into the hands of terrorists.

The second center’s annual budget is about $8 million. Officials who work on preparedness issues elsewhere in government told congressional investigators last year they weren’t sure if it “contributed anything to the federal biosurveillance community that other agencies were not already accomplishing,” according to a December 2009 report.

Passage of a law in 2007 that implemented leftover recommendations from the 9/11 Commission led to the establishment of the biosurveillance integration center. Its job is to analyze biothreat data flowing in from “partner” agencies and to send out an alert if disturbing trends or events are detected. At least that’s its job on paper.

The center’s “partners,” interviewed by the Government Accountability Office, expressed “widespread uncertainty and skepticism” about its purpose and responsibilities. Its partners include the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Others complained that during the response to H1N1, the center “was not able to demonstrate that it had unique value to add.” Some said they’d rather deal with another of the many centers available, namely the Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center.

There were even worries that the biosurveillance center would fail to accurately interpret data and end up mass distributing ill-informed reports. Interviewees said they were concerned “that [the center’s] lack of contextual sophistication could lead to confusion, a greater volume of unnecessary communication in the biosurveillance environment, or even panic.” In other words, an overabundance of centers could lead to the very shockwaves from non-existent impending doom that we fear.

To be certain, the risks involved shouldn’t be dismissed as science fiction. Experts say the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the U.K. during 2001 led to billions of dollars in losses suffered by the food and agricultural industries. If perpetrators actually figured out a way to spread deadly biological agents over, say, a large vacation resort, it would cause unbelievable tragedy and no doubt send tremors through the economy. The Obama administration is training postal workers to distribute treatments if something like anthrax is loosed into the air.

But the GAO learned that federal agencies responsible for transmitting essential data to the biosurveillance center aren’t doing so with enthusiasm, leaving it to rely in part on publicly available information, which includes news stories. The center’s “partners” also weren’t detailing personnel there with enough expertise to make it effective in rapidly detecting biological threats.

The National Biosurveillance Integration Center isn’t alone in its troubles.

Federal drug enforcement officials created the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) all the way back in the 1970s to collect, analyze and share information about narcotics traffickers and border violence. More than 20 agencies have representatives there. Yet requests for information from its own federal partners, some of them critical, have declined substantially in recent years, the Justice Department’s watchdog inspector general concluded in a June report.

Its ability to coordinate with state and federal bureaucracies “is inconsistent,” the report said. And the center did not keep an up-to-date list of all the other intelligence and fusion centers it should have ties with, nor did EPIC know if it had users in each of those facilities. The following quote, however, seems to say the most about the rise of such centers:

When we compared EPIC with other multi-agency centers having counterdrug intelligence responsibilities, we found increasing potential for overlap in certain areas. … With the emergence of new centers and EPIC’s expansion into program areas that were not addressed [in earlier planning], there is an increased likelihood for duplication of effort among the centers.

If only the federal government would create a command center for processing Freedom of Information Act requests. At least then there would be a single institution to hold accountable.

Authorities in Maryland plan to collect data on motorists using automated license-plate
scanners and centrally store it at a police intelligence fusion center where law enforcement specialists analyze and share sensitive information about criminal and terrorist threats.

The initiative makes Maryland among the first nationally to establish a statewide network for data generated from license-plate readers. While the devices have not endured regular scrutiny and occasional opposition the way public surveillance cameras have historically, the technology in many respects is more powerful.

Privacy advocates warn that plate recognition enables police to document where drivers go – both guilty car thieves and innocent citizens alike – by registering their GPS locations when each license plate is scanned. Police need reasonable suspicion that a crime has been or will be committed for much of the contact officers have with the public, at least in theory. But laws that restrict data gathering by law enforcement don’t always keep up with the 21st century.

A statement by Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley on Aug. 4 says only that the data will be used for “legitimate law enforcement purposes” and “the privacy rights of Maryland’s citizens are protected using appropriate policies and procedures.” The state plans to spend $4 million by next year for over 200 scanners and says so far they’ve alerted police to carjacking suspects, plates stolen from other cars, suspended registrations, drivers wanted on felony warrants and more.

After Elevated Risk pressed a spokesman in the governor’s office for additional answers, Shaun Adamec said in an e-mail that local agencies are being encouraged to develop privacy policies that limit how long data can be held. Maryland’s Coordination and Analysis Center, meanwhile, has internal rules for ensuring that information “is carefully maintained, responsibly stored, safely disseminated and routinely purged,” he said.

“Any information on license plates is used specifically for public safety purposes,” Adamec said. “It’s also important to note that license plates are state-issued and are not considered private property.”

The latest news comes just two years after civil liberties advocates exposed a spying program coordinated by the Maryland State Police and aimed at political activist groups not necessarily believed to have committed any crimes. State authorities infiltrated and monitored activist organizations and collected information about their members, in part by using fake e-mail addresses and screen names.

Targets of the spying included death penalty opponents, mainstream human rights groups and peace activists. One longtime anti-violence organizer ended up in a database used for storing information about high-level drug traffickers. There he was categorized under “terrorism – anti-government” and “terrorism – anti-war protesters.” Surveillance logs generated by police even described a meeting he had with a member of Congress to discuss withdrawing troops from Iraq.

The revelation led O’Malley to request an investigation of the state police, and he called on past-U.S. Attorney Stephen Sachs to conduct it. In a final report, the former prosecutor concluded that no one in the state police’s chain of command “gave any thought whatever” to the possibility that infiltrating such groups was inappropriate, nor were efforts made to establish reasonable suspicion that the activists were involved in criminal activity. According to the probe from Sachs:

Many of the [Maryland State Police] troopers and commanders whom we interviewed maintained, essentially, that it is better to be safe than sorry, and that even a remote risk to public safety justifies the infiltration of groups that plan lawful protests and demonstrations. Such a justification proves too much. It would justify government infiltration, without limitation, of any group of people who seek to exercise publicly their rights of free expression and association.

Shaun Adamec, the spokesman for O’Malley, said Maryland’s spy scandal occurred under a past governor. “Such behavior may have been the policy of that administration,” he said. “It’s certainly not the practice of this one.” By “that administration” he means former Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich, who’s now locked in an election battle with O’Malley to regain his throne after losing it in 2006. Ehrlich has publicly expressed concern about plate readers, and he strongly opposes the use of traffic cameras, a very similar technology facing resistance in many corners of the country.

Police nationally are buying license-plate readers with greater frequency in part because of the availability of economic stimulus funds and advancements in the technology. Funding for Maryland’s plate-recognition program comes from a mix of federal criminal justice and homeland security grants.

The Illinois-based company Motorola Inc., which has made a small fortune since Sept. 11 from readiness grants by selling public safety radio systems to state and local governments, foresees patrol cars someday carrying four scanners aimed in different directions. Officers have to do virtually nothing when the devices are in operation. Motorola says the recognition technology allows police to check up to 5,000 plates during an eight-hour shift. The systems then compare plate information automatically against databases of outstanding warrants or vehicles reported stolen.

But Motorola’s product literature also emphasizes that the scanners can “quietly note the time and location” when a “vehicle of interest” is captured by the device. From there, a software program named BOSS turns the data into “useful intelligence,” which police can query by time, date, all or a portion of the plate’s numbers and location of the vehicle. This data can also be mapped to form a larger portrait of the driver’s activities.

Few states have distinct rules governing the scanners. The Kansas City Star did a story on them Aug. 2 and found this:

Police like the devices for their speed and efficiency but mostly for their ability to record thousands of plates and their locations each day. … Over time, as more information is collected, the database is more likely to reveal a particular vehicle’s movements, according to a privacy study released last year by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which supports police use of the license plate readers. The study noted that residents may worry that cameras would collect their license plate numbers at places with which they may not prefer to be linked, such as addiction counseling meetings, doctors’ offices or staging areas for political protests. Police agencies should adopt a policy that regulates the collection and use of the data, to reduce residents’ anxiety, according to the study. Area police departments, including Kansas City, don’t yet have such policies.

Video demonstration of automated license-plate scanners from NDI Recognition Systems, a vendor of the technology founded in the U.K.

Flickr image of a license-plate recognition device courtesy alexrhee25.

Few stories about the state of Arizona could possibly command more attention right now than its passage of a bill that directs police officers to determine the immigration status of people they come into contact with and suspect of being in the country illegally.

While Americans were riveted by debate over the law, however, something else occurred there recently that’s nothing short of remarkable, something that also turned out to be fatally tragic for one man. And it could have implications for the former governor of Arizona, called upon by Barack Obama at the beginning of his term to take over the Department of Homeland Security.

At midnight on July 15, Arizona’s Department of Public Safety pulled the plug on dozens of speed cameras that criss-crossed state highways, part of a widely loathed program to catch traffic violators and control erratic driving. This at a time when every other government agency around the nation is steadily adopting as many enhanced security technologies as possible.

Outrage among residents over the cameras grew so severe that a technician who worked for the contractor hired to maintain the devices was shot to death last year. Other less-violent local tales of defiance include covering the cameras with boxes and Post-it Notes, disarming them with an axe, leaving tickets unpaid, or in the case of one driver, donning a monkey mask to foil attempts at identification. A politician from the area even said surveillance trends like speed cameras are an ominous sign that Obama and the federal government may eventually track drivers with microchips.

Janet Napolitano, one-time governor of the state, “famously” declared the camera system would generate $90 million in needed revenue from citations during its first year, according to the Arizona Republic. The total instead came in at $78 million after almost two years, a figure that still arguably makes the program a cash cow but nonetheless was cited as another reason for abandoning it.

Aggravation some Arizona residents expressed over the intrusive nature of the cameras poses an intriguing dilemma for Washington where Napolitano now leads a sprawling homeland security bureaucracy that probably does more to represent the idea of domestic surveillance – good or bad – than any other federal agency.

Ex-GOP state Rep. Sam Crump, who’s now making a bid for Congress, applauded Arizona’s move to end its speed-camera program calling it an abusive use of the technology and suggesting it would result in more spying from the government. “I can see the Obama administration putting a chip in every car and saying, ‘We’ll issue a ticket,’” if you break the law, the Republic quoted him as saying.

Redflex Traffic Systems, the company in charge of operating the cameras, warned gravely – and perhaps somewhat predictably – that if they were taken down, a segment of drivers would endanger the lives of others by becoming bold and reckless. The recent move doesn’t impact similar speed-camera systems maintained by local governments in Arizona since this case only involves a state-run network. But there have been attempts through a ballot initiative and legislation to ban them completely from state highways.

Instances exist elsewhere of towns fighting back against public-safety projects viewed as a threat to privacy. Local leaders in the tiny fishing village of Dillingham, Ala., used $200,000 in federal homeland security grants to blanket parts of the town with 80 surveillance cameras. Some residents complained about them so relentlessly that Dillingham’s mayor eventually resigned due to criticism.

Meanwhile, police in other cities across the country are continuing years-long campaigns to expand the use of such cameras, much of it fueled by anti-terrorism funds handed out by Washington. Or they’re deploying more sophisticated technologies that actually are capable of registering the GPS locations of innocent and guilty motorists alike, namely license-plate scanners.

New York City is among the leaders with its “ring of steel,” a plan announced in 2006 to install 3,000 public and private cameras alongside dozens of license-plates readers to guard Lower Manhattan against terrorists. Yet residents in the Big Apple learned recently that hundreds of cameras controlled by the city’s public transit authority didn’t actually work.

Police in Pittsburgh, on the other hand, say camera footage helped them identify two teenaged suspects allegedly behind the killing of a retired firefighter. Shortly afterward the mayor announced he wanted to use $12 million in Recovery Act funding for a project that would include 200 more cameras.

Surveillance devices can also aid in enforcing better conduct among public employees. Los Angeles installed them in the control cabs of metro trains to observe engineers after one operator, reportedly distracted by text messaging, was blamed in part for the gruesome 2008 Chatsworth accident that killed 25 people.

GOP Congressman Jeff Flake of Arizona blasts a $200,000 homeland security grant as wasteful. A tiny fishing village in Alaska used it to purchase surveillance cameras.

Flickr image courtesy anarchosyn.

Former Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton (right) during a meeting in 2009. Flickr image courtesy ericrichardson.

Speaking at a high-profile security conference in Colorado this summer, former Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton touched on a subject we’ve been exploring here at Elevated Risk: the militarization of local police since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The legendary police leader joined a roster of star-studded attendees for the Aspen Security Forum, which included past homeland security honcho Michael Chertoff; Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, and a host of inside-the-beltway journalists and one-time senior national security officials.

Bratton told an audience that even though the LAPD’s special weapons and tactics team had access to “several hundred high-powered firearms,” the 2008 bloodshed in Mumbai, India, led him to believe it wasn’t enough and the department needed more assault weapons, according to Government Security News, which both sponsored and heavily covered the event. Segments of the forum have also been appearing on C-SPAN.

During the Mumbai attacks carried out at several locations, gunmen killed nearly 180 people in a three-day spree of violence that demonstrated to the world terrorism isn’t limited to airliner hijackings. Also as a result of the Mumbai shootings, according to GSN:

The LAPD changed its entire strategy related to a hostage-taking incident conducted by terrorists in the future. Bratton said he concluded that terrorists are not interested in negotiating for the release of the hostages, but would try to gain as much media attention as possible, and would eventually kill their hostages. So, instead of negotiating, Bratton said he would plan for his police officers to break in on the terrorists quickly, and kill them, if possible. At the time [of the Mumbai shooting deaths], the LAPD had about 300 officers assigned to its counterterrorism units, said Bratton, and they were retrained ‘on a dime’ in the revised tactics.

Bratton added that terrorism was a low priority earlier in his career as a policeman, but when he announced plans to leave the LAPD in August of 2009, literally half his time was spent on terrorism-related issues.

Local police have sought to acquire more military-style equipment and techniques, and as we’ve noted in recent weeks, the LAPD isn’t the only force to argue it should be carrying more lethal weaponry. The Boston Police Department pushed for the right last year to accept 200 M-16s free from the Defense Department for its patrol officers citing terrorist threats as a justification. Community leaders condemned the plan, however.

Police agencies in addition have the used the hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-terrorism and preparedness grants handed out by Congress since the 9/11 hijackings to finance armored trucks, beefed-up incident command vehicles that resemble RVs on steroids, battering rams, surveillance devices and an endless array of expensive gear capable of defeating or at least limiting the impact of explosives and ammunition.

But the new, aggressive look of your neighborhood police department hasn’t been without political resistance from citizens and civilian elected officials. The police chief appointed by Detroit Mayor Dave Bing last year to take on the city’s notorious street violence was asked to step down in July following a string of headline-grabbing incidents that at least in part centered around the city’s SWAT team.

Chief Warren Evans made a habit of deploying the specialized unit for everyday law-enforcement activities. The department on his watch also became friendly toward reality TV cameras, and the crew of one program was present when an officer from Detroit’s Special Response Team shot and killed a 7-year-old girl during a botched raid. Weeks later, after the tragedy had agitated already deep divisions between the city’s black community and police, a Hollywood-style promotional video for another show called “The Chief” surfaced in which Evans wielded an assault rifle and promised he’d do “whatever it takes” to fix Detroit.

The instantly controversial video illustrated another habit for Evans – to join field-level police officers and march through frostbitten Detroit neighborhoods in combat boots, handcuffing perpetrators and seizing bags of drugs. “Instead of sitting at my desk with my feet up, eating potato chips and reading the newspaper, I’d much rather have my 61-year-old ass on the street in a scout car, working,” Evans says at one point in the promo. And elsewhere: “Every time I enter a dark building, I don’t know what’s waiting for me on the other end.”

Although the video was likely filmed prior to the death of Aiyana Jones, Bing eventually told the press he was “blindsided” by the department’s participation in reality TV and wasn’t aware of a contract it had signed with A&E’s “The First 48." Bing announced a ban on camera crews after the deadly house raid.

It’s worth noting there were other factors that apparently contributed to Bing asking for the police chief’s resignation. Evans also had an ongoing relationship with a subordinate woman inside the department. The Associated Press sought comments from Evans last month about turmoil at the agency but after not hearing back referred to statements posted on his Facebook page that addressed the TV stints:

“I don’t get the big fuss! It’s a producers [sic] product. If the City doesn’t like it there won’t be a series Period! Does someone want to believe the streets aren’t like that? LOL.”

While the melodrama Evans brought to his campaign against crime isn’t shared by every police official in the United States, including Bratton, it fits a larger narrative maintained by the law enforcement community since Sept. 11. Police cast the world as more dangerous than ever before, arguing that without hundreds of millions of dollars in intelligence fusion centers, evermore military-type apparel and the right to carry powerful assault weapons, they won’t be able to protect and serve communities vulnerable to the 21st century’s brand of terrorism, drug cartels, ruthless street gangs and more.

But the rise and fall of Warren Evans raises questions about which solutions may go too far.