'Citizen Spying Program' revealed in #BlueLeaks documents, Austin Chronicle reported; general ineptitude at fusion centers likely prevents worse abuses

Grits wanted to flag this report from the Austin Chronicle on some of the "BlueLeaks" revelations dumped from, among other agencies, Texas fusion centers. The Chron reported that the documents "reveal a secret citizen spying program that's active in the Austin area and across the country." They plan to follow up with future stories.

Reported the Chron's John Anderson, about 800 so-called Threat Liaison Officers (TLOs) "report suspicious activity or behavior" to the Austin fusion center. TLOs "include sworn law enforcement officers, but also non-sworn government employees as well as private citizens." Some TLOs work as "private security officers with local hotels, malls, large venues, and local semiconductor companies. Others are government employees in 'education,' 'code enforcement,' and 'public works.'" Further, documents alluded to partner organizations in the "military," "hospital systems," and the "faith community."

Texas Civil Rights Project lawyer and fusion center Community Advocate Peter Steffensen told the Chronicle the TLO program creates "a cadre of anonymous, non-law-enforcement citizen informants who, unlike ARIC, are completely unaccountable to the public."

Grits tracked fusion center activities some when they first rolled out, but soon concluded that their ineptitude and irrelevant methods, in practice, trumped the potential civil liberties threats. I more or less feel about them as I did in 2008: "[P]robably the greatest comfort to me about potential abuse of fusion centers is that I don't believe analysts can meaningfully comb through that much data pro-actively, which means their work is reactive and thus largely redundant and worthless. I see them, at least so far, as more a pointless boondoggle than a tangible privacy threat. That could change, though, if we begin to hear evidence these data streams have been abused."

We've seen some of these criticisms before, but now researchers can review primary documentation for themselves. Grits still considers Texas fusion centers more boondoggle than threat. But the potential threat is certainly there, and it grows when hundreds of private informants have access to this information, even if they've signed non-disclosure agreements.

DPS intelligence chief who briefed Trump on immigrant rapists himself accused, arrested, jailed for sexual assault: He ran the state's fusion centers gathering intelligence on millions of Texans

This seems self evidently awful, so rather than opine on the subject in prose, here's the short version of how I feel about this story:

Click to enlarge

With AT&T's 'Hemisphere' program, formerly 'Hudson Hawk,' high-dollar phone surveillance goes local

Several readers forwarded me a link to a New York Times story titled, "Drug agents use vast phone trove eclipsing N.S.A.'s." Here's the lede: "For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs." See more coverage from The Daily Dot, and AP's synopsis.

AT&T's records supposedly go back 26 years. In Europe there's a vigorous debate in electronic privacy circles over the "right to be forgotten," which to my surprise has never really caught on in the U.S. the way one might expect. But that concept springs to mind here. God help me, who knows what my phone records from 26 years ago might show?! I'm not surprised the DEA accessed these records. But I'm disappointed that AT&T kept them that long, apparently at the behest/direction of law enforcement. There's SCOTUS' "Third Party Doctrine" in action for you!

Local Texas agencies, at least in Houston and  likely elsewhere, also accessed the Operation Hemisphere database. Chris Soghoian tweeted out several; links with references to local agencies potentially using this "Hemisphere" database. One Harris County Commissioners Court agenda dated January 25, 2013 (pdf) included item 12(f) approving as a sole source, no-bid contract, "AT&T in the amount of $373,795 sole source for Operation Hemisphere investigative services for the Sheriff’s Department for the period ending June 30, 2013." And on a February 4, 2011 agenda item 10(a) under "19(c) Purchasing," included, "Request for approval of sole source (a) AT&T sole source for Operation Hemisphere, formerly Hudson Hawk, investigative services for the Sheriff's Department in the amount of $924,500."

Another agenda dated Jan. 20, 2012 included item 19(c)3 which read, "Accept High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Grant funds in the additional amount of $666,667 from the Office of National Drug Control Policy for the Houston Intelligence Support Center – Operation Hemisphere Initiative."  And what is the Houston Intelligence Support Center? Best I can tell, it's the Houston Regional Intelligence Service Center, one of many "fusion centers" that cropped up post 9/11. How are they utilizing the Hemisphere database? With whom are they sharing the information? Your guess is as good as mine. What we do know is that, including the fusion center money (which came from a federal grant), those three payments alone total $1,964,962 that the Harris County commissioners court spent on this one surveillance tool between 2011 and 2013 (so far). That's a big sum any way you look at it.

Grits has not covered the NSA metadata scandals extensively, as much as they intrigue me. Keeping this blog tightly focused on Texas criminal justice helps keep the task from getting utterly out of hand. But the Hemisphere program - especially if it turns out that other Texas counties or cities paid AT&T to participate, starts to get closer to this blog's wheelhouse. Lots of state and local-level questions here: For starters, which agencies use Hemisphere? Journalists should be checking old city council and commissioners court agendas to see who else has been paying AT&T for its "Hemisphere" service, or its predecessor, "Hudson Hawk." Houston reporters already have sufficient material to localize this story. I'll bet they're not the only Texas media market where that's possible.

MORE: From Mark Bennett, Scott Greenfield,

Budget writers delete fusion-center funding from state budget

Good news: State budget writers eliminated funding for the Department of Public Safety's "fusion center," reported Brenda Bell at the Austin Statesman ("Budget conferees vote not to fund fusion center," May 14), which would make Texas the first state to close one. She wrote:

DPS requested close to $16 million over the next biennium to continue operating the Texas Fusion Center, where about 100 employees now work in offices located at the DPS headquarters. The House had eliminated money for the center in its version of the appropriations bill, and the conference committee that is hashing out the 2014-15 state budget concurred in that decision Monday.

A factor in that decision, according to budget documents crafted by the House, was an October 2012 report by a U.S. Senate investigative subcommittee that lambasted the fusion centers for “irrelevant, useless or inappropriate” intelligence gathering and wasteful spending on private contractors, while doing little to keep the country safer. Both the statewide fusion center and the one operated by the Austin Police Department opened toward the end of 2010, too late to be included in the Senate report.

Another issue raised in the budget documents has been the focus of much attention during this legislative session — the diversion of state money collected for one purpose to other uses. Currently the lion’s share of state funding for the DPS, $1.2 billion, comes from the highway fund.

Grits won't lose any sleep over this change which IMO won't harm public safety in the slightest. Even for folks lacking a civil libertarian streak, fusion centers deserve to be axed based on a cost benefit analysis alone.

MORE: Via PrivacySOS, "Time to shut down fusion centers altogether?"

See related Grits posts:

• Texas work product overrepresented among fusion center reports criticized by US Senate subcommittee
• Fusion centers criticized by US Senate subcommittee report
• Fusion centers' lameness thus far trumps potential civil liberties threats
• Fusion centers might be scary if they actually worked

Texas work product overrepresented among fusion-center reports criticized by Senate subcommittee

Grits mentioned the publication of a rare, bipartisan report (pdf) from a US Senate subcommittee which was highly critical of fusion centers (see additional recent coverage here). Texas now has seven, out of 77 nationally. Perhaps predictably, the local recipients of fusion-center grant funds have spoken out to say all the money they received was well spent and they'd like more of it, please, or that's the gist of Patrick George's piece, "Austin police, DPS defend fusion centers after critical Senate report," published last night on the Austin Statesman site, which opened.

Law enforcement officials in Austin are defending the use of “fusion centers,” some of which across the country were lambasted by a U.S. Senate subcommittee recently as spending wastefully, being intrusive into citizens’ private lives and producing information of little value for counterterrorism.

Austin is home to two such centers, the Police Department’s Austin Regional Intelligence Center and the Department of Public Safety’s Texas Fusion Center, both of which opened in late 2010. Fusion centers are designed to enable law enforcement agencies to pool and share information with one another.

Responding to the Senate criticism, DPS Director Steve McCraw said in a statement that the report is inaccurate because investigators did not get a large enough sample of how the nation’s 77 fusion centers operate.

“In fact, they did not visit even one of the seven fusion centers operating in Texas, including the state level fusion center,” McCraw said.

Assistant Police Chief David Carter, who oversees the Austin Regional Intelligence Center, said the Senate report mainly focused on fusion centers’ work in counter-terrorism. He said the Austin center was set up from the beginning with an “all crimes” approach and has proved useful in several investigations.

While it's true no Texas fusion  centers were named, a Texas report was chronicled on p. 33 (p. 39 of the pdf) as an exemplar of the type of a non-actionable HIRs [Homeland Information Reports] that fusion centers pass on to DHS which must be canceled by federal reviewers. So it's not at all accurate to claim the Senate subcommittee didn't closely evaluate the work of Texas fusion centers. Indeed, they studied Texas' work more than any other. From the subcommittee report:

As noted, the Subcommittee investigation reviewed every raw DHS intelligence report drafted on information from state and local fusion centers from April 1, 2009, to April 30, 2010....

The Subcommittee investigation counted that, during that period, DHS intelligence officers at state and local fusion centers around the country filed 610 draft reports to DHS headquarters for dissemination. During that period, the draft HIRs came from fusion centers in just 31 states; fusion centers in 19 states generated no reports at all. In addition, the vast majority of the 574 unclassified draft reports filed came from DHS detailees assigned to fusion centers in just three states – Texas (186 drafts), California (141) and Arizona (89). Meanwhile, fusion centers in most other states produced little to no reporting.

Contrary to Col McCraw's complaint, Texas' fusion center reporting was closely examined, making up a disproportionate share (32%, or 186 out of 574 unclassified draft reports) of the sample judged by the subcommittee.And how did we fare?

Of the 574 unclassified draft reports field officers filed, the Subcommittee investigation counted 188 marked by DHS reviewers as cancelled, nearly a third. Reviewers recommending cancellation of drafts faulted the reports for lacking any useful information, for running afoul of departmental guidelines meant to guard against civil liberties or Privacy Act protections, or for having no connection to any of DHS’s many missions, among other reasons.

Of the 386 unclassified reports published, the Subcommittee investigation counted only 94 which related in some way to potential terrorist activity, or the activities of a known or suspected terrorist. Of those 94 reports, most were published months after they were received; more than a quarter appeared to duplicate a faster intelligence-sharing process administered by the FBI; and some were based on information drawn from publicly available websites or dated public reports. In one case, DHS intelligence officials appear to have published a report which drew from or repeated information in a Department of Justice press release published months earlier. In short, the utility of many of the 94 terrorism-related reports was questionable.

The Subcommittee investigation found that fusion center reporting that attempted to share terrorism-related information was more likely to be cancelled than reporting on other topics. While the overall cancellation rate of draft intelligence reports from fusion centers during the period of review was around 30 percent, the cancellation rate for reports which alleged or indicated a possible connection to terrorism had a higher cancellation rate – over 45 percent.

To review: Texas provided the largest number of reports of any state in the dataset from which the subcommittee faulted  fusion center reporting for "lacking any useful information, for running afoul of departmental guidelines meant to guard against civil liberties or Privacy Act protections, or for having no connection to any of DHS’s many missions, among other reasons." The subcommittee may not have named which specific Texas fusion centers published the most reports that were canceled by DHS reviewers  - and granted, the two Austin fusion centers reportedly came on line after the period they analyzed - but they were definitely looking at Texas fusion centers' work product when they made those assessments, as either Col. McCraw or the reporter should have known from reading the report.

Speaking of which, it should be mentioned that, as if in direct response to Ast. Chief Carter's published remarks, the subcommittee report specifically discussed shortcomings of the "all crimes" approach that Austin PD endorses, lamenting that, “Most [fusion] centers focus on the priority mission of the law enforcement agency that owns/manages them; primarily analytical case support to drug, gang, and violent crime investigations for the geographic area of responsibility,” the report stated. “As a result many centers struggle to build the necessary capabilities required to support federal counterterrorism mission requirements, specifically in the areas of intelligence analysis and information sharing beyond their jurisdictions.” In a subsection titled, "DHS “Success Stories” Do Not Demonstrate Centers’ Value to Counterterrorism Efforts," the report made a point echoed in a recent Grits post:

On its web site, DHS has devoted a page to fusion center “success stories.” On that page, DHS includes many events unrelated to terrorism in a long list of fusion center “successes.” DHS praises, for example, fusion center efforts that have helped to reduce automobile thefts, apprehend a man suspected of kidnapping and rape, and bust up a drug ring

While those anticrime successes are notable, they do not advance the DHS counter terrorism mission; they do not fulfill the promise federal officials made to Congress and the public that the significant taxpayer support directed to fusion centers would aid in the fight against terror; and they do not meet the expectations set by legislative and executive mandates which make clear both branches expected fusion centers to perform as conduits of terrorism information-sharing to and from the federal government.

The feds aren't funding fusion centers just to augment the state's local anti-crime work, in the view of the subcommittee, but based on metrics more at the direct service of federal counter-terrorism efforts. From that perspective, it's easy to see how an "all crimes" or "all hazards" focus of Texas fusion centers doesn't mitigate the Senate subcommittee's negative appraisal, it personifies it. Fusion centers have indulged in massive mission creep, is the federal criticism, and serve little if any anti-terrorism function. DPS and APD would respond, yeah, but we can use that money to go after our own, local bad guys, and when budget times weren't so tight, for years that was enough to justify the grants' rapid expansion. But in budget cutting times, fusion center funding looks like low-hanging fruit that's not fulfilling its mission, from a federal counter terrorism perspective.

Will federal budget cutters succeed in scaling back domestic surveillance, forging new political grounds where civil libertarian critics were too tepid to tread? That's my hope after reviewing the subcommittee report.

Either way, the report effectively rebuts the present claims by Col. McCraw and Ast Chief Carter in the Statesman story: Texas' work was analyzed along with everyone else's and in the end, criticisms in the report can't simply be dodged with claims that "we're different" or they"did not get a large enough sample." The  comment about sample size was either uninformed or disingenuous: If anything, the main problem with the subcommittee's sample was that they looked at Texas fusion centers' work product perhaps a little too closely.

MORE: See, from Government Executive, "Defenders of fusion centers hit back at Senate panel criticisms."

Fusion centers criticized by US Senate subcommittee report

A helpful reader alerted me to a report from the Secrecy News blog which informed us that:

The state and local fusion centers supported by the Department of Homeland Security have produced little intelligence of value and have generated new concerns involving waste and abuse, according to an investigative report from the Senate Homeland Security Committee Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.  (NYT, WP)

“It’s troubling that the very ‘fusion’ centers that were designed to share information in a post-9/11 world have become part of the problem. Instead of strengthening our counterterrorism efforts, they have too often wasted money and stepped on Americans’ civil liberties,” said Senator Tom Coburn, the ranking member of the Subcommittee who initiated the investigation.

While it may not be the last word on the subject, the new Subcommittee report is a rare example of congressional oversight in the classical mode.  It was performed by professional investigators over a two-year period.  It encountered and overcame agency resistance and non-cooperation.  And it uncovered — and published — significant new information that demands an executive branch response.  That’s the way the system is supposed to work. 

Very encouraging

One key finding from the report (pdf) was that "Many Terrorism-Related HIRs [Homeland Information Reports] from Fusion Centers Appeared to Duplicate a Faster, More Efficient Information-Sharing Process." Another was that "DHS Intelligence Reporting Officials Who Repeatedly Violated Guidelines Faced No Sanction." The report also criticized fusion centers on the grounds that "Retaining Inappropriate Records is Contrary to DHS Policies and the Privacy Act."

See Grits' recent related item, "Fusion centers' lameness thus far trumps civil liberties threats."

Fusion centers' lameness thus far trumps potential civil liberties threats

The Constitution Project last week issued a document titled "Recommendations for Fusion Centers" (pdf) that merits readers attention. For those unfamiliar with them, "fusion centers" are a post 9/11 intelligence sharing concept operated at the state and sometimes local level. Beginning in 2003, federal funding and state-level enthusiasm for homeland security and intelligence sharing spawned "the creation of a network of state and regionally-based fusion centers that share information among law enforcement and some intelligence agencies. Today at least 77 fusion centers are active in the United States." The Constitution Project worried that "fusion centers can also pose serious risks to civil liberties, including rights of free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion, racial and religious equality, privacy, and the right to be free from unnecessary government intrusion," and offered 25 recommendations to improve their functioning. (Go here to listen to an audio recording of a forum held in D.C. accompanying the report's release.)

The report echoes many of the concerns raised by a 2007 report from the ACLU titled, "What's wrong with fusion centers?" (pdf), which was issued at a time when only 40 fusion centers had been established. While the ACLU focused on criticisms of the fusion center concept from a civil liberties perspective, though, the report by the Constitution Project focused more on specific and detailed operational recommendations aimed at cabining information gathered to legitimate law enforcement needs and ensuring it's properly used.

It's a worthy project and I agree with many of their recommendations - particularly the creation of an immutable audit trial for those who access fusion center records, requiring regular audits and purging information that doesn't relate to criminal conduct (particularly often-nebulous "suspicious activity reports" that are received by fusion centers in large volumes), restricting data use to criminal investigations based on, at least, reasonable suspicion, providing redress for identifying and correcting false information maintained by fusion centers, and their cautions against using the data gathered for counterproductive racial and religious profiling or unwarranted political harassment of First-Amendment protected activities.

Some of these issues have arisen in Texas. One example cited was a "February 2009 'Prevention Awareness Bulletin,' circulated by a Texas fusion center, [which] described Muslim lobbying groups as 'providing an environment for terrorist organizations to flourish' and warn[ing] that 'the threats to Texas are significant.' The bulletin called on law enforcement officers to report activities such as Muslim 'hip hop fashion boutiques, hip hop bands, use of online social networks, video sharing networks, chat forums, and blogs.'"

As evidenced by that example (and others in other jurisdictions), the Constitution Project worried that "the definitions of suspicious behavior used by the federal government and police forces are wide-raging and include behavior that may be completely innocuous." They observed that federal statute, "28 CFR Part 23 prohibits state law enforcement agencies that receive federal funding from collecting or maintaining personal information about indivividuals in a criminal intelligence database unless 'there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal conduct and the information is relevant to that criminal conduct or activity'."

That said, I must say I found the analysis a bit tepid, focused more on the micro-issues surrounding fusion centers and in the process offering suggestions that apply not just to fusion centers but to law enforcement intelligence gathering generally. But the report failed to confront what to me is the much larger question confronting policymakers who champion fusion centers: Are they effective? Are they worth the vast amounts being spent on them?

Fusion centers are little more than a law-enforcement fad, and there's little evidence they're providing much bang for the buck.

The report mentioned that between 2004 and 2007 (when far fewer fusion centers were in operation than today),  the Department of Homeland Security "provided $254 million to sate and local governments to support fusion centers. Federal funding accounts for 20 to 30 percent of state fusion center budgets," according to the report. Extrapolating, that means the total amount spent on fusion centers (in local, state and federal dollars) ran somewhere between $846 million and $1.27 billion over that period, and much more since then, since the number of fusion centers has grown from 40 to 77 between 2007 and 2012.

Searching online for evidence that fusion centers actually help solve crimes, one finds very few examples. The Department of Homeland Security has compiled what appears to be a nearly comprehensive list on its website of instances where fusion centers have effectively assisted law enforcement, even in the smallest capacity, in actual criminal cases (a fairly aggressive though not comprehensive Google search by your correspondent discovered only repeats of those cited by DHS). See their list of "Fusion Center Success Stories."

However, with 77 fusion centers active, DHS could only identify 22 "success stories," and reading through the details, in most of those instances the assistance was not particularly critical and law enforcement would have discovered the same leads and information through traditional investigative techniques. The GAO noted in a 2010 report (pdf) that "DHS has not set standard performance measures for the centers." And it shows.

The Constitution Project report (and speakers at their recent forum) assumed that fusion centers have a legitimate and necessary role to play, but I'm increasingly skeptical that's true. Spending on fusion centers has now run well into 10 figures, and those 22 "success stories" represent a pitifully poor return on investment for that level of taxpayer expenditure. So while I'm glad to see the Constitution Project offer detailed operational recommendations to protect privacy and prevent abuse, to me the bigger question is whether the strategy has demonstrated sufficient effectiveness to justify fusion centers' existence in the first place. Certainly if federal funding ran out, I suspect state and local governments would not be able to justify continuing them based on any rational cost-benefit analysis.

Grits understands why ACLU and the Constitution Project would fear civil liberties violations related to fusion centers, and on paper, at least, those concerns are justified. But often on such questions flat-out government incompetence can trump the potential for abuse, and IMO that's what's happened so far with fusion centers. If they were more effective, they could indeed pose a serious civil liberties threat. But from my observation their lameness has thus far outweighed any such dangers, and the bigger question becomes whether their continued existence can be justified at all given the minimal outcomes resulting from such vast expenditures. Based on the evidence available so far, IMO the answer is probably "no."

RELATED: "Fusion centers might be scary if they actually worked." And from the Collin County Observer, "What's wrong with the North Texas Fusion Center?"

Governor releases Texas Homeland Security Strategic Plan

Here's a press release received via email from the Governor's office:

Gov. Rick Perry has released the Texas Homeland Security Strategic Plan 2010-2015, a strategic plan that will guide the state’s preparation, preparedness, response and recovery efforts for all types of threats over the next five years. The plan serves as a high-level roadmap to allow for adaption to evolving situations in an ever-changing threat environment.

“Texas faces a diverse array of challenges to our safety and security, requiring a unique approach to preparedness, response and recovery efforts,” Gov. Perry said. “This plan was developed with the input of state agencies, law enforcement and emergency management personnel that form the homeland security community in Texas, ensuring the most accurate assessment of the risks in our state and the best recommendations on how to address them.”

Over the last five years, Texas has: increased the scope and magnitude of its coordinated border security operations; committed more than $230 million to fund border security operations; significantly improved radio interoperability; established a state health and medical operations center; and earned national recognition for its response to the spring 2009 novel H1N1 influenza outbreak. Over the same period, Texas responded to 7 hurricanes, 2 tropical storms, 18 tornadoes, drought, wildfires that burned more than 2 million acres and 1 terrorist attack at Fort Hood.

The Texas Homeland Security Strategic Plan 2010-2015 builds on the successes from the past five years while incorporating new initiatives to address new and evolving threats. This plan places additional focus on:

• Unified investigations and prosecutions of high threat gangs;
• Increased information sharing between all levels of government, law enforcement and the public; and
• Enhanced public-private partnerships.

A complete copy of the Texas Homeland Security Strategic Plan 2010-2015 can be found here (pdf).

I haven't had a chance to ready any of it yet but thought I'd put the link out there for anyone interested.

What's wrong with fusion centers?

Bill Baumbach at the Collin County Observer has authored a must-read post titled, "What's wrong with the North Texas Fusion Center?" - see particularly the excellent linkfest at the end.

MORE: From my pal Forrest Wilder at the Texas Observer.

Related Grits coverage:

• Fusion centers in Texas: What we have here is a failure to communicate
• Fusion centers might be scary if they actually worked
• Biometrics slope got slippery awfully quick

Consultant recommends DPS create 'Special Ops' team for snooping

Speaking of political snooping, check out this troubling passage from the recently issued Deloitte and Touche consultant recommendations (pdf, p. 14) for reorganizing the Texas Department of Public Safety:

Deloitte recommends creation of a new Special Operations Group within the new Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism Division to be explicitly intelligence driven. The Special Operations Group should collect investigative and intelligence data on threats, terrorism and violent criminal gangs. It would perform counter-surveillance on key facilities like the Governor’s Mansion and State Capitol. It would perform surveillance on possible terrorists and violent criminal enterprises, provide back-up undercover investigators to infiltrate such organizations (emphasis added) and directly fill intelligence gaps through collection in a rapid fashion.

If the "violent criminal enterprises" they're talking about "infiltrating" are Mexican drug cartels or prison gangs, that's one thing. If they're talking about infiltrating dissident political organizations, as we've seen from the UT-Austin police or, in another era, from the Nixon Administration, my inclination would be to oppose undercover infiltration except where DPS is investigating a specific crime or criminal organization based on articulable reasonable suspicion. Another section of the report makes it sound like a more common use of the proposed Special Operations Group would be to gather intelligence on groups that might protest the Governor or other key political figures:

The Division should have a Special Operations unit, which would be deployed to conduct protective counter-surveillance on the Governor’s protection detail, the Lieutenant Governor, visiting dignitaries, the State Capital and Governor’s Mansion. The protection of these potential targets should be intelligence driven. ...

The Special Operations group would be the “eyes and ears” of the Intelligence & Counter- Terrorism division by tasking and deploying “collectors” of information deemed to be important to the overall intelligence and counter-terrorism effort. The unit should be organized to enable it to shift quickly into law enforcement operations, based upon threat intelligence.

The section of the Deloitte report on intelligence (intentionally?) conflates combating "terrorism" with more mundane but much more common law enforcement duties and also DPS' protective service duties regarding elected officials and state facilities. That leaves the door wide open for abusing this authority without further clarification. There are not enough checks and balances currently proposed in the Deloitte report to ensure abuses won't occur.

In addition, Deloitte supports throwing good money after bad by integrating the state's near-worthless "fusion centers," which have been a black hole for spending with virtually no demonstrable public safety benefit, into DPS' new intelligence division they've proposed:

Deloitte recommends significantly expanding the capabilities of the existing Fusion Center at DPS to become the State’s central point for the collection, analysis, and dissemination of criminal, terrorist, and homeland security related information. The center should seek to integrate its activities with those of regional fusion centers in Houston and North Texas, as well as significantly increasing representation of local and federal law enforcement and homeland security agencies on the team.

Admittedly these programs haven't been well coordinated, but that's because the Fusion Centers and border security grants were political stunts the Governor and the Lege were pushing for electioneering purposes, not initiatives driven by law enforcement needs. The state would do well to scrap the fusion centers, keep DPS criminal intelligence services integrated into their investigative units, and leave the political snooping to the FBI.

Fusion center intelligence gathering in crisis limited to watching local TV news

The Collin County Observer poses a terrific question: What good is the North Texas Fusion Center - an intelligence gathering collaboration between various regional law enforcement agencies - if during a crisis they're getting their information from the local TV news channel like everyone else?

Bill Baumbach put it succinctly: No one seems to be asking the questions, "Why have millions been poured into an early warning system if local officials still believe their best information is from Channel 8?"

Related Grits coverage:

• Fusion centers in Texas: What we have here is a failure to communicate
• Fusion centers might be scary if they actually worked
• The Governor's Great Border Security Power Grab
• Perry moves to consolidate intelligence gathering in Governor's office
• Biometrics slope got slippery awfully quick

Hello, this is your local fusion center: Be very afraid

Bill Baumbach at the Collin County Observer got a call from one of Texas' fusion centers (see past Grits coverage here and here) to warn him of a severe thunderstorm ... that had already passed over his house. See his discussion of the North Central Texas Fusion Center, a good analysis of its financing, and links to an array of other resources on the topic.

Best way to terminate surveillance society is through cost-benefit analysis

In a recent episode of the Fox-TV sci-fi hit, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a spin-off from the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator movies about time travel and a future where intelligent machines took over the planet, the eponymous character (who'd returned to the past to eliminate the threat) discovers that, in the fictional plot, the key network that wound up allowing an artificial intelligence system to impose its will on humanity began with the implementation of red light cameras, giving the machines a near-ubiquitous surveillance and control of American cities.

Fictional fantasies aside, with technology advancing so rapidly, it's hard to know how concerned one should be about the possibility of some future, a la The Terminator, in which technology is used to enslave the public rather than liberate us from crime. My favorite quote from the show about the difficulty of that judgment came as Sarah Connor and her band of "heroes" contemplate whether to kill the maker of an artificial intelligence program at a 1997 computer chess tournament:

Cameron: “It could become Skynet.”
Sarah: “It could also become 'Pong.”

While we're a long way from any real world enactment of the "Skynet" scenario from Terminator, we're already to the point where human authorities, using increasingly intelligent machines, routinely use roadway cameras for purposes unrelated to traffic control, or even antithetical to it.

In Houston, tollway cameras have been configured to identify license plate numbers and run them against vehicle registration records and arrest warrants. Meanwhile, in California, red light cameras have been configured so that private vehicles owned by elected officials, public employees and their families will not be ticketed for red light running.

So these technologies already are used both to grant privileges and to bust "bad guys," not to mention (much more likely) low-level ticket scofflaws and other petty offenders not savvy enough to simply stay on the freeway.

Indeed, in Dallas, Houston, and Austin, police want to go even further in the direction of a human-run version of the the ubiquitous, automated surveillance society foreseen in Terminator, placing surveillance cameras in public spaces with feeds directly to the police department. The potential for real-time identification of individuals in the public sphere creates all sorts of scenarios worthy of a good sci-fi plot.

Whatever the merits though, of any arguments about privacy, a surveillance society, slippery slopes, and other debates about cameras centered around individual rights, the best argument against them when it comes to crime reduction is that they don't work. In Britain and other locations where they've been in place long enough to study the results, there's simply little impact on crime.

On his blog this week, Bruce Schneier, who arguably ranks among the most important electronic security specialists in the country (he literally "wrote the book" about cryptography in the computer age), links to a past Grits post in an item about the results from San Francisco's anti-crime cameras. As in Britain and everywhere else I'm aware of, results from San Francisco;s long-term study found that the "best thing that can be said about [cameras] is they have a placebo effect for worried residents," but crime didn't go down overall as a result of their placement.

That's why, rather than waste too much breath arguing about the possibility of Big Brother's potential misuse of camera technologies, a better tactic IMO may be to vet such ideas to determine if they really produce the promised results.

In that respect, my thoughts regarding surveillance cameras aren't that different from those regarding new, state-level "fusion centers" that have aggregated mountains of private citizens' information. Yes, there may be legitimate Big-Brotherish concerns, but those arguments will only ever convince people who are predisposed to agree with them. If those opposed to general public surveillance can demonstrate, however, that promised public safety benefits do not result - another thing security cameras in public areas have in common with fusion centers - those arguments appeal to broader constituencies and situate such opposition much more favorably in the political arena.

Not only that, they have the added benefit of being true.

'Fusion centers' might be scary if they actually work

There are darn good reasons why President Harry Truman in 1947 insisted on a ban in the CIA charter on US intelligence services spying on Americans, but in the wake of 9/11 our nation seems to have largely forgotten them.

Still, anyone with the slightest small "l" libertarian streak must surely question the rise of a secretive network of "Fusion Centers," discussed on the front page of yesterday's Washington Post ("Centers tap into personal databases," April 2). Indeed, what are "fusion centers" except the state-level spearpoint of a domestic intelligence operation? Reported the Post:

Dozens of the organizations known as fusion centers were created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to identify potential threats and improve the way information is shared. The centers use law enforcement analysts and sophisticated computer systems to compile, or fuse, disparate tips and clues and pass along the refined information to other agencies. They are expected to play important roles in national information-sharing networks that link local, state and federal authorities and enable them to automatically sift their storehouses of records for patterns and clues.

Though officials have publicly discussed the fusion centers' importance to national security, they have generally declined to elaborate on the centers' activities. But a document that lists resources used by the fusion centers shows how a dozen of the organizations in the northeastern United States rely far more on access to commercial and government databases than had previously been disclosed.

Those details have come to light at a time of debate about domestic intelligence efforts, including eavesdropping and data-aggregation programs at the National Security Agency, and whether the government has enough protections in place to prevent abuses.

The list of information resources was part of a survey conducted last year, officials familiar with the effort said. It shows that, like most police agencies, the fusion centers have subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans' locations, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like.

Centers serving New York and other states also tap into a Federal Trade Commission database with information about hundreds of thousands of identity-theft reports, the document and police interviews show.

Pennsylvania buys credit reports and uses face-recognition software to examine driver's license photos, while analysts in Rhode Island have access to car-rental databases. In Maryland, authorities rely on a little-known data broker called Entersect, which claims it maintains 12 billion records about 98 percent of Americans.

It's a little creepy for law enforcement to gather information en masse about average Americans who've committed no crimes. There's a slippery slope aspect here that can't be ignored, circumventing the ban in the 1947 National Security Act on domestic spying.

We have two formal "fusion centers" in Texas - one in Austin (the Texas Security Analysis and Alert Center) and one in Collin County (the North Central Texas Fusion Center). In addition, though, last year it was revealed that the Governor created 11 "joint operational intelligence centers" aimed at border security that I know very little about (nor do I understand the relation between those and the two Fusion Centers). These "joint operational intelligence centers" do not collaborate with the Department of Public Safety (which operates the Austin fusion center in a nuke-proof bunker three stories below ground in North Austin) according to legislative testimony last year, so it's a mystery to me how all this "fusing" of information really plays out on the ground.

Legislation authorizing Texas' Fusion Centers only passed in 2007, but they were bothclearly already up and running by the time they were authorized. As I wrote during the 80th Texas Legislature:

There's one thing I find particularly odd about all this. Rep. Farrar and the bill language itself say the legislation would "create" the Texas Fusion Center, which is a massive, secretive, centralized intelligence gathering operation that analyzes info from all levels of law enforcement.

Not only is that redundant with the Department of Public Safety's criminal intelligence division, the "Fusion Center" as I understand it is already in operation - apparently without legal authority. I say that because when the Lege in 2005 removed restrictions on law enforcement's use of fingerprints from the driver license database, Gov. Perry's Texas Fusion Center immediately took the data and gave it to the feds to run against unnamed criminal and terrorism databases.

So this bill won't create the Fusion Center, it will only give cover to Gov. Perry for initiating such projects (like the TDEX database) without legislative authority or approval.

That same kind of mass information dump is taking place all over the country via these fusion centers. Information that was scattered in government silos on a need to know basis - or gathered by private vendors for commercial purposes - now gets dumped wholesale upstream into federal hands. To what end, though? Do the benefits outweigh the risks and costs? Indeed, can anyone identify any benefit at all?

The Congressional Research Service last year similarly questioned whether fusion centers could demonstrate they were worth the money, time and effort, identifying "several risks to the fusion center concept — including potential privacy and civil liberties violations, and the possible inability of fusion centers to demonstrate utility in the absence of future terrorist attacks, particularly during periods of relative state fiscal austerity."

CRS additionally questioned whether fusion centers have "created a false sense of security?"

Indeed, probably the greatest comfort to me about potential abuse of fusion centers is that I don't believe analysts can meaningfully comb through that much data pro-actively, which means their work is reactive and thus largely redundant and worthless. Thus I see them, at least so far, as more a pointless boondoggle than a tangible privacy threat. That could change, though, if we begin to hear evidence these data streams have been abused.

Texas' fusion centers and "joint operational intelligence centers" are a subject I'd planned to pursue in greater detail on the blog last year, but the Texas Youth Commission debacle knocked them off my radar screen. Still, I've seen scarce little benefit from all this information sharing, and much potential for waste and even harm. This Washington Post piece does little to abate that initial skepticism.

See prior related Grits posts:

• Fusion Centers: What we have here is a failure to communicate
• The Governor's Great Border Security Power Grab
• Perry moves to consolidate intelligence gathering in Governor's office
• Biometrics slope got slippery awfully quick

And from the Congressional Research Service:

• Fusion Centers: Issues an Options for Congress

Fusion Centers in Texas: "What we have here is a failure to communicate"

One product of the 80th Texas Legislature was giving after-the-fact approval in HB 13 (amended at the end of session into SB 11) to Governor Perry's 2005 decision to consolidate intelligence gathering in "fusion centers," which are new intelligence gathering bureaucracies controlled by his political appointees instead of law enforcement personnel.

A new report from the Congressional Research Service explores state "Fusion Centers" in more detail than anywhere else I've seen, so I thought I'd pull a few highlights that jumped out at me from the lengthy study. (For those with a detailed interest, CRS also referenced a 104-page manual called "Fusion Center Guidelines" published by the US Department of Justice in August 2006 about a year after Texas' created its first center.)

Fusion centers' stated purpose is to prevent terrorism and crime through intelligence gathering. But the CRS report says in practice they don't prevent crime, but typically only react to events:

research indicates that while fusion centers want to become more proactive, many continue to follow a reactive model. Most fusion centers respond to incoming requests, suspicious activity reports, and/or finished information/intelligence products. This approach largely relies on data points or analysis that are already identified as potentially problematic. As mentioned above, it could be argued that this approach will only identify unsophisticated criminals and terrorists.

Indeed, right now, says CRS, it's "unclear if a single fusion center has successfully adopted a truly proactive prevention approach to information analysis and sharing." This will require a law enforcement culture change, says CRS, that has not occurred yet, "Moving from a 'need to know' rule to a 'responsibility to share'" mentality.

I'm still not sure what constitutes a Fusion Center in Texas. The map in Appendix B of the report lists two Texas sites - one in Austin (the Texas Security Analysis and Alert Center) and one in Collin County (North Central Texas Fusion Center). In addition, though, this spring it was revealed Texas also has 11 "joint operational intelligence centers" that I know very little about, nor do I understand the relation between those and the two Fusion Centers listed in the report. (Anybody with more knowledge about the relationship there, fill me in, please, in the comments or by email.) All told, different states have created about 40 nationwide, according to CRS, each with separate structures, rules and focus.

In any event, from the outset, CRS acknowledges in the report summary there's a good chance Fusion Centers are a reactive and unwise approach:

There are several risks to the fusion center concept — including potential privacy and civil liberties violations, and the possible inability of fusion centers to demonstrate utility in the absence of future terrorist attacks, particularly during periods of relative state fiscal austerity.

I'd add several more risks to that list, starting with potentially disrupting existing information flows and relationships, agreements and protocols established among public safety personnel over years of working together, particularly regarding natural disasters but also in criminal investigations. In Texas, for example, the Governor's "joint operational intelligence centers" don't communicate with state law enforcement regarding narcotics interdiction at the Texas-Mexico Border. That makes you wonder how "joint" these centers really are in Texas, and how "intelligent"?

In the MSM this spring, nearly all discussion of Texas' Fusion Centers spoke in now-familiar terms of sharing intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks, crime, etc.. But the devil is in the details, and the CRS forthrightly articulated some of the

hazards associated with creating fusion centers without the requisite philosophical and organizational changes necessary within the intelligence and law enforcement communities to sustain the work of the centers.

That's CLEARLY what's happened in Texas. Governor Perry and the 78th (2003) Legislature created a new entity now headed by Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw, who spearheaded creating Texas' fusion centers. He's butted heads frequently with the Department of Public Safety, and used grant funds distributed by the Governor to undermine DPS and muscle them out of their traditional intelligence role. In other words, by creating a fusion center the Governor launched a classic, still ongoing government turf battle. If you care about actual, on the ground homeland security, though, it's potentially one with real-world consequences.

I thought CRS raised another interesting and valid concern. Creating a fusion center is an action politicians can take to say the did something on the topic. But "if fusion center development occurs devoid of a more fundamental transformation, is any real progress made? Is the country any safer or more prepared with fusion centers or have we created a false sense of security?"

Good question! Speaking only of Texas, from what I've seen creating these competing agencies then snubbing DPS probably harmed security more than enhanced it, wasting time and resources on bureaucratic infighting instead of pursuing law enforcement goals, and missing potential opportunities. As the prison warden said to Cool Hand Luke, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

The CRS report also questioned whether problems with data accuracy at fusion centers might lead to misdirected law enforcement resources or even civil rights violations. A footnote declared:

Some might argue that the entire concept for fusion centers, particularly those aspects involving the incorporation of private sector data that may not be accurate or based on any criminal predicate is fundamentally flawed. If there is little legal recourse for citizens to challenge information related to them that resides in commercially available databases, and such information is included in fusion center operations, privacy rights and civil liberties could be undermined.

Another criticism of fusion centers has been the secrecy and lack of public scrutiny surrounding their creation and management. CRS quoted national ACLU declaring, “We’re setting up essentially a domestic intelligence agency, and we’re doing it without having a full debate about the risks to privacy and civil liberties.” It's hard to argue with that.

Even some fusion center supporters recognized the potential civil liberties risks: "An official from a fusion center that advocated a proactive approach to civil liberties-related outreach warned colleagues of the dangers of civil liberties abuses, saying, 'even the perception of abuse associated with a single center, will be devastating for us all.'”

Most of the report offers a range of options for how to proceed regarding Fusion Centers, and I won't wade through all that speculative prose here. But anyone interested in a federal perspective and an exhaustive literature analysis on these "fusion centers" should definitely see the rest of the CRS report.

UPDATE: See a much more detailed and thorough account of the CRS report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and a good, shorter summary overview from the blog Homeland Stupidity.

HB 13: The Governor's Great Border Security Power Grab

The Governor's big homeland security bill, HB 13 by Swinford, heads to the House floor today and if I had my druthers they'd shoot the sucker down.

The legislation places many law enforcement and intelligence gathering functions under the purview of the Governor's office, opening the door to all sorts of problems with both the functionality and credibility of border security operations. That's especially problematic since, under the rubric of homeland security, the Governor's office created a massive, Big Brother-esque database. After its creation, nobody could say who was in charge of the database, who was in it, or even what happened to the data after it was given to a private defense contractor.

Rep. Jessica Farrar has issued a press release, reprinted by Kuff here, which details problems with the bill more substantively. Though it's improved since the original filed version, it's still a piece of unnecessary junk - basically a power grab by the Governor - and Farrar's release ably demonstrates how and why.

In addition, chiefs of police on the border have come out in opposition to the bill. How much extra security do you think the bill will provide when even police chiefs don't like it?

There's one thing I find particularly odd about all this. Rep. Farrar and the bill language itself say the legislation would "create" the Texas Fusion Center, which is a massive, secretive, centralized intelligence gathering operation that analyzes info from all levels of law enforcement.

Not only is that redundant with the Department of Public Safety's criminal intelligence division, the "Fusion Center" as I understand it is already in operation - apparently without legal authority. I say that because when the Lege in 2005 removed restrictions on law enforcement's use of fingerprints from the driver license database, Gov. Perry's Texas Fusion Center immediately took the data and gave it to the feds to run against unnamed criminal and terrorism databases.

So this bill won't create the Fusion Center, it will only give cover to Gov. Perry for initiating such projects (like the TDEX database) without legislative authority or approval. The Texas House should send a message to the Governor that he cannot operate above the law and should cease politicizing public safety and border security.

MORE: The Texas Observer has three excellent posts about HB 13 on its blog this morning, see here, here, and here.

See prior, related Grits coverage:

• The Case of the Missing Data
• DPS: Open criminal case data given to Northrop Grunman, never given back
• Don't do it! Perry moves to consolidate intelligence gathering in Governor's office
• Farrar: HB 13 won't secure border, risks letting political concerns interfere with law enforcement

Don't Do It!! Perry moves to consolidate intelligence gathering in Governor's office

Another major Gubernatorial power grab lies waiting in the wings related to border enforcement in the form of HB 13 by Swinford, which will be heard in the House State Affairs Committee this morning at 8 a.m.. It's the only bill on the agenda.

Jake Bernstein at the Texas Observer has excellent coverage of the Governor's efforts to consolidate information, databases, and ultimately power over key law enforcement functions in his office away from its traditional home in the Department of Public Safety. Reports Bernstein ("The Governor's Database," April 20):

What is most striking, and disturbing, about the database is that it is not being run by the state’s highest law enforcement agency—the Texas Department of Public Safety. Instead, control of TDEx, and the power to decide who can use it, resides in the governor’s office.

That gives Perry, his staff, future governors, and their staffs potential access to a trove of sensitive data on everything from ongoing criminal investigations to police incident reports and even traffic stops. In their zeal to assemble TDEx, Perry and his homeland security director, Steve McCraw, have plunged ahead with minimal oversight from law enforcement agencies, and even DPS is skittish about the direction the project has taken.

Jake's article is a must-read. He focuses particularly (as does Capitol Annex in this post) on the Nixonian-type accumulation of raw intelligence data under the auspices of a politician instead of law enforcement professionals:

“Criminal intelligence data should be in the hands of a professional law enforcement agency that has distance from the political pressures on elected officials,” says Rebecca Bernhardt, immigration, border and national security policy director for the Texas ACLU. “How can we be sure that we will never have a governor who will misuse this power?”

Rather than take a serious look at these issues, the Texas Legislature seems intent on giving Perry even more power. The governor is pushing an appropriation of $100 million for border and homeland security. Presumably, some of that money would be used for TDEx. House State Affairs Chairman David Swinford, a Dumas Republican, is offering House Bill 13, “relating to homeland security issues.” The bill is scheduled for hearing on Friday, April 13. Leading up to the hearing, the bill’s content was a bit of a moving target. Two days before the hearing, there already had been two committee substitutes, with the possibility of a third on the way.

As noted yesterday, the House approved the Governor's $100 million request, but the Senate only approved $54 million, just $10 million of which would come from General Revenue.

We've already seen that Governor Perry's efforts to consolidate intelligence gathering under Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw have taken on a Keystone Kops flavor. As I mentioned recently,

I mentioned that I spoke to Patrick O'Burke about drug task forces earlier today - he's the Deputy Commander of DPS' Narcotics division. While I had him on the phone, I asked O'Burke about the Governor's joint operational intelligence centers that were announced earlier this year. Much to my surprise, he told me DPS Narcotics "didn't have anything to do" with any of that.

Understandably the deputy commander didn't feel comfortable baring his soul to an unemployed blogger, but he said he'd addressed these issues last Wednesday at a joint hearing of the State Affairs and Border & International Security Committees. So I went to look, and indeed he gave his "Border Threat Briefing" as the very last invited speaker on quite a long agenda.

Here's the link to an audio file of the committee hearing. O'Burke's testimony begins at the 9:34:45 mark (yes, the hearing lasted more than 10 hours!). Interesting stuff, and worth a listen for anyone who cares about the border or the drug war.

The most shocking news came at the end of his testimony in response to questioning, I couldn't tell by whom. There is no coordination at all between DPS and the Governor's Border Security Operations Center, O'Burke replied in response to a query. He said DPS' Narcotics division didn't know about some of the Governor's proposals until after they were operational. He knew nothing, he said, about any of their training, protocols, or after-operation procedures, and said he wasn't even aware if there were any - to his knowledge the sheriffs, he said, mostly "do whatever they want." ...

DPS is the state's primary statewide drug trafficking enforcement agency, and if they're not dialed in then the operation is neither very "joint" nor "intelligent." If they're not coordinating with DPS Narcotics, if they're not working with federal "deconfliction" centers, if they're not party to intelligence from secret agreements with the Mexican government, then these "joint operational intelligence centers" aren't really in the drug enforcement game on the border - that's just a fact.

Before the Lege sinks $100 million into the Governor's plan, perhaps they ought to consider making sure the money already sunk into border enforcement was spent wisely.

So the Governor's border operations have spent tens of millions of dollars without coordinating with key agencies. The Senate Criminal Justice Committee studied the program during the interim and recommended that:

Future grants to border operations should be made through a fiscally accountable state agency. The method of distribution did not account for population size, department size, or crime rates. There was no measure for success or failure built into the program, and an alarming lack of stipulations for use of the money.

What does that tell you about the wisdom of consolidating operations in the Governor's office?

HB 13 has changed since the filed version, but I obtained a copy yesterday evening of what I believe to be the latest committee substitute. The most egregious portion by far would place the Department of Public Safety's "criminal intelligence division" under the purview of the Governor's office and the Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw. According to a fact sheet on the bill prepared by the ACLU:

HB 13 formally changes the focus of the Office of Homeland Security from emergency planning and preparedness to intelligence gathering. HB 13 would eliminate the Texas Infrastructure Protection Communications Center and create a new entity called the “Texas Fusion Center” that does not have a limited or even clearly defined purpose. Texans deserve to know what information is being collected by the “Texas Fusion Center” and for what purposes.

What's the Texas Fusion Center? I don't know a lot about it, but I first heard of the entity after Texas removed restrictions on law enforcement's use of fingerprint and biometric data from Texas' civilian drivers license database. The data was handed over lock stock and barrel to the Fusion Center, which proceeded to start matching the data with unnamed federal databases that no one had ever mentioned in debates at the Legislature over eliminating constraints on using Texans personal information. As I wrote at the time:

So Texas has not only removed restrictions on police using drivers' fingerprints, now the state will routinely vet them through federal databases nobody ever mentioned before. That's almost the definition of a slippery slope. (Before HB 2337 passed, drivers' fingerprints in Texas were considered private, personal data only accessible with a court order.)

I honestly can't imagine a worse idea from a pure accountability perspective that putting the state's intelligence apparatus under the Governor. It's just inappropriate bordering on corrupt to give the state's executive that power - the kind of thing you expect from the East German Stasi, not liberty-loving Texans.

Criminal intelligence is the division that manages wiretaps statewide, even for local departments (though legislation moving this session aims to change that). They gather intelligence from a wide variety of sources, but much of the raw intelligence contains faulty information or at least unverified data of questionable veracity.

Such information should not be in the hands of a political appointee like McCraw, but of the career law enforcement officers who've managed those functions for Texas since the division was first established 75 years ago or so as a sort of "red squad" to root out Communists. Despite that ignominious history, the agency has professionalized greatly in recent decades and remains IMO the best location for Texas' criminal intelligence functions. I trust DPS more than I do the Governor's political operatives to respect the law and the public's privacy.

Remember, even if you like this Governor, you probably won't like the next one, or the one after that. Keeping this power separated from the executive's direct control is an important check and balance on abuse of power by ANY governor, and there's no compelling argument I've heard as to why they should be removed now. The Legislature should reject or neuter this bill - as it stands HB 13 is a recipe for abuse.

Biometrics slope got slippery awfully quick ...

Just two months after HB 2337 took effect allowing the Texas Department of Public Safety to gather drivers' biometric information and removing judicial oversight of its use, Governor Perry let the other shoe drop. The Dallas News reported yesterday (Exclusive: State homeland plan links data," Nov. 2):

The Texas Fusion Center is one facet of an ambitious new homeland security strategy to be unveiled by Gov. Rick Perry's office today.

The five-year plan, described as a "high-level road map for our homeland security efforts," is designed to bring together 34 state agencies and 24 regional councils to focus on preventing terrorism, protecting critical infrastructure and recovering from man-made and natural disasters.

Among the plan's elements:

•The use of driver's licenses and identification cards with biometric identifiers, in this case an embedded fingerprint. Applicants will also have their fingerprints checked against federal criminal and terrorism lists. The Texas standard goes beyond what Congress required for enhancing driver's license security in the controversial REAL ID Act this year.

So Texas has not only removed restrictions on police using drivers' fingerprints, now the state will routinely vet them through federal databases nobody ever mentioned before. That's almost the definition of a slippery slope. (Before HB 2337 passed, drivers' fingerprints in Texas were considered private, personal data only accessible with a court order.)

The Houston Chronicle's Polly Hughes followed up today ("Worries mount about system to ID drivers," Nov. 3) with more on the risks of Texas' new biometrics database, many of which will be familiar to Grits readers. For starters (as I warned before the bill passed), "A company the state hired to gather computerized facial imaging and thumbprints on all Texas driver's licenses failed to protect the identities of 7,500 Nevada drivers last spring," Hughes reported.

"Yes, indeedy. They stole everything you needed to make digitized driver's licenses," [a Nevada official] said. He added that the heist netted Social Security numbers, names, ages, dates of birth and photographs of drivers.

Ironically, a system touted as a tool to catch people with fake IDs could have the opposite effect if personal information of drivers gets out. "This new system is an identity thief's dream come true," said Ann del Llano of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. "Now any good identity thief in the world has a new database that's going to be one of the largest databases that exists."

That's exactly right, as Grits argued here and here during the 79th Legislature. What's more, reported Hughes, Rep. Frank "Corte's House Bill 2337 not only authorizes the new method for recognizing thumb and facial images, it also gives law enforcement agencies the power to access the high-tech images without first obtaining a search warrant as required in the past." (Don't forget, you heard it here first!)

Rep. Corte summed up the matter with his closing comments in Hughes' article: "Really, I guess it depends on, who are you going to trust? If you don't trust government, you don't trust any of that stuff," he said.

Trust us, we're the government. When did that become the slogan of the Republican Party? What happened to the party of small government, one wonders? Ronald Reagan must be spinning in his grave.

When Texas passed HB 2337 I asked, "Where are the small government conservatives?" I still want to know. For whatever reason, very few of them seem to make it through the GOP primary process into state government. Instead we get Big Brother's handmaidens, like Rick Perry and Frank Corte.