Deepening concern about homegrown terrorism is driving a new federal push to tap local cops as the eyes and ears that could prevent the next 9/11.
Top officials of the FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and others – embracing the push at a meeting this week in Denver – resolved to break down barriers so that local and federal agents can share tips.
“We have to integrate,” said Thomas McNamara, a former State Department counterterrorism official now in charge of a national intelligence information- sharing initiative.
He and others cite recent cases in which local police work trumped traditional espionage to foil homegrown plots:
Police looking into a string of gas-station holdups last year in Torrance, Calif., stumbled onto a plot by gang members radicalized in prison to bomb Israeli government and U.S. military facilities in Southern California.
Narcotics agents investigating a Mexican-run methamphetamine ring in Arizona found that Canadian-based pseudoephedrine suppliers served as a financial support cell for Hezbollah.
Police in the Northeast probing cigarette smuggling last year learned smugglers were moving hundreds of thousands of dollars to terrorism suspects in Pakistan.
Those cases demonstrate that first leads in cracking terrorist plots “are very likely to come from nontraditional sources,” such as “local police officers walking their beats,” McNamara told participants at the four-day intelligence meeting in Denver.
The broadened intelligence system that U.S. officials described would enlist police around the country with sophisticated handsets. They would phone in tips – suspicious people at motels, license plate numbers, rental car records. That information then would meld into vast new databases that intelligence analysts use to try to make connections and track enemies.
Federal officials at the meeting weighed the perils of sharing classified information that locals would need to be effective. Local police assured federal authorities that, as one put it, “we’re really not a bunch of Barney Fifes.”
The system would rely heavily on “fusion centers” set up in Colorado and 37 other states – secure rooms looped into local and national computer networks – to relay intelligence.
Today’s federal agents in Washington are limited in what they can do to stop homegrown terrorists, FBI chief information officer Zal Azmi said. “The next terrorist attack will be prevented by one of those cops on the street,” Azmi said.
Over the past year, senior intelligence officials have expressed growing concerns about U.S. groups inspired by al-Qaeda and other foreign terrorists.
Now, amid recent evidence of a homegrown plot in Britain to bomb U.S.-bound airplanes, “the value of the input and the observations of local police has gone up exponentially,” FBI assistant director John Miller said.
Drawing local police into counterterrorism has become a priority, Miller said. “All the weather vanes are pointing this way. … What you are seeing is, local police are having a lot more opportunities to run into terrorists in the early stages of plots.”
The challenge is developing system technology that can capture disparate data and make it available to everyone, said Karen Valenta, a former CIA field agent now helping to run the National Counterterrorism Center, which melds intelligence from federal agencies.
“Just finding the needles in the haystack is not enough. We need to be able to put the needles together to find the true picture,” Valenta said.
Civil libertarians question what is happening.
“Does any of this information sharing really make us safer?” said Tim Sparapani, chief legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
“We might at some time uncover a group of suspicious individuals,” Sparapani said. “The bad part is that people who have no connection to terrorism could wrongly be put into a database and come under suspicion, and likely their names and information would never be removed from the databases, without even an iota of evidence they’ve done anything wrong.
“Any information-sharing environment has to be built with safeguards. It has to have a way of expunging bad information.”
National intelligence officials refused to let Sparapani participate at the conference in Denver, he added. Excluding civil libertarians sets up an “oppositional relationship” that hurts the country, he said. “We all want to stop terrorism.”
Local police chiefs welcomed a greater police role as collectors and users of intelligence. But they also complained that federal agencies currently overload them with useless data, rather than tips they use such as locations of possible terrorists.
Another concern: funding for the fusion centers that relay intelligence. Federal security grants that helped states set up these centers have run out.
And federal rules limiting access to “classified” and “sensitive but unclassified” information are a mess, said Col. Ken Bouche of the Illinois State Police.
“The reality is, there are 800,000 police officers, and the federal government can’t clear them all,” he said. “We need a classified system designed to share.”
Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at bfinley@denverpost.com.
This story has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to editing errors, the names of Zal Azmi and Tim Sparapani were misspelled.
