Since 9/11 the federal government has poured half a billion dollars into building up local and state police intelligence units, with little oversight – and the result has often been questionable spying on American citizens.
The funding has helped create more than 100 police intelligence units, and the national plan now being pushed by Washington calls for every law enforcement agency to develop some intelligence capability.
But after four years of handing out homeland security grants to police departments, federal officials released guidelines for conduct only last year – and the standards are voluntary, according to an investigative report by U.S. News & World Report titled "Spies Among Us.”
The problem, critics say, is that no one is certain what the rules for domestic surveillance are, and what these police intelligence units should be doing.
"The money has been moved without guidance or structure, technical assistance, or training,” one law enforcement official told U.S. News.
Most federal funding for police intelligence comes from the Department of Homeland Security, but the department has set no standards for agencies receiving grants.
"Armed with the latest information, police will be better able to catch crooks and spot criminal trends,” U.S. News states.
"But in this digital age, with so much data available about individual Americans, the lines between what is acceptable investigation and what is intrusive spying can quickly grow unclear.”
The investigation turned up cases in which local and state police have put under surveillance animal-rights activists, anti-war protesters, union activists and even library patrons surfing the Web.
Among the incidents cited by U.S. News:
Police in DeKalb County, Ga., arrested two vegan activists handing out anti-meat leaflets in front of a HoneyBaked Ham store and demanded that they turn over notes that included the license plate number of an undercover car.
Suspicion of spying is so strong among antiwar activists that some begin meetings by "welcoming” any undercover cops present.
Activists in Fresno, Calif., learned that their antiwar group had been infiltrated by a local sheriff’s deputy after he died in a car crash and his obituary appeared in the local paper.
In Montgomery County, Md., two agents entered a library and forcefully warned patrons that viewing pornography on the Internet was illegal. (It is not.)
Two plainclothes sheriff’s deputies from Contra Costa, Calif., monitored a protest by striking Safeway supermarket workers, identifying themselves as homeland security agents.
Authorities in Texas identified 2,052 people as "potential threat elements,” including members of biker gangs, militia groups and "save the whales” environmentalists.
In Minnesota, State Rep. Mary Liz Holberg was alarmed when a hacker who had broken into a state-run database told her she was classified as a "suspect” because of a neighbor’s old complaint about where she parked her car.
Civil liberties watchdogs like attorney Richard Gutman, who led a 1974 class action lawsuit against the Chicago police that obtained hundreds of thousands of pages of intelligence files, want to know how efforts to thwart al-Qaida have ended up targeting animal rights activists and others.
"You’ve got all this money and all this equipment,” he said. "You’re going to find someone to use it on.”
