The strange and scary story of the North Central Texas Fusion System.

Forrest Wilder | April 03, 2009 | Features

One morning in February, more than 2,000 cops, fire marshals, and public health officials in the Dallas-Fort Worth area received a memo—stamped “For Official Use Only”—that contained shocking information: Middle Eastern terrorists and “their supporting organizations” had gained a stronghold in America. The memo warned:

A number of organizations in the U.S. have been lobbying Islamic-based issues for many years. These lobbying efforts have turned public and political support towards radical goals such as Shariah law and support of terrorist military action against Western nations. … [T]he threats to Texas are significant.

Who were these Osama bin Lobbyists who had convinced Americans to support terrorism? Citing a grab bag of right-wing blogs and news sources, the memo lists the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the International Action Center, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism—“ANSWER”—and former Democratic U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. It also suggests that a class on Islamic finance taught at the Treasury Department “indicates the possibility that the government hopes to secure recycled petrodollars in exchange for conforming to Shariah economic doctrine.” The memo ends by calling on law enforcement to “report” the activities of the organizations.

The missive reads like a rant by a paranoid conspiracy nut. In fact, the so-called “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” is a weekly product of the North Central Texas Fusion System, a terrorism and crime-prevention intelligence center run by the Collin County Department of Homeland Security. The system gathers and shares information for a 16-county area that includes Dallas and Forth Worth. The bulletin is written by the architect and operator of the fusion system, Bob Johnson, a former chief scientist for defense contractor Raytheon Co. Johnson has a background in data mining, the controversial, computer-aided practice of trolling massive quantities of data in pursuit of patterns and links.

At Raytheon, Johnson oversaw a short-lived project in Garland for the U.S. Special Forces Command that mined public information as well as classified files to sniff out Al-Qaida. The program, identified in congressional testimony as Able Danger, generated attention in 2005 and 2006 when former Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican, claimed that Able Danger had identified Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, before the terror attacks. Weldon asserted that Johnson had told him that he personally had identified Atta. The allegations fired up 9/11 conspiracy buffs, but were dismissed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Inspector General of the Department of Defense.

Among his critics in Texas, Johnson is better known as “Son of Sam”—the son of U.S Rep. Sam Johnson, the conservative Republican congressman who has represented Collin County since 1992.

In 2004, Collin County tapped ADB Consulting LLC, which stands for Anita and Dr. Bob, to build the fusion system. Anita Miller, also a former Raytheon employee, is Johnson’s wife. On the couple’s personal Web site, anitaanddrbob.com, which has since been taken down, they wrote that they were “ecstatic” to “be implementing a system similar to what we have advocated since before 9/11 for the security of our homeland. For us, the Fusion System is a dream come true!”

Their dream has been profitable. Since 2004, Anita and Dr. Bob have received $1.1 million in no-bid contracts. At least $80,000 of that money has been passed along, in the form of a subcontract, to Anita’s brother, Elbert Bassham, who runs a one-person consulting firm listed at a Marfa post-office box that he shares with a beauty salon.

“I’m not aware of any other fusion center that has a husband-and-wife team building, running, and managing it,” says James Paat, CEO of Sypherlink Inc., an Ohio-based data integration company that lost the subcontract. In a 2007 letter to Collin County, Paat accused ADB Consulting of rigging the scoring process and asked that the contract be rescinded.

Read More;

http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=3003

Wired News

September 23, 2009

Headquartered in Crystal City, Virginia, just outside Washington, the FBI’s National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) maintains a hodgepodge of data sets packed with more than 1.5 billion government and private-sector records about citizens and foreigners, the documents show, bringing the government closer than ever to implementing the “Total Information Awareness” system first dreamed up by the Pentagon in the days following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Such a system, if successful, would correlate data from scores of different sources to automatically identify terrorists and other threats before they could strike. The FBI is seeking to quadruple the known staff of the program.

But the proposal has long been criticized by privacy groups as ineffective and invasive. Critics say the new documents show that the government is proceeding with the plan in private, and without sufficient oversight.

“We have a situation where the government is spending fairly large sums of money to use an unproven technology that has a possibility of false positives that would subject innocent Americans to unnecessary scrutiny and impinge on their freedom,” said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Before the NSAC expands its mission, there must be strict oversight from Congress and the public.”

The FBI declined to comment on the program.

. . .The NSAC was born as two separate systems designed to improve information-sharing between government agencies following the Sept. 11 attacks. The Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force database has been used to screen flight-school candidates and assist anti-terror investigations. The Investigative Data Warehouse is the more general system, and is the principal element now under expansion.

“The IDW objective was to create a data warehouse that uses certain data elements to provide a single-access repository for information related to issues beyond counterterrorism to include counterintelligence, criminal and cyber investigations,” stated a formerly secret fiscal year 2008 budget request document.  “These missions will be refined and expanded as these capabilities are folded into the NSAC.”

When the bureau unified the systems under the NSAC banner in 2007, the move set off alarm bells with lawmakers, who thought it sounded a lot like the Pentagon’s widely-criticized Total Information Awareness project, which had sought to identify terrorist sleeper cells by linking up and searching through U.S. credit card, health and communication databases. The TIA program had moved into the shadows of the intelligence world after Congress voted to revoke most of its funding.

Read More

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/09/fbi-nsac/

Fusion centers are where state, local, and federal officials work to share information that may have both law-enforcement and intelligence value—presumably while listening to early '70s Miles Davis albums. Though the concept predates the terror attacks of September 11, fusion centers have become far more popular in recent years, and in 2007, the 9/11 Commission Act established the State, Local and Regional Fusion Center Initiative within DHS, which now coordinates about 60 such facilities. Civil libertarians have long worried that fusion centers could become warehouses for reams of data about innocent persons.

Though this week's report provides precious little in terms of genuine assessment—most of its 42 pages are devoted to reviewing formal principles and guidelines rather than on-the-ground practices, and it leans heavily on a January Congressional Research Service report—the PIA does identify seven areas of concern DHS should work to address.

Pursuant to the terms of the 9/11 Act, the DHS fusion center initiative should be restricted to the collection of data relevant to national security investigations in order to prevent so-called “mission creep.” As the report notes, “many fusion centers have an 'all crimes and/or all-hazards' mission, which is substantially broader than the homeland security mission the Initiative supports.” The Privacy Office, however, “presumes that the States are interested in preserving and competent to protect the rights of their own citizens, and offers no opinion as to their methods.”

The report also expresses concern about “ambiguous lines of authority, rules and oversight,” noting that 10 percent of fusion centers indicated to the Government Accountability Office that they lacked adequate guidance on information storage and sharing practices. While privacy training for fusion center agents is meant to mitigate this problem, the report observes that “content is still being created for the privacy training requirements established under the 9/11 Commission Act for State and local fusion center representatives.”

Perhaps the most frequent worry about fusion centers concerns the use of information from private databases, in particular for the purpose of data mining—an investigative technique whose efficacy was questioned in a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences. The Privacy Office promises to conduct a data mining workshop in the near future, and to update its impact assessment as it gathers more information. In the interim, the report recommends increased transparency and the implementation of a redress procedure to permit individuals to correct inaccurate information about themselves held in fusion center databases.

via DHS report surveys fusion center privacy concerns.