A November 25, 2008 report by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) reported that whistleblowers inside the Air Marshals Service were harassed for speaking out and that the Office of Special Counsel headed by the now fired Scott Bloch (item 153) did little to protect them.

This level of wrongdoing, chaos and mismanagement is pretty much what you would expect from Michael Chertoff’s Department of Homeland Security.

As described in a November 2007 ACLU report and a July 2008 update, fusion centers were cooperative efforts to share information that grew up haphazardly beginning around 2003 among local, state, and federal authorities. Almost every state has or is planning to have one. Since state and local laws vary, each fusion center is different. Mixed jurisdictions and chains of command within and between fusion centers and with no overarching regulation have led to an uncontrolled growth in mission. The goal has moved from counterterrorism to more general law enforcement to even broader information gathering on ordinary Americans. Military (in violation of posse comitatus) and private actors have also become involved.

In this, the centers can be seen as the next iteration in a long line of domestic surveillance programs from the old Red squads to the infamous FBI’s COINTELPRO which targeted Americans like Martin Luther King to the Total Information Awareness/Terrorist Information Awareness program which Congress defunded in 2003 just as fusion centers were taking off. By the end of 2006, the Department of Homeland Security had spent $380 million on them.

Like its predecessors, the system is ripe for abuse. It mixes criminal, public, and private information into profiles of large numbers of Americans and is perfect for data mining. It allows users to “policy shop” and acquire information from another jurisdiction which is against the law in one’s home state or locality. It includes reports on perfectly legal activities, such as using binoculars, taking notes, and espousing “extremist” views. Some of these extremist views include being Muslim, a peace activist, or against the death penalty. While these reports supposedly do not contain names, they do contain enough information for identification using other sources. They are also in violation of Title 28 Part 23 of the Code of Federal Regulations which states that law enforcement “shall collect information concerning an individual only if there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal conduct or activity and the information is relevant to that criminal conduct or activity.” In 2006, the DHS and Justice Department came up with guidelines for fusion centers which ignored this regulation completely and suggested the following as an incomplete list of possible information sources:

• Private sector entities such as food/water production facilities, grocery stores and supermarkets, and restaurants.
• Banks, investment firms, credit companies and government-related financial departments.
• Preschools, day care centers, universities, primary & secondary schools and other educational entities providing information on suspicious activity.
• Fire and emergency medical services in both the public and private sector such as hospitals and private EMS services.
• Utilities, electricity, and oil companies, Department of Energy.
• Private physicians, pharmaceutical companies, veterinarians.
• The gaming industry, sports authority, sporting facilities, amusement parks, cruise lines, hotels, motels, resorts and convention centers.
• Internet service and e-mail providers, the FCC, telecom companies, computer and software companies, and related government agencies.
• Defense contractors and military entities.
• The U.S. Postal service and private shipping companies.
• Apartment facilities, facility management companies, housing authorities.
• Malls, retail stores and shopping centers.
• State and child welfare entities.
• Governmental, public, and private transport entities such as airlines and shipping companies.

This is breathtaking in its scope. The result is that some 800, 000 of the nation’s law enforcement officials have in effect become intelligence agents, and not very good ones, of the government. It is not an exaggeration to say that what this is about is Big Brother and the creation of a surveillance state. Fusion centers operate in the dark with no oversight. They have shown no ability in their original counterterrorism mission and in their current form violate the First and Fourth Amendments massively and repeatedly. They are antithetical to American values of privacy and democracy.

On July 31, 2008, the Justice Department posted proposed rule changes in light of “the new, post-9/11 information sharing environment” that would legalize the illegal activities under Title 28 Part 23 the fusion centers have been engaged in for the last few years. It would also increase the length of time information could be held by such centers without any updating from 5 years to 10 years. This is another example of a government department seeking to institutionalize Administration power grabs and legitimize lawless behavior before Bush leaves office. The rules changes are set to go into effect on October 1, 2008.

Among departments, Pentagon spending on procurement increased from $133.5 billion in 2000 to $297.7 billion in 2006 representing 72% of the total federal procurement budget. At the Department of Homeland Security, procurement spending went up from $3.5 billion in 2003 when the DHS was created to $15.1 billion in 2006 with $5.1 billion of that occurring between 2005 and 2006 alone.

Among contractors the top 6 were Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Halliburton. Together, they received $99.9 billion in 2006 or 24% of all federal procurement spending in that year. The largest federal contractor was Lockheed Martin with 14,016 contracts worth $31.5 billion, or more than the gross domestic product of 109 countries. Interestingly, Halliburton which Vice President Cheney once headed has been the fastest growing federal contractor. It went from 28th place in 2000 with $763 million in contracts to 6th place with $6 billion in 2006, a 700% increase. It’s good to be the king, as Mel Brooks once said.

As for the contracts, $67.5 billion were let in 2000 without full and open competition. By 2006, this had increased to $206.9 billion, an increase of 206%. Of this last number, no-bid contracts comprised $103 billion, up form $46.6 billion in 2000. Limited competition contracts (where only a small pre-selected group is allowed to bid) amounted to $62.6 billion in 2006. In $10 billion of these, there was in fact only one bidder. Among contracts listed as available to full and open competition in 2006, some $47.7 billion also had a single bid up from $11.7 billion in 2000 (a 308% rise).

The report also found significant waste, fraud, and abuse in 187 ongoing contracts worth $1.1 trillion. The principal reason for this has been a failure in oversight. While procurement contracts have exploded in size and number under the Bush Administration, competition has shriveled, more abuse prone cost-plus contracts have been awarded, and the number of personnel to oversee them has remained static. It is all a recipe to loot the government by the powerful. It is welfare for the wealthy and the well connected.