The days, weeks and months following my arrest were some of the darkest we have had to endure. I personally was subject to lockdown, strip searches, sleep deprivation, unsanitary living conditions, shackles and chains, threats, physical pain and humiliation.

It is important to realize the intensity of the government’s pressure on Mayfield. They were hanging death penalty offenses over him and generally terrorizing both him and his family. In this, the government’s investigation recalls the heavy-handedness and sloppiness of its anthrax investigations (see item 366).

Nevertheless, a January 6, 2006 report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General Glenn Fine, in a fairly typical whitewash characteristic of IG reports, found that the FBI had not misused any provisions of the Patriot Act although it noted that the government’s sharing of information on Mayfield to other agencies had amplified the effects of its “mistake”.

On November 29, 2006, the government settled with Mayfield for $2 million. It issued him an apology, and allowed his case challenging the Constitutional validity on 4th Amendment grounds of the Patriot Act to go forward.

With great power comes great responsibility. Along with understanding a lot about human nature, the Founders understood this. They knew from their own experience that there were plenty of fools and zealots who would abuse and misuse any power that was given to them. It is why they were so careful to make sure that no power went unchecked. Post-9/11, the Bush Administration went on a bender and with considerable help, or complicit silence, from the Democrats undid many of the simple lessons that the Founders struggled so hard and sacrificed so much to bequeath to us. Bush and the political leadership on both sides of the aisle thought they were considerably smarter than the Founders gave them credit for. What they did not understand was that they were the ones the Founders were warning us about.

Then just days before the convention opening, the FBI and local law enforcement, especially of diehard Republican loyalist Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher, initiated a series of punitive raids over the weekend against various groups. The first occurred at a central clearinghouse for protestors known as the “Welcoming Committee”. Those there were handcuffed, computers were seized, but no arrests were made. Sheriff Fletcher released a statement in which he described the “Welcoming Committee” as a “criminal enterprise made up of 35 self- described anarchists who are intent on committing criminal acts.” If such were the case, it is surprising no arrests were made. The following day raids were also carried out against other “dangerous” groups, such as Legalwatch and Food not Bombs. In one case, building inspectors arrived after a raid and gave owners until 6:30 the next morning to fix the door the police had kicked in or have the premises boarded up.

In the later raids, some 6 individuals were arrested but none charged. Instead they were kept on probable cause holds. Such a hold allows police to hold someone up to 36 hours, weekends not counting, without charge. Effectively, this permits law officers like Sheriff Fletcher to mete out 4-5 day jail sentences to anyone he doesn’t like, in other words, punishment without charge, conviction, or crime. Similar strong arm tactics by the New York police at the Republican convention in 2004 led to settlements in the millions. But with the federal government underwriting security costs this is not much of a disincentive.

On September 1, 2008, the police using pepper spray, tear gas, and “less lethal” projectiles fought numerous battles with demonstrators most of whom were peaceful. By the end of the first day, official figures listed 163 arrests, unofficial numbers 256.

This pattern of infiltration, fearmongering, high profile raids, large shows of military style force, aggressive indiscriminate treatment of demonstrators, and mass arrests has come to be known as the “Miami model” from its use against protesters to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations in Miami in November 2003.

In the early phases, police actions were largely ignored by the mainstream media and most of the reporting came from bloggers and independent media sources. As violence increased, the mainstream media did pick up the story but even they noted that most protesters were peaceful.

It is important to remember that the real object of these raids, seizures, and arrests is not to stop crime but dissent. They are meant to send a message, that if you protest, even legally, even peacefully, you risk arbitrary detention, seizure of your property, punishment, and humiliation by the powers that be. Dissent in this country has become for many un-American. Worse it is seen as a kind of terrorism. This is all the more bizarre and disheartening because our country was itself founded on dissent. Pilgrims, Quakers, believers and non-believers of all sorts, came to these shores precisely because they did not agree with the powers of their day. The Founding Fathers were dissenters and started a revolution and a country over their dissent. The Framers understood this and enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution the right to dissent in both the guarantees of freedom of speech and of peaceful assembly. Yet in the Age of Terror, dissent is no longer seen as a living, breathing expression of our democracy but as suspicious, probably criminal, certainly unpatriotic, a thing to be suppressed, especially so that the greater good, in this case the photo-ops of the national party conventions can proceed unquestioned, unchallenged, and unhindered.

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.

Will they catch terrorists? The answer is a few perhaps. The NGI is essentially a confirmatory system. Technical problems aside, it works if you already know who you are looking for and that person has been scanned and conveniently walks before another scanner for you. It also works if you have someone already in custody and you query the system and get lucky. But it won’t identify high level targets because Osama bin Laden is unlikely to oblige the FBI by walking through an American airport. Nor will it identify those involved in another terrorist attack on this country because they will be chosen from those who have not been scanned or whose links to terrorism are unknown. As it is, the system is far more likely to be used as an expensive adjunct to current fingerprint records in criminal cases in this country.

The program has the hallmarks of a pet project of someone highly placed in the NSA, or the White House. It has an annual budget of $500 million, and both the budget and program were hidden from the Congress for over a year by means of a complicated shell game of creative accounting and splitting up its components (so it would be harder to identify and track not from our enemies but from our Congress). That takes considerable pull. Still the strategy is a simple one, get a program up and running before it can be quashed. Once up, as I have noted before, programs like Turbulence are virtually impossible to kill. In this light, the hookup with DHS is not about inter-agency cooperation but about extending the program’s political constituency and improving its chances for survival.

Turbulence is by its nature highly intrusive and ripe for abuse. Yet from its origins, it has been designed to avoid to the maximum possible any oversight. It is another case of the Bush Administration which has a record of repeatedly abusing the public trust saying, "Trust us," again.

On January 8, 2008, Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 giving the program an even solider political foundation. It gives the direction of the program to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA will do its thing. The DHS will seek to protect government computer systems from attack, and the Pentagon will have responsibility for any counterattacks. Questions of privacy aside, without a unified response team, this is a plan made in bureaucratic hog heaven and will likely be both intrusive and ineffective.