Kansas City News Blog

Did you know that there's an office at 635 Woodland that collects reports from local police departments about suspicious activities in the metro area and analyzes them for terrorist threats? And that "suspicious activities" can include taking pictures of questionable aesthetic value, lurking around potential terrorist targets like power plants and oil refineries, or looking up subversive stuff on the 'net? Amateur photographers who like staging photo shoots in the West Bottoms, you might want to keep reading.

Fusion centers started sprouting up all over the country as a result of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007. They were created to solve communications problems experienced by emergency responders and intelligence agencies that came to light after September 11, 2001. The 9/11 Commission noted that there were plenty of warnings that an attack was imminent, but because of the way intelligence experts like the FBI kept information in "silos," nobody connected the dots that might have warned us of the incoming threat. Fusion centers collect information from local, state and national levels and try to analyze it for patterns in order to prevent terrorist attacks on American soil.

I'm writing like I know what I'm talking about because I attended the first day of the National Fusion Center Conference, going on yesterday, today and tomorrow at the downtown Marriott hotel. Representatives from more than 1,000 agencies were there, including the FBI, the State Department, FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and police and sheriffs departments from coast to coast. I've never seen so many badges, Blackberrys and buzz cuts assembled in one place.

Part of this year's theme is "Protecting Privacy, Civil Liberties and Civil Rights," an obvious shout-out to members of the media and the ACLU who were invited to watch yesterday's proceedings. At last year's conference in San Francisco, reporters only got to attend a very short, vague discussion. This year, all of Tuesday's "breakout sessions" were open to the media, but today's and Wednesday's sessions are closed.

Copfest 2009 began bright and early around a coffee machine in one of the Marriott's ballrooms, where I met three policemen from Delaware who told me they were none too impressed with KC's barbecue (they'd already visited Jack Stack and said it was "dry") or our nightlife. "Does this city roll up its sidewalks at night or what?" one said.

I collected my bag of federal swag at the check-in desk and received a bright-yellow laminated name tag attached to a yellow lanyard that screamed "MEDIA," lest anyone accidentally spill state secrets to me over the course of the day. (Everyone else had a black lanyard and white name tag.) Then I headed to the huge room where the MC, Russell M. Porter, the Director of the Intelligence Fusion Center in Iowa, explained the day's activities.

Thumbing through the schedule of events, a breakout session titled "Radicalization" caught my eye. The description of the session said it would help attendees "understand the importance of identifying and understanding the different subversive groups in your area."  The radicalization talk was going on at the same time as another session, "Engaging the Media in Homeland Security." That's just where they expect me to be, my authority-flouting brain mused, feeling very clever.

Just then, MC Porter announced changes to the schedule. Wouldn't you know it, Radicalization had suddenly been moved to Wednesday's schedule. The one closed to media.

I was still fuming over this when everyone was dismissed from the ballroom. I wandered around and struck up a conversation with a man reading the same placard in the hallway. How weird is this: He just happened to be Wayne A. Robbins, Principal Investigator, New Jersey Department of Corrections Intelligence Center, one of the presenters of the Radicalization session.

Robbins confirmed that they'd moved the Radicalization session to Wednesday to keep it from prying eyes like mine (and yours). "This kind of information has legs," he said. I took this to mean that it would freak people out if they read about it, say, on The Pitch blog. I wondered if he'd advise some not-so-privacy-sensitive tactics when instructing cops to keep an eye on "subversive" types. He told me that he'd be speaking as an expert on street gangs and prisons. People in prison tend to already have a robust dislike of the government, he said, and all the boredom and lack of outside stimuli makes it easy for prisoners to be misled, to join radicalized groups and to become cult-like in their beliefs.

Still annoyed that the juicy stuff was being saved for Wednesday, I huffed off to the session titled "Integrating the Privacy and Civil Liberties Framework Into Your Fusion Center's Operations." Civil liberties might have been a priority of the conference's coordinators, but not of the attendees,  judging by lots of empty seats.

ACLU lawyer Michael German was a speaker for this session. He's former FBI (16 years), which lent him some credibility from the law-enforcement crowd. He stressed that when he was an agent, he felt that the rules that guarded citizens' privacy made him more effective. "Every investigation opened on an innocent person or group is a waste of security resources," he said. He referenced ACLU reports on fusion centers that found, among other things, that a troubling lack of transparency existed in the fusion center model. Another problem: When information is collected by an agency for one purpose (say, the names of people who applied for protest permits in a year) and is kept for intelligence purposes. This is the kind of stuff that overshadows the good work being done and leads conspiracy theorists to believe that fusion centers are really just tools for a domestic spying program.

"If you start following every person you see taking pictures, you're going to be very busy people," German said.

Another panelist, Luis Fuste of the Miami-Dade Police Department's legal bureau, suggested that fusion centers can enforce accountability when they overstep their privacy policies by telling on themselves -- like, calling the local media or ACLU to report their mistakes. Which is a great idea that totally takes place all the time in Neverland.

I was thoroughly creeped out by the Civil Liberties panel, but the next session I attended, on Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), made me feel better because of the smart folks involved. A panelist introduced as the "Queen of SARs," Commander Joan T. McNamara of the Los Angeles Police Department, explained how LAPD officers were trained to write reports on suspicious activity as part of their daily beats, as well as collect SARs from security working at places like local hospitals and hotels. The SARs get carefully coded so they make sense in the big-picture: Different instances of people lurking around the same oil refinery, taking pictures, abandoning cars and cutting holes in fences at different times over different days eventually could add up to the makings of a future attack. "If only Mumbai had SARs," McNamara said, referring to the recent terrorist attack on hotels in India. "I said it when that happened, didn't you?" 

Sometimes, SARs make much ado about nothing. McNamara talked about an instance in which a SAR was written because a local laundromat had found a tiny computer file in the pocket of a customer's clothes that contained detailed floor plans of the Los Angeles International Airport. The file turned out to belong to a legitimate airport worker who'd misplaced it -- and that's OK, McNamara said. The incident has closure. "It doesn't cloud my picture," she said.

A guy who identified himself as FBI asked a great question: What do you do with tips from the public that are race-based? Do you discount ethnic information or consider it?

The panel unanimously answered that ethnicity has zero value in a report. "Race is not enough" of an indicator to warrant a report, said Deputy Superintendent Earl Perkins of the Boston Police Department. SARs have to be written about an activity or behavior that warrants memorializing. He told a story about a report that came in about three Middle Eastern men checking into a Boston hotel and refusing help with their many boxes. When hotel staff went to the room to retrieve their luggage cart, they saw the men watching what appeared to be training videos. "Our interest went from zero to 60" at the mention of the videos, Perkins said. But when the police knocked on the door to investigate, they found three lawyers from Mexico watching television, and no threat whatsoever. Bottom line: Good police work will separate bogus reports from real threats.

I saw lots of other good stuff, but in the interest of keeping this a blog and not a novel, here's what I learned about KC's fusion center from Bob Kolenda, Interim Director of the Interagency Analysis Center for the Kansas City Regional Terrorism Center (can you believe all that fits on a business card?).

• The center employs just five people: three analysts, one IT specialist and Kolenda, the director. They're looking to hire a health specialist. 

• They're in charge of all the areas covered by the Mid-America Regional Council (MARC)

• Their partners are the Overland Park Police Department; the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department; the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department; the Independence Police; the Missouri Highway Patrol; and the Missouri Information Analysis Center in Jefferson City.

• They don't generate SARs at the KC site. They only collect them, and their analysts check them for connections to terrorism. They also relay useful information back to police departments to help keep them all informed when their work overlaps.

• Computer systems differ between the local police departments and the highway patrol, etc., but the local fusion center uses software that can put every agency's reports and narratives into a readable document. It's like a Google search that touches all of their databases, so they can search for partial license plate tags, names and whatever else. It's kind of genius. 

• They use information from the TIPS Hotline. Later, our fusion center's Web site will include a form where regular people can narc on each other report suspicious activity, but it's not operational yet.

If I don't end this blog now, Plog shift supervisor Faysal Alkhaiwani will kick my ass. But thumbs up to America's Finest who are currently Blackberry-ing away at the Marriott and will surely be kicking up their shiny, fed/cop heels at the P&L District this evening. And cheers to the tiny group of civil liberties protesters who came to Barney Allis Plaza yesterday carrying an ACLU banner. "Aw, that's kind of sad!" exclaimed one conference attendee who spotted the small assembly from the skywalk yesterday afternoon.

I believe, thanks to yesterday's informative breakout sessions, that fusion centers are committed to going after the bad guys and protecting the rest of us.

Then again, who knows what's going on in that Radicalization session. Without the press' prying eyes, they could be Tazering foreign-looking hotel staff, checking out your Facebook page and hog-tying each other for practice. Who knows? It's all about transparency, people.