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Top Secret America

A web of 3,984 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions, an alternative geography of the United States, one that has grown so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it.

Map Your Local Fusion Center: From California’s 359 counterterrorism offices to Rhode Island’s 21 — examine what’s going on in your state on this map, created as part of The Washington Post’s investigation into the country’s massive and hidden post-9/11 national security apparatus. You can also read reporter Dana Priest and William Arkin’s Dec. 20, 2010 story “Monitoring America”.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/map/

Price of Peril: Homeland Security Spending by State: http://cironline.org/sites/default/files/legacy/files/homelandsecurity/priceofperil.html

America’s War Within: http://cironline.org/projects/americas-war-within

ACLU: More About Fusion Centers http://www.aclu.org/spy-files/more-about-fusion-centers

Are We Safer?: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/are-we-safer/

The federal guidelines for operating fusion centers can be found here on the Justice Department’s website: http://www.it.ojp.gov/default.aspx?area=nationalInitiatives&page=1181

The data center that will be able to store unlimited information on you. It will be a place that can break 256K encryption, so passwords will become obsolete. No one is uttering one peep about it. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/

America Is Being Systematically Transformed Into A Giant Surveillance Grid: http://bit.ly/RmDZaw

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say): http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/

Monitoring America:

* Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.

* The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators, increasing concerns that it could somehow end up in the public domain.

* Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies.

* The Department of Homeland Security sends its state and local partners intelligence reports with little meaningful guidance, and state reports have sometimes inappropriately reported on lawful meetings.

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