Profiling in the age of total information awareness

Race and Class

Volumn 52, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 3-24

  Murray, Nancy ^a  

^a American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

counter terrorism; fusion centres; policing; surveillance

Indexed keywords

EID: 77957329418     PISSN: 03063968     EISSN: 17413125     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0306396810377002     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. S. Saulny, 'Prayers and criticism in wake of Detroit imam's killing by FBI', New York Times (30 October 2009).
2. FBI press release, 'Eleven members/associates of Ummah charged with federal violations: one subject fatally shot during arrest', 28 October 2009. In fact, the former H. Rap Brown was convicted of murdering one officer and wounding another. The press and blogs have widely reproduced the error in the FBI's press release.
3. Microfilm edition, FBI surveillance files: FBI files on black extremist organizations. Part 1: COINTELPRO files on black hate groups and the investigation of the Deacons for Defense and Justice.
4. See 'Narrative timetable of H. Rap Brown', < http://americanascherrypie.tripod.com/id3.html >.
5. E.M. Thelwell, 'H. Rap Brown/Jamil Al-Amin: a profoundly American story', Nation (28 February 2002).
6. His conviction in 1990 on charges of conspiracy, the obstruction of justice, perjury and defrauding the government was overturned on a constitutional technicality the following year.
7. S. Harris, The Watchers: the rise of America's surveillance state(London, Penguin Books, 2010), p. 22.
8. See N. Blackstock, COINTELPRO: the FBI's secret war on political freedom (New York, Vintage Books, 1975)
9. The Nelson Rockefeller Report to the President, by the Commission on CIA Activities, June 1975 (New York, Manor Books, 1975).
10. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which created a secret court to hear applications for the wiretapping of Americans, rarely turned down government requests. It was circumvented by the Bush administration when it instituted its post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping programme and has had its ability to serve as a break on government spying undermined by subsequent legislation.
11. T. Bunyan, 'Just over the horizon - the surveillance society and the state in the EU', Race & Class(Vol. 51, no. 3, January-March 2010).
12. B. Gross, Friendly Fascism: the new face of power in America (Boston, South End Press, 1982), p. 271.
13. J. Markoff, 'Threats and responses: intelligence: Pentagon plans a computer system that would peek at personal data of Americans', New York Times(9 November 2002).
14. G. Healy, 'Beware of Total Information Awareness', Cato Institute (20 January 2003).
15. Shane Harris first revealed the NSA connection in 'TIA lives on', National Journal(23 February 2006)
16. Wrote about it at length in his 2010 book, The Watchers, op. cit.
17. P. Marks, 'Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites', New Scientist (9 June 2006).
18. S. Gorman, 'NSA's domestic spying grows as agency sweeps up data', Wall Street Journal(10 March 2008).
19. R. Singel, 'Newly declassified files detail massive FBI data-mining project', Wired (23 September 2008).
20. A. Ramasastry, 'The FBI STAR terrorist risk assessment program should raise renewed concerns about private sector data mining', Find Law (24 July 2007).
21. Committee on Technical and Privacy Dimensions of Information for Terrorism Prevention and Other National Goals, Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: a framework for program assessment (National Research Council, October 2008).
22. Rep. Brad Miller, chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the Committee on Science and Technology, wrote to the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence criticising the performance of Boeing and other contractors and citing a government report that '413 government IT projects totaling more than $25 billion in FY 2008 alone were poorly planned, poorly performing or both' (21 August 2008). Congress exercises little oversight over the hidden, rapidly metastising homeland security industry which, according to a two-year investigation by the Washington Post, now involves an unknown amount of funding, at least 1,271 government organisations and 1,931 private companies, with 854,000 people - more than the population of Washington DC - holding top security clearance (see, < www.TopSecretAmerica.com >.).
23. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has used both the federal Freedom of Information Act and state public records laws to seek information about fusion centres with mixed results. The ACLU of Massachusetts has produced a preliminary report based on the information it has managed to obtain: 'When we are all suspects: a backgrounder on government surveillance in Massachusetts' (January 2010) which can be downloaded from
24. 'Department of Justice evaluation and inspections report 1 - 2005-007' (June 2005).
25. M. German and J. Stanley, 'Fusion Center Update', American Civil Liberties Union (July 2008).
26. Mass Impact: the domestic war against terrorism in Massachusetts - are we on the right track? (American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, 2004), p. 19.
27. T. Cincotta, Platform for Prejudice: how the nationwide suspicious activity reporting initiative invites racial profiling, erodes civil liberties and undermines security (Political Research Associates, 2010).
28. Office of the Chief of Police, Los Angeles Police Department, Special order number 11, 'Reporting incidents potentially related to foreign or domestic terrorism' (5 March 2008).
29. Information Sharing Environment (ISE), Functional Standard (FS), Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR), Version 1.0, p.6.
30. .
31. .
32. K. Burke and J. Kayyem, 'The State of Homeland Security in the Commonwealth: Trends and Process' (October 2008).
33. 'When we are all suspects: a backgrounder on government surveillance in Massachusetts' (January 2010), p. 7.
34. .
35. S. Mufti, 'Islam in American prisons', IslamOnline.net (31 August 2001).
36. Out of the Shadows: getting ahead of prisoner radicalization, a special report by the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute and the University of Virginia Critical Incident Analysis Group (September 2006), executive summary, p. i.
37. See, for instance, C. Reinarman and H. Levine, eds, Crack in America: demon drugs and social justice (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1997)
38. C. Lusane, Pipe Dream Blues: racism and the war on drugs (Boston, South End Press, 1991)
39. S. Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 years of imprisonment in America (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1998)
40. See D. A. Harris, 'Driving while black: racial profiling on our nation's highways, an American Civil Liberties Union special report' (June 1999).
41. For an analysis of the targeting of Arabs and Muslims before 9/11 and the connection with support for Palestinian rights, see S. Akram and K. Johnson in E. Hagopian, ed., Civil Rights in Peril: the targeting of Arabs and Muslims(London/Chicago, Pluto Press/Haymarket Books, 2004).
42. They 'stopped reporting the cumulative totals after the number reached approximately 1,200, because the statistics became confusing', according to a senior official. Office of the Inspector General, US Department of Justice, The September 11 Detainees: a review of the treatment of aliens held on immigration charges in connection with the investigation of the September 11 attacks (April 2003), p. 1.
43. They 'stopped reporting the cumulative totals after the number reached approximately 1,200, because the statistics became confusing', according to a senior official. Office of the Inspector General, US Department of Justice, The September 11 Detainees: a review of the treatment of aliens held on immigration charges in connection with the investigation of the September 11 attacks (April 2003), p. 1.
44. In its report, Muslim Americans: middle class and mostly mainstream (2007), the Pew Research Center states that its estimate of 2.5 Muslims in the country is significantly lower than other estimates, p. 10. The US State Department puts the figure at approximately six million and other estimates run as high as eight million.
45. The Justice Department claimed to have registered 133,000 people under NSEERS and apprehended eleven 'suspected terrorists', 800 criminal suspects and 9,000 illegal aliens. Thousands of people who feared being arrested sought asylum in Canada. For more information, see Nancy Murray, 'Profiled: Arabs, Muslims and the post-9/11 hunt for the enemy within', in Hagopian, Civil Rights in Peril, op.cit.
46. US News and World Report (20 December 2005).
47. New York Times(9 November 2007).
48. According to a study by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, in the two years following 9/11, the Justice Department referred 6,400 people for investigation on terrorism charges. Two thirds of them were never charged with anything and only a few got lengthy prison sentences. Among the cases labelled as 'terrorist' were sixty-five involving foreign students who hired others to take their English proficiency exams.
49. See Ten Years of Terror: a Southern Poverty Law Center intelligence report (No. 118, summer 2005) and the FBI's 2002-5 Terrorism Report. Very little national attention was paid to the 2003 FBI raid on an arsenal in Texas belonging to White-supremacist William Krar, which included a sodium-cyanide bomb with the capacity to kill thousands, more than a hundred other explosives, assorted military weapons and 500,000 rounds of ammunition, or to a similar cache that had been found in 2002 in the Florida home of Robert Goldstein, along with a list of fifty mosques in the area and a detailed plan for attacking an Islamic education centre. In the local press, Goldstein was referred to as a 'Florida doctor' or 'a podiatrist' but never a 'Jewish terrorist'.
50. New York Times(23 February 2010).
51. The New York press immediately acclaimed two other street vendors as heroes for alerting the police to the smoking car. It took The Times of London to give Aliou Niasse credit for spotting the car and pointing it out to his fellow vendors (Alexandra Freah, 'Unexploded car bomb in Times Square amateurish one-off terrorism attempt', The Times (2 May 2010).
52. S. Hsu and A. Becker, 'ICE officials set quotas to deport more illegal immigrants', Washington Post(27 March 2010).
53. Migration Policy Institute, 'Collateral damage: an examination of ICE's fugitive operations program' (4 February 2009).
54. N. Bernstein, 'Rushed from Haiti by the US, only to be jailed for lacking visas', New York Times (1 April 2010).
55. See Human Rights Immigrant Community Network, Over-Raided, Under Siege: US immigration laws and enforcement destroy the rights of immigrants (January 2008)
56. Department of Homeland Security Inspector General, The performance of 287(g) agreements (March 2010).
57. This is the conclusion of a report by the New York University School of Law for the Migration Policy Institute entitled Blurring the Lines: a profile of state and local police enforcement of immigration law using the National Crime Information Center Database, 2002-04. The report found that the NCIC database was wrong in 42 per cent of the cases in which it identified non-citizens stopped by local police as immigration violators, with the state of Maine having 90 per cent false positives.
58. Jacqueline Stevens, 'America's secret ICE castles', Nation (16 December 2009). In November 2008, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a $44.35 million contract to the military contractor Northrop Grumman to provide 'an integrated system that will locate and track detainees, reserve detainee bed space among various facilities, and manage detainee transportation'.
59. As an example, Fawaz Damra, the imam of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, was stripped of his citizenship and deported to Israel for failing to reveal his ties to the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad when applying for US citizenship in 1993 - which was four years before Islamic Jihad was put on the government's list of terrorist organisations.
60. S. Mufti, 'Islam in American prisons' IslamOnline.com (31 August 2001).
61. Office of the Inspector General, 'The Federal Bureau of Prisons monitoring of mail for high-risk inmates, Appendix VIII, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's response', Evaluation and Inspections Report I-2006-009 (September 2006).
62. 'Statement of John M. Vanyur before the Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment Committee on Homeland Security, US House of Representatives, concerning Radicalization, Information Sharing and Community Outreach: Protecting the Homeland from Homegrown Terrorism' (5 April 2007).
63. Association of State Correctional Administrators, 'ASCA's reentry information sharing initiative', Correctional intelligence, counterterrorism, gangs, and violent crime project, winter 2010.
64. S. Schwartz, 'Radical Muslims are taking over US prisons', Weekly Standard (24 April 2006).
65. 'Judge refuses to dismiss Bronx synagogue bomb plot case', New York Times(19 May 2010).
66. The case was still under investigation when five of the autopsy photos were posted online. .
67. D. Shanzer, C. Kurzman, E. Moosa, Anti-terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans (National Institute of Justice, 6 January 2010).
68. In his 8 April 2010 talk, Chomsky recalls how, in just a handful of years, anger with the 'incessant wrangling of Weimar politics' and its failure to deal with popular grievances was mobilised by 'forces dedicated to upholding the greatness of the nation and defending it against invented threats in a revitalized, armed and unified state, marching to a glorious future. The world is too complex for history to repeat, but there are nevertheless lessons to keep in mind.'.
69. Gross, Friendly Fascism, op.cit., p. 162.
70. V. Harding, Hope and History: why we must share the story of the movement (Orbis Books, New York), p. 11.