Computer attacks pose the biggest risk “from a national security perspective, other than a weapon of mass destruction or a bomb in one of our major cities,” said Shawn Henry, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division told the International Conference on Cyber Security in New York . According to multiple reports Henry went on to say  terrorist groups aim for an online 9/11, “inflicting the same kind of damage on our country, on all our countries, on all our networks, as they did in 2001 by flying planes into buildings.”

“The cyber infrastructure of the U.S. government is closely linked to the national cyber infrastructure that we all know and use.  And that infrastructure is largely made up of privately owned networks.  Moreover, our economic security is quickly becoming linked to our ability to protect information in cyberspace.  Even if the government wanted to devise cyber security policies without private input, these policies would have limited reach, and would not reach many of the most critical potential vulnerabilities in the United States, said Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip at the International Conference on Cyber Security.”For instance, electrical grids depend on cyber components to function, and the banking system and Wall Street rely on computers and Internet-based transactions.  The crown jewels of our technology and intellectual property rights – held in corporations and research universities – are similarly affected by such vulnerabilities.  These and many more like examples make clear that we cannot have a rational national cyber security policy without thinking long and hard about how to protect private networks.”

“I can’t tell you how strongly I believe, how much I’ve been convinced by my colleagues in the FBI, and the rest of the Executive Branch, that we must secure our cyber infrastructure in a manner that addresses threats from foreign armies, adversary intelligence services, criminals, and terrorists,” Filip said.  “It’s hard to exaggerate how important this is or how hard it is to accomplish fully.”

Filip went on to say that the US, partners abroad and private industry have made substantial progress at battling cyber crime despite the challenges that cyber operations and investigations present.  For example:

• The Department of Justice chairs the G-8 High Tech Crime Group, which now includes over 50 countries.  The group is designed to facilitate parallel criminal investigations with law enforcement agencies abroad and allow for quick cooperation on emerging and exigent cyber crime matters.
• The United States ratified the International Convention on Cybercrime.  The Convention provides a basic framework for substantive and procedural laws to allow greater cooperation among nations in the investigation and prosecution of cybercrime, and sets minimum levels for substantive cyber laws, procedural laws, and standards of cooperation with other nations.
• The Department of Justice, in cooperation with other government agencies, helps train foreign police, prosecutors, and judges on investigating and prosecuting cybercrime and the importance of obtaining and preserving electronic evidence.
• The FBI has created InfraGard, a partnership between the government and private industry that encourages information sharing to better protect America’s physical and electronic infrastructure, including banks, water and food supplies, and transportation and communications networks.  InfraGard, includes federal, state, and local law enforcement; military officials; business executives; entrepreneurs; and academics.  FBI agents are able to provide threat alerts and warnings, investigative updates, and other information, and private sector partners share expertise and information that helps law enforcement track down criminals and terrorists.

TAMPA – If an officer asks if you need help on Super Bowl Sunday, he might be more than just gracious.

For the first time, the Transportation Security Administration’s “Behavior Detection Officers” are enhancing security at the championship event by watching people for combinations of suspicious behavior.

“They’re trained to do exactly that – pick people out of a crowd,” Gary Milano, federal security director for the TSA’s Tampa office, said today.

These officers don’t have the power to arrest but are uniformed behavioral experts, Milano said.

The TSA and the U.S. Secret Service trained about 70 Tampa police officers and Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies working the event in their techniques. Milano described them as “telltale signs of people about to engage in wrongdoing” based on the Israeli security system.

Each behavior, such as profuse sweating, could be innocent on its own but raises eyebrows when coupled with other behaviors, Milano said. He declined to elaborate.

The officers evaluate the behaviors on a point system and approach a person for a chat to determine whether there’s a need for concern, said Tampa police Maj. John Bennett, who was familiar with the TSA program and invited the agency to participate.

“Legally, you can walk up and just have a conversation,” Bennett said, noting that the officers aim to keep the contact friendly.

Bennett said he asked for the TSA’s help about a month ago, after he realized the “secure footprint” around the venue was similar to the security at a port or airport. “If you’re inside the secure footprint, you either have a credential or a ticket,” he said.

Bennett added that he had visited previous Super Bowls looking for ways to mirror or improve upon security. After a man was found armed with a rifle last year in a parking lot near the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, he saw the need for this layer of expertise.

“Our mission is to make a safe event,” Bennett said. “If we can ask a few more questions … that’s reasonable.”

The interception of an Iranian arms ship by the US Navy in the Red Sea last week likely was conducted as a covert operation and is being played down by the US military due to the lack of a clear legal framework for such operations, an American expert on Iran told The Jerusalem Post on Saturday evening.

The ship was initially suspected of being en route to delivering its cargo to smugglers in Sinai who would transfer the ammunition to Hamas in Gaza, but the US Navy became uncertain over the identity of the intended recipient since “Hamas is not known to use artillery,” The Associated Press cited a defense official as saying.

It was then allowed to sail toward the Suez Canal, where Egyptian authorities have been asked to conduct another search of the vessel, according to the report.

In an e-mail to the Post, Lt.-Col. Patrick Ryder of the US Air Force, who is a spokesman for the Defense Department, said the US military was “aware of the media reports and are looking into them, but we have nothing to provide at this time.”

Prof. Raymond Tanter, president of the Washington-based Iran Policy Committee, said, “It is not surprising that the US Navy is reluctant to acknowledge the operation, which may have been covert,” adding that maritime law posed challenges when it came to intercepting ships that fly the flag of a sovereign country.

“The navy generally uses special forces, sometimes including Navy Seals, to conduct interceptions on the high seas,” Tanter said.

Maritime law provides a basis for the interception of suspicious vessels not flying a country’s flag (called “stateless vessels”), such as the North Korean ship carrying Scud missiles intercepted in the Arabian Sea by the American and Spanish navies in 2002. However, in last week’s incident, “it was a Cypriot-flagged, Iranian-owned commercial vessel, and the maritime law is less able to justify stop and search operations against such ships,” Tanter said.

Iranian arms smuggling ships are not subject to the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), launched by the US in 2003 to “stop trafficking of weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems, and related materials to and from states and non-state actors of proliferation concern,” he noted.

“Indeed, there is a need for international institutions like the PSI to interdict rockets from Iran to Hamas, but it is unlikely for such a multilateral regime will be established in the near-term,” he said. “Without such international legitimacy, the United States has to act publicly alone to interdict suspected January Iranian shipments to Hamas.”

Legalities aside, however, the US interception was likely helped by “intelligence provided by friendly states, such as Egypt,” Tanter added. “Because of fear in intelligence circles that a ‘dirty bomb’ might make it into Gaza, there is some thought to apply the PSI to interdict ships en route to Hamas,” he added.

For the time being, the interceptions and searches are being carried out on the basis of the memorandum of understanding signed between Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on January 16, which is “aimed at halting arms smuggling into Gaza as part of efforts to clinch the cease-fire,” Tanter said.

“I suspect that the 19-20 January interception stemmed from that deal. Moreover, having the US Navy intercept the suspect ship would have significantly better prospects for unopposed boarding than if Israeli commandos took it down. Were this ship to be operated by Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guards Corps or Quds force, and Israelis came aboard, it would not be a pretty scene, to say the least,” he said.

Emily Landau, director of the Arms Control and Regional Security Program at the Institute of National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said Tehran would do its utmost to replenish Hamas weapons stocks in the coming months.

“Iran has a very strong interest in terms of its regional hegemonic designs to continue to support its two proxies in our part of the Middle East,” Landau said. “I think the result of the war and the obvious poor performance of Hamas will also have implications on Iran’s regional standing. Iran hoped Hamas could have declared victory – this would give Iran more bargaining chips when it came to nuclear negotiations with the US,” she said.

At the same time, “Iran is not looking for an armed confrontation [with the US Navy] at this point,” Landau said. “An armed confrontation would start a whole different set of dynamics that could have implications for what Iran could achieve.”

Iran’s arms-smuggling and nuclear program “all tie in to the same agenda. Iran wants to be the leading power in the Middle East and to call the shots,” she said.

Barack Obama gave the go-ahead for his first military action yesterday, missile strikes against suspected militants in Pakistan which killed at least 18 people.

Four days after assuming the presidency, he was consulted by US commanders before they launched the two attacks. Although Obama has abandoned many of the “war on terror” policies of George Bush while he was president, he is not retreating from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders.

The US believes they are hiding in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, and made 30 strikes last year in which more than 200 people were killed. In the election, Obama hinted at increased operations in Pakistan, saying he thought Bush had made a mistake in switching to Iraq before completing the job against al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The US marine corp commander said yesterday that his 22,000 troops should be redeployed from Iraq to Afghanistan. Gen James Conway said “the time is right” to leave Iraq now the war had become largely nation-building rather than the pitched fighting in which the corps excelled; he wanted the marines in Afghanistan, especially in the south where insurgents, and the Taliban and al-Qaida, benefit from both a nearby safe haven in Pakistan and a booming trade in narcotics.

Obama has warned that he is prepared to bomb inside Pakistan if he gets relevant intelligence about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. He had also said he would act against militants along the border if the Pakistan government failed to.

The US missiles were fired by unmanned Predator drones, which hang in the sky gathering intelligence through surveillance and, when commanded and directed by remote control, to launch attacks.

The strikes will help Obama portray himself as a leader who, though ready to shift the balance of American power towards diplomacy, is not afraid of military action.

The first attack yesterday was on the village of Zharki, in Waziristan; three missiles destroyed two houses and killed 10 people. One villager told Reuters on the phone that of nine bodies pulled from the rubble of one house, six were its owner and his relatives; Reuters added that intelligence officials said some foreign militants were also killed. A second attack hours later also in Warizistan killed eight people.

The Pakistan government publicly expressed hope that the arrival of Obama would see a halt to such strikes, which stir up hostility from Pakistanis towards the government; in private, the government may be more relaxed about such attacks.

There is a lot of nervousness in the new administration about the fragility of Pakistan, particularly as it has nuclear weapons, but it also sees Afghanistan and Pakistan as being linked. In the face of a Taliban resurgence, there is despair in Washington over the leadership of the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, and there will not be much disappointment if he is replaced in elections later this year.

But Washington insists on seeing as one of its biggest problems the ability of the Taliban and al-Qaida to maintain havens in Pakistan. Obama on Thursday announced he was making veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke a special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, spoke by phone to the Pakistan president, Asif Ali Zardari.

They are run by the Department of Homeland Security and are locally based across the country.  A fusion center is an effective and efficient mechanism to exchange information and intelligence, maximize resources, streamline operations, and improve the ability to fight crime and terrorism by merging data from a variety of sources.

At first blush this sounds good.  After 9/11 discussions were had about how to streamline communication between local and federal law enforcement agencies.

From the Department of Homeland Security website:

Many states and larger cities have created state and local fusion centers to share information and intelligence within their jurisdictions as well as with the federal government.  The Department, through the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, provides personnel with operational and intelligence skills to the fusion centers.  This support is tailored to the unique needs of the locality and serves to:

help the classified and unclassified information flow,
provide expertise,
coordinate with local law enforcement and other agencies, and
provide local awareness and access.

But, it is being alleged that something has gone wrong along the way.  Fusion centers have now come under the scrutinizing eye of the ACLU, and for good reasons.

Who is spying in your neighborhood?

These centers have been placed in our neighborhoods.  Our local fusion center is located on Bataan Boulevard in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  You can find the fusion center nearest you by clicking on this interactive map. The ACLU has also set up a site that tracks camera surveillance. Video surveillance is nothing new, but:

Video surveillance is not a new phenomenon, but the amount of attention that the federal government has been paying is. In the past five years, the Department of Homeland Security has awarded $300 million in grants to state and local governments, all in the name of public video surveillance.

From the same article:

Meanwhile, a timely University of California study has found that San Francisco’s $700,000 ‘Crime Camera’ program has had no impact on violent crime since its 2005 installation. The study also states that robberies dropped significantly within each camera’s radius, but notes that this finding is inconclusive.

These two paragraphs beg some further discussion.  Is the surveillance arm of the Department of Homeland Security working in conjunction with the fusion center in this California neighborhood?  If surveillance cameras aren’t reducing crime significantly, what other purposes are they serving?

From California again:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of California have filed a federal lawsuit against the FBI and local authorities over the seizure and search of two organizations’ computers, they jointly announced Wednesday.

…

On August 27, 2008, the University of California Police, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI took part in a raid of the Berkeley offices of two politically active groups, Long Haul Infoshop and East Bay Prisoner Support Group (EBPS), seizing every computer in the building, even those behind locked doors, which were opened by force. The raid was conducted despite no allegations of wrongdoing on the part of either organization or any of their members, and the complaint questions the legality of the warrant obtained by authorities.

Why search and seize at the Long Haul Infoshop or the East Bay Prisoner Support Group?  Was the FBI working in conjunction with the local fusion center?  More questions.

The neighborhood spying isn’t limited to California.

From the Washington Post:

Organizational meetings, public forums, prison vigils, rallies outside the State House in Annapolis and e-mail group lists were infiltrated by police posing as peace activists and death penalty opponents, the records show. The surveillance continued even though the logs contained no reports of illegal activity and consistently indicated that the activists were not planning violent protests.
…
The records show that undercover agents collectively spent 288 hours on surveillance activities over 14 months from March 2005 until May 2006.

The fusion center in New Mexico is known as a “cut and paste” shop.  Analysts peruse media, in all forms (print and electronic), clipping information that they feel is “important” or “questionable.”  It is also alleged that they peruse the internet.  It wouldn’t surprise me if they were reading this diary, now.

Their peering eyes are looking into the private sector:

A new institution is emerging in American life: Fusion Centers. These state, local and regional institutions were originally created to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different state, local and federal law enforcement agencies. Though they developed independently and remain quite different from one another, for many the scope of their mission has quickly expanded – with the support and encouragement of the federal government – to cover “all crimes and all hazards.” The types of information they seek for analysis has also broadened over time to include not just criminal intelligence, but public and private sector data, and participation in these centers has grown to include not just law enforcement, but other government entities, the military and even select members of the private sector.

Legislation has been drafted, and will be presented to the New Mexico State Legislature, addressing concerns over the fusion center in Santa Fe.

A draft of the ACLU legislation, sponsored by Rep. Antonio “Mo” Maestas, D-Albuquerque, would prohibit a law enforcement agency from collecting, maintaining and sharing “with any other law enforcement agency, information about the political, religious or social associations, views or activities of a person unless” they are suspected of committing a crime.

That is the kicker…they aren’t watching American citizens who are suspected of committing crimes.  They are watching whoever they want to.

A quick summary:

But in a democracy, the collection and sharing of intelligence information – especially information about American citizens and other residents – need to be carried out with the utmost care. That is because more and more, the amount of information available on each one of us is enough to assemble a very detailed portrait of our lives. And because security agencies are moving toward using such portraits to profile how “suspicious” we look.

American citizens aren’t being spied on just by the NSA.  They are being spied on by the fusion center office around the corner.