A in-depth report Monday in the Washington Post describes the expanding apparatus of US domestic intelligence since the September 11th Terrorist Attacks, including fusion centers, the new Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative and the FBI’s Guardian Database. The article is well worth reading, but it is missing a bit of legal context that is important to an understanding the government policy that is driving the change.
US domestic intelligence is being expanded under the authority of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004. This was the first and most comprehensive legal response to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. It outlined a wholesale rewiring of the domestic intelligence apparatus and the establishment of an Information Sharing Environment (ISE). The nationwide suspicious activity reporting initiative (NSI), which journalists Dana Priest and William M Arkin mention briefly, is the primary focus of the ISE today. It includes its own federal data standard. The “See something say something” campaign which has been getting so much press recently is simply one facet of the NSI, the focus of which up until recently has been training local and state police to be intelligence agents. For a wide range of public documents that provide coverage of the NSI and ISE, see post-doc Kenneth Farrall’s isesar.us web site, developed with the support of NYU’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication and a grant from the Department of Defense.