In October of 1952, Judge Learned Hand delivered his famous speech at the University of the State of New York passionately denouncing the culture of surveillance and suspicion that had stricken the United States at the onset of the cold war. "I believe that that community is already in process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbour as a possible enemy, where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection," he said.
Almost 60 years later, Pennsylvanians have come to learn how prescient Hand's words remain today, in post-9/11 America. This month, the state's citizens were shocked when they discovered that their Office of Homeland Security had been issuing intelligence bulletins to local law enforcement and private industry that covered the activities of law-abiding activist groups, most prominently those opposed to natural gas drilling. The bulletins, however, weren't generated by state law enforcement. Instead they were produced by the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, a Philadelphia- and Jerusalem-based consulting firm that received a $103,000 no-bid contract from the state homeland security director James Powers to identify threats to Pennsylvania's critical infrastructure.
Aside from the obvious civil liberties abuses, Powers's decision to outsource his agency's intelligence mission demonstrates that the murky world of "Top Secret America" has trickled down to the states. Or in other words, intelligence is now big business. In an explosive two-year investigation published in July, Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M Arkin described how the federal government has aggressively created a hidden, lucrative industry of private intelligence contractors that help the intelligence community do its job since 9/11. The downside of this system is that it's so secretive and unwieldy that sources told Priest and Arkin that agencies and their contractors do redundant work that has of little or no intelligence value for unknown sums of taxpayers' dollars.
These same inefficiencies also apply to Pennsylvania's homeland security system but on a smaller scale, providing a closer look at the pathologies of secrecy, waste, and abuse created by the surveillance state. Since the leak of the ITRR intelligence bulletin, Pennsylvanians were informed that their state police already has an intelligence shop that performs similar work. On Monday they also learned that not only were the intelligence reports wasteful but positively harmful in the beginning. According to the Associated Press, leaders from the state police told a legislative hearing that the bulletins initially led law enforcement to chase down phantom threats before they directed "local stations" to ignore them.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/28/private-surveillance-pennsylvania-scandal
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