[fd] Monitoring America - Full Story [long]

[J.A. Terranson]

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/monitoring-america/

Monitoring America

Monday, December 20, 2010; 1:40 AM

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is 
assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information 
about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security 
offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in 
the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about 
thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been 
accused of any wrongdoing.

The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement 
agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work 
of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United 
States.

Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted 
with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum 
of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.

This localized intelligence apparatus is part of a larger Top Secret 
America created since the attacks. In July, The Washington Post described 
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.

Today's story, along with related material on The Post's Web site, 
examines how Top Secret America plays out at the local level. It describes 
a web of 4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own 
counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 935 of these 
organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved 
in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11.

The months-long investigation, based on nearly 100 interviews and 1,000 
documents, found that:

* 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.

Job fair
Counterterrorism on Main Street
In cities across Tennessee and across the nation local agencies are using 
sophisticated equipment and techniques to keep an eye out for terrorist 
threats -- and to watch Americans in the process. Launch Gallery ;

The need to identify U.S.-born or naturalized citizens who are planning 
violent attacks is more urgent than ever, U.S. intelligence officials say. 
This month's FBI sting operation involving a Baltimore construction worker 
who allegedly planned to bomb a Maryland military recruiting station is 
the latest example. It followed a similar arrest of a Somali-born 
naturalized U.S. citizen allegedly seeking to detonate a bomb near a 
Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore. There have been nearly 
two dozen other cases just this year.

"The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to 
fight them here' is just that - the old view," Homeland Security Secretary 
Janet Napolitano told police and firefighters recently.

The Obama administration heralds this local approach as a much-needed 
evolution in the way the country confronts terrorism.

Top Secret America is a project two years in the making that describes the 
huge security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, 
attacks. Today.s story is about those efforts at the local level, 
including law enforcement and homeland security agencies in every state 
and thousands of communities. View previous stories, explore relationships 
between government organizations and the types of work being done, and 
view top-secret geography on an interactive map.

However, just as at the federal level, the effectiveness of these 
programs, as well as their cost, is difficult to determine. The Department 
of Homeland Security, for example, does not know how much money it spends 
each year on what are known as state fusion centers, which bring together 
and analyze information from various agencies within a state.

The total cost of the localized system is also hard to gauge. The DHS has 
given $31 billion in grants since 2003 to state and local governments for 
homeland security and to improve their ability to find and protect against 
terrorists, including $3.8 billion in 2010. At least four other federal 
departments also contribute to local efforts. But the bulk of the spending 
every year comes from state and local budgets that are too disparately 
recorded to aggregate into an overall total.

The Post findings paint a picture of a country at a crossroads, where 
long-standing privacy principles are under challenge by these new efforts 
to keep the nation safe.

The public face of this pivotal effort is Napolitano, the former governor 
of Arizona, which years ago built one of the strongest state intelligence 
organizations outside of New York to try to stop illegal immigration and 
drug importation.

Napolitano has taken her "See Something, Say Something" campaign far 
beyond the traffic signs that ask drivers coming into the nation's capital 
for "Terror Tips" and to "Report Suspicious Activity."

She recently enlisted the help of Wal-Mart, Amtrak, major sports leagues, 
hotel chains and metro riders. In her speeches, she compares the 
undertaking to the Cold War fight against communists.

"This represents a shift for our country," she told New York City police 
officers and firefighters on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary this fall. 
"In a sense, this harkens back to when we drew on the tradition of civil 
defense and preparedness that predated today's concerns."

----

>From Afghanistan to Tennessee

On a recent night in Memphis, a patrol car rolled slowly through a parking 
lot in a run-down section of town. The military-grade infrared camera on 
its hood moved robotically from left to right, snapping digital images of 
one license plate after another and analyzing each almost instantly.

Suddenly, a red light flashed on the car's screen along with the word 
"warrant."

"Got a live one! Let's do it," an officer called out.

The streets of Memphis are a world away from the streets of Kabul, yet 
these days, the same types of technologies and techniques are being used 
in both places to identify and collect information about suspected 
criminals and terrorists.

The examples go far beyond Memphis.

* Hand-held, wireless fingerprint scanners were carried by U.S. troops 
during the insurgency in Iraq to register residents of entire 
neighborhoods. L-1 Identity Solutions is selling the same type of 
equipment to police departments to check motorists' identities.

* In Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Facial Recognition Unit, using 
a type of equipment prevalent in war zones, records 9,000 biometric 
digital mug shots a month.

* U.S. Customs and Border Protection flies General Atomics' Predator 
drones along the Mexican and Canadian borders - the same kind of aircraft, 
equipped with real-time, full-motion video cameras, that has been used in 
wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan to track the enemy.

The special operations units deployed overseas to kill the al-Qaeda 
leadership drove technological advances that are now expanding in use 
across the United States. On the front lines, those advances allowed the 
rapid fusing of biometric identification, captured computer records and 
cellphone numbers so troops could launch the next surprise raid.

Here at home, it's the DHS that is enamored with collecting photos, video 
images and other personal information about U.S. residents in the hopes of 
teasing out terrorists.

The DHS helped Memphis buy surveillance cameras that monitor residents 
near high-crime housing projects, problematic street corners, and bridges 
and other critical infrastructure. It helped pay for license plate readers 
and defrayed some of the cost of setting up Memphis's crime-analysis 
center. All together it has given Memphis $11 million since 2003 in 
homeland security grants, most of which the city has used to fight crime.

"We have got things now we didn't have before," said Memphis Police 
Department Director Larry Godwin, who has produced record numbers of 
arrests using all this new analysis and technology. "Some of them we can 
talk about. Some of them we can't."

One of the biggest advocates of Memphis's data revolution is John Harvey, 
the police department's technology specialist, whose computer systems are 
the civilian equivalent of the fancier special ops equipment used by the 
military.

Harvey collects any information he can pry out of government and industry. 
When officers were wasting time knocking on the wrong doors to serve 
warrants, he persuaded the local utility company to give him a daily 
update of the names and addresses of customers.

When he wanted more information about phones captured at crime scenes, he 
programmed a way to store all emergency 911 calls, which often include 
names and addresses to associate with phone numbers. He created another 
program to upload new crime reports every five minutes and mine them for 
the phone numbers of victims, suspects, witnesses and anyone else listed 
on them.

Now, instead of having to decide which license plate numbers to type into 
a computer console in the patrol car, an officer can simply drive around, 
and the automatic license plate reader on his hood captures the numbers on 
every vehicle nearby. If the officer pulls over a driver, instead of 
having to wait 20 minutes for someone back at the office to manually check 
records, he can use a hand-held device to instantly call up a mug shot, a 
Social Security number, the status of the driver's license and any 
outstanding warrants.

The computer in the cruiser can tell an officer even more about who owns 
the vehicle, the owner's name and address and criminal history, and who 
else with a criminal history might live at the same address.

Take a recent case of two officers with the hood-mounted camera equipment 
who stopped a man driving on a suspended license. One handcuffed him, and 
the other checked his own PDA. Based on the information that came up, the 
man was ordered downtown to pay a fine and released as the officers drove 
off to stop another car.

That wasn't the end of it, though.

A record of that stop - and the details of every other arrest made that 
night, and every summons written - was automatically transferred to the 
Memphis Real Time Crime Center, a command center with three walls of 
streaming surveillance video and analysis capabilities that rival those of 
an Army command center.

There, the information would be geocoded on a map to produce a visual 
rendering of crime patterns. This information would help the crime 
intelligence analysts predict trends so the department could figure out 
what neighborhoods to swarm with officers and surveillance cameras.

But that was still not the end of it, because the fingerprints from the 
crime records would also go to the FBI's data campus in Clarksburg, W.Va. 
There, fingerprints from across the United States are stored, along with 
others collected by American authorities from prisoners in Saudi Arabia 
and Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are 96 million sets of fingerprints in Clarksburg, a volume that 
government officials view not as daunting but as an opportunity.

This year for the first time, the FBI, the DHS and the Defense Department 
are able to search each other's fingerprint databases, said Myra Gray, 
head of the Defense Department's Biometrics Identity Management Agency, 
speaking to an industry group recently. "Hopefully in the not-too-distant 
future," she said, "our relationship with these federal agencies - along 
with state and local agencies - will be completely symbiotic."

----

The FBI's 'suspicious' files

At the same time that the FBI is expanding its West Virginia database, it 
is building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a 
top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building 
in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of 
Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they 
have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic 
cop or even a neighbor.

If the new Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, or SAR, 
works as intended, the Guardian database may someday hold files forwarded 
by all police departments across the country in America's continuing 
search for terrorists within its borders.

The effectiveness of this database depends, in fact, on collecting the 
identities of people who are not known criminals or terrorists - and on 
being able to quickly compile in-depth profiles of them.

"If we want to get to the point where we connect the dots, the dots have 
to be there," said Richard A. McFeely, special agent in charge of the 
FBI's Baltimore office.

In response to concerns that information in the database could be 
improperly used or released, FBI officials say anyone with access has been 
trained in privacy rules and the penalties for breaking them.

But not everyone is convinced. "It opens a door for all kinds of abuses," 
said Michael German, a former FBI agent who now leads the American Civil 
Liberties Union's campaign on national security and privacy matters. "How 
do we know there are enough controls?"

The government defines a suspicious activity as "observed behavior 
reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or 
other criminal activity" related to terrorism.

State intelligence analysts and FBI investigators use the reports to 
determine whether a person is buying fertilizer to make a bomb or to plant 
tomatoes; whether she is plotting to poison a city's drinking water or 
studying for a metallurgy test; whether, as happened on a Sunday morning 
in late September, the man snapping a picture of a ferry in the Newport 
Beach harbor in Southern California simply liked the way it looked or was 
plotting to blow it up.

Suspicious Activity Report N03821 says a local law enforcement officer 
observed "a suspicious subject . . . taking photographs of the Orange 
County Sheriff Department Fire Boat and the Balboa Ferry with a cellular 
phone camera." The confidential report, marked "For Official Use Only," 
noted that the subject next made a phone call, walked to his car and 
returned five minutes later to take more pictures. He was then met by 
another person, both of whom stood and "observed the boat traffic in the 
harbor." Next another adult with two small children joined them, and then 
they all boarded the ferry and crossed the channel.

All of this information was forwarded to the Los Angeles fusion center for 
further investigation after the local officer ran information about the 
vehicle and its owner through several crime databases and found nothing.

Authorities would not say what happened to it from there, but there are 
several paths a suspicious activity report can take:

At the fusion center, an officer would decide to either dismiss the 
suspicious activity as harmless or forward the report to the nearest FBI 
terrorism unit for further investigation.

At that unit, it would immediately be entered into the Guardian database, 
at which point one of three things could happen:

The FBI could collect more information, find no connection to terrorism 
and mark the file closed, though leaving it in the database.

It could find a possible connection and turn it into a full-fledged case.

Or, as most often happens, it could make no specific determination, which 
would mean that Suspicious Activity Report N03821 would sit in limbo for 
as long as five years, during which time many other pieces of information 
about the man photographing a boat on a Sunday morning could be added to 
his file: employment, financial and residential histories; multiple phone 
numbers; audio files; video from the dashboard-mounted camera in the 
police cruiser at the harbor where he took pictures; and anything else in 
government or commercial databases "that adds value," as the FBI agent in 
charge of the database described it.

That could soon include biometric data, if it existed; the FBI is working 
on a way to attach such information to files. Meanwhile, the bureau will 
also soon have software that allows local agencies to map all suspicious 
incidents in their jurisdiction.

The Defense Department is also interested in the database. It recently 
transferred 100 reports of suspicious behavior into the Guardian system, 
and over time it expects to add thousands more as it connects 8,000 
military law enforcement personnel to an FBI portal that will allow them 
to send and review reports about people suspected of casing U.S. bases or 
targeting American personnel.

And the DHS has created a separate way for state and local authorities, 
private citizens, and businesses to submit suspicious activity reports to 
the FBI and to the department for analysis.

As of December, there were 161,948 suspicious activity files in the 
classified Guardian database, mostly leads from FBI headquarters and state 
field offices. Two years ago, the bureau set up an unclassified section of 
the database so state and local agencies could send in suspicious incident 
reports and review those submitted by their counterparts in other states. 
Some 890 state and local agencies have sent in 7,197 reports so far.

Of those, 103 have become full investigations that have resulted in at 
least five arrests, the FBI said. There have been no convictions yet. An 
additional 365 reports have added information to ongoing cases.

But most remain in the uncertain middle, which is why within the FBI and 
other intelligence agencies there is much debate about the effectiveness 
of the bottom-up SAR approach, as well as concern over the privacy 
implications of retaining so much information on U.S. citizens and 
residents who have not been charged with anything.

The vast majority of terrorism leads in the United States originate from 
confidential FBI sources and from the bureau's collaboration with federal 
intelligence agencies, which mainly work overseas. Occasionally a stop by 
a local police officer has sparked an investigation. Evidence comes from 
targeted FBI surveillance and undercover operations, not from information 
and analysis generated by state fusion centers about people acting 
suspiciously.

"It's really resource-inefficient," said Philip Mudd, a 20-year CIA 
counterterrorism expert and a top FBI national security official until he 
retired nine months ago. "If I were to have a dialogue with the country 
about this . . . it would be about not only how we chase the unknowns, but 
do you want to do suspicious activity reports across the country? . . . 
Anyone who is not at least suspected of doing something criminal should 
not be in a database."

Charles Allen, a longtime senior CIA official who then led the DHS's 
intelligence office until 2009, said some senior people in the 
intelligence community are skeptical that SARs are an effective way to 
find terrorists. "It's more likely that other kinds of more focused 
efforts by local police will gain you the information that you need about 
extremist activities," he said.

The DHS can point to some successes: Last year the Colorado fusion center 
turned up information on Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born U.S. resident 
planning to bomb the New York subway system. In 2007, a Florida fusion 
center provided the vehicle ownership history used to identify and arrest 
an Egyptian student who later pleaded guilty to providing material support 
to terrorism, in this case transporting explosives.

"Ninety-nine percent doesn't pan out or lead to anything" said Richard 
Lambert Jr., the special agent in charge of the FBI's Knoxville office. 
"But we're happy to wade through these things."

----

Expert training?

Ramon Montijo has taught classes on terrorism and Islam to law enforcement 
officers all over the country.

"Alabama, Colorado, Vermont," said Montijo, a former Army Special Forces 
sergeant and Los Angeles Police Department investigator who is now a 
private security consultant. "California, Texas and Missouri," he 
continued.

What he tells them is always the same, he said: Most Muslims in the United 
States want to impose sharia law here.

"They want to make this world Islamic. The Islamic flag will fly over the 
White House - not on my watch!" he said. "My job is to wake up the public, 
and first, the first responders."

With so many local agencies around the country being asked to help catch 
terrorists, it often falls to sheriffs or state troopers to try to 
understand the world of terrorism. They aren't FBI agents, who have years 
of on-the-job and classroom training.

Instead, they are often people like Lacy Craig, who was a police 
dispatcher before she became an intelligence analyst at Idaho's fusion 
center, or the detectives in Minnesota, Michigan and Arkansas who can talk 
at length about the lineage of gangs or the signs of a crystal meth 
addict.

Now each of them is a go-to person on terrorism as well.

"The CIA used to train analysts forever before they graduated to be a real 
analyst," said Allen, the former top CIA and DHS official. "Today we take 
former law enforcement officers and we call them intelligence officers, 
and that's not right, because they have not received any training on 
intelligence analysis."

State fusion center officials say their analysts are getting better with 
time. "There was a time when law enforcement didn't know much about drugs. 
This is no different," said Steven W. Hewitt, who runs the Tennessee 
fusion center, considered one of the best in the country. "Are we experts 
at the level of [the National Counterterrorism Center]? No. Are we 
developing an expertise? Absolutely."

But how they do that is usually left up to the local police departments 
themselves. In their desire to learn more about terrorism, many 
departments are hiring their own trainers. Some are self-described experts 
whose extremist views are considered inaccurate and harmful by the FBI and 
others in the intelligence community

Like Montijo, Walid Shoebat, a onetime Muslim who converted to 
Christianity, also lectures to local police. He too believes that most 
Muslims seek to impose sharia law in the United States. To prevent this, 
he said in an interview, he warns officers that "you need to look at the 
entire pool of Muslims in a community."

When Shoebat spoke to the first annual South Dakota Fusion Center 
Conference in Sioux Falls this June, he told them to monitor Muslim 
student groups and local mosques and, if possible, tap their phones. "You 
can find out a lot of information that way," he said.

A book expanding on what Shoebat and Montijo believe has just been 
published by the Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based 
neoconservative think tank. "Shariah: The Threat to America" describes 
what its authors call a "stealth jihad" that must be thwarted before it's 
too late.

The book's co-authors include such notables as former CIA director R. 
James Woolsey and former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence 
Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, along with the center's director, a longtime 
activist. They write that most mosques in the United States already have 
been radicalized, that most Muslim social organizations are fronts for 
violent jihadists and that Muslims who practice sharia law seek to impose 
it in this country.

Frank Gaffney Jr., director of the center, said his team has spoken 
widely, including to many law enforcement forums.

"Members of our team have been involved in training programs for several 
years now, many of which have been focused on local law enforcement 
intelligence, homeland security, state police, National Guard units and 
the like," Gaffney said. "We're seeing a considerable ramping-up of 
interest in getting this kind of training."

Government terrorism experts call the views expressed in the center's book 
inaccurate and counterproductive. They say the DHS should increase its 
training of local police, using teachers who have evidence-based 
viewpoints.

DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said the department does not maintain a list of 
terrorism experts but is working on guidelines for local authorities 
wrestling with the topic.

So far, the department has trained 1,391 local law enforcement officers in 
analyzing public information and 400 in analytic thinking and writing 
skills. Kudwa said the department also offers counterterrorism training 
through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which this year enrolled 
94 people in a course called "Advanced Criminal Intelligence Analysis to 
Prevent Terrorism."

----

A lack of useful information

The DHS also provides local agencies a daily flow of information 
bulletins.

These reports are meant to inform agencies about possible terror threats. 
But some officials say they deliver a never-ending stream of information 
that is vague, alarmist and often useless. "It's like a garage in your 
house you keep throwing junk into until you can't park your car in it," 
says Michael Downing, deputy chief of counterterrorism and special 
operations for the Los Angeles Police Department.

A review of nearly 1,000 DHS reports dating back to 2003 and labeled "For 
Official Use Only" underscores Downing's description. Typical is one from 
May 24, 2010, titled "Infrastructure Protection Note: Evolving Threats to 
the Homeland."

It tells officials to operate "under the premise that other operatives are 
in the country and could advance plotting with little or no warning." Its 
list of vulnerable facilities seems to include just about everything: 
"Commercial Facilities, Government Facilities, Banking and Financial and 
Transportation . . ."

Bart R. Johnson, who heads the DHS's intelligence and analysis office, 
defended such reports, saying that threat reporting has "grown and matured 
and become more focused." The bulletins can't be more specific, he said, 
because they must be written at the unclassified level.

Recently, the International Association of Chiefs of Police agreed that 
the information they were receiving had become "more timely and relevant" 
over the past year.

Downing, however, said the reports would be more helpful if they at least 
assessed threats within a specific state's boundaries.

States have tried to do that on their own, but with mixed, and at times 
problematic, results.

In 2009, for instance, after the DHS and the FBI sent out several 
ambiguous reports about threats to mass-transit systems and sports and 
entertainment venues, the New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence 
Center's Threat Analysis Program added its own information. "New Jersey 
has a large mass-transit infrastructure," its report warned, and "an NFL 
stadium and NHL/NBA arenas, a soccer stadium, and several concert venues 
that attract large crowds."

In Virginia, the state's fusion center published a terrorism threat 
assessment in 2009 naming historically black colleges as potential hubs 
for terrorism.

>From 2005 to 2007, the Maryland State Police went even further, 
infiltrating and labeling as terrorists local groups devoted to human 
rights, antiwar causes and bike lanes.

And in Pennsylvania this year, a local contractor hired to write 
intelligence bulletins filled them with information about lawful meetings 
as varied as Pennsylvania Tea Party Patriots Coalition gatherings, antiwar 
protests and an event at which environmental activists dressed up as Santa 
Claus and handed out coal-filled stockings.

----

'We have our own terrorists'

Even if the information were better, it might not make a difference for 
the simplest of reasons: In many cities and towns across the country, 
there is just not enough terrorism-related work to do.

In Utah on one recent day, one of five intelligence analysts in the 
state's fusion center was writing a report about the rise in teenage 
overdoses of an over-the-counter drug. Another was making sure the 
visiting president of Senegal had a safe trip. Another had just helped a 
small town track down two people who were selling magazine subscriptions 
and pocketing the money themselves.

In the Colorado Information Analysis Center, some investigators were 
following terrorism leads. Others were looking into illegal Craigslist 
postings and online "World of Warcraft" gamers.

The vast majority of fusion centers across the country have transformed 
themselves into analytical hubs for all crimes and are using federal 
grants, handed out in the name of homeland security, to combat everyday 
offenses.

This is happening because, after 9/11, local law enforcement groups did 
what every agency and private company did in Top Secret America: They 
followed the money.

The DHS helped the Memphis Police Department, for example, purchase 90 
surveillance cameras, including 13 that monitor bridges and a causeway. It 
helped buy the fancy screens on the walls of the Real Time Crime Center, 
as well as radios, robotic surveillance equipment, a mobile command center 
and three bomb-sniffing dogs. All came in the name of port security and 
protection to critical infrastructure.

Since there hasn't been a solid terrorism case in Memphis yet, the 
equipment's greatest value has been to help drive down city crime. Where 
the mobile surveillance cameras are set up, criminals scatter, said Lt. 
Mark Rewalt, who, on a recent Saturday night, scanned the city from an 
altitude of 1,000 feet.

Flying in a police helicopter, Rewalt pointed out some of the cameras the 
DHS has funded. They are all over the city, in mall parking lots, in 
housing projects, at popular street hang-outs. "Cameras are what's 
happening now," he marveled.

Meanwhile, another post-9/11 unit in Tennessee has had even less 
terrorism-related work to do.

The Tennessee National Guard 45th Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil 
Support Team, one of at least 50 such units around the country, was 
created to respond to what officials still believe is the inevitable 
release of chemical, biological or radiological material by terrorists.

The unit's 22 hazardous-materials personnel have the best emergency 
equipment in the state. A fleet of navy-blue vehicles - command, response, 
detection and tactical operations trucks - is kept polished and ready to 
roll in a garage at the armory in Smyrna.

The unit practices WMD scenarios constantly. But in real life, the crew 
uses the equipment very little: twice a year at NASCAR races in nearby 
Bristol to patrol for suspicious packages. Other than that, said Capt. 
Matt Hayes, several times a year they respond to hoaxes.

The fact that there has not been much terrorism to worry about is not 
evident on the Tennessee fusion center's Web site. Click on the incident 
map, and the state appears to be under attack.

Red icons of explosions dot Tennessee, along with blinking exclamation 
marks and flashing skulls. The map is labeled: "Terrorism Events and Other 
Suspicious Activity.

But if you roll over the icons, the explanations that pop up have nothing 
to do with major terrorist plots: "Johnson City police are investigating 
three 'bottle bombs' found at homes over the past three days," one 
description read recently. ". . . The explosives were made from plastic 
bottles with something inside that reacted chemically and caused the 
bottles to burst."

Another told a similar story: "The Scott County Courthouse is currently 
under evacuation after a bomb threat was called in Friday morning. Update: 
Authorities completed their sweep . . . and have called off the 
evacuation."

Nine years after 9/11, this map is part of the alternative geography that 
is Top Secret America, where millions of people are assigned to help stop 
terrorism. Memphis Police Director Godwin is one of them, and he has his 
own version of what that means in a city where there have been 86 murders 
so far this year.

"We have our own terrorists, and they are taking lives every day," Godwin 
said. "No, we don't have suicide bombers - not yet. But you need to remain 
vigilant and realize how vulnerable you can be if you let up."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this story.