Department of Homeland Security

Minnesota police proved their commitment to the war on terror before an international audience in September of 2008. At that time, 45,000 people were expected to fill St. Paul for the Republican National Convention.

Authorities designated the convention a National Special Security Event, and for as long as a year in advance, local and federal law enforcement spied widely on political protesters planning to fill the streets and noisily oppose the Republican Party’s agenda.

Officials viewed the demonstrators as a possible terrorist threat, and a county sheriff sought to infiltrate one group considered a leading protest organizer with personnel from his office acting as undercover agents.

Then on the eve of the convention, Sheriff Bob Fletcher’s team carried out a series of high-profile “pre-emptive” raids at buildings across the Twin Cities area of St. Paul and neighboring Minneapolis seizing laptops, cell phones, cameras, supplies for making banners and signs, maps and piles of political pamphlets. They also confiscated “caltrops,” steel points that can be placed in the street to deflate tires, which police implied protesters would use during the convention, according to later court affidavits.

Eight locals were arrested and charged with “conspiracy to riot in the furtherance of terrorism” based on a relatively new state law passed after Sept. 11 and used for the first time during the convention. The terrorism enhancements were eventually dropped, however, after a county attorney complained that they “complicated” the case. The eight defendants were still awaiting trial on lesser charges as of fall 2009.

Supporters of the group say they’re being criminally prosecuted for what amounts to political bluster – hotly rhetorical statements made on planning Web sites and elsewhere announcing dramatic protest actions on the streets of St. Paul.

On the one-year anniversary of the convention and in a partnership with the news Web site Minnpost.com, we published a 5,000-word narrative of police tactics used before and during the convention relying in part on documents obtained through open-government laws from Minnesota’s so-called “fusion center.”

Law enforcement agencies compile and exchange data about potential terrorist activities at the centers, and dozens of them have been established across the United States with the help of federal homeland security grants. Civil libertarians have expressed concern about police linking political activists to terrorism since the Sept. 11 hijackings. In a sidebar, we also examined the history of Minnesota’s unique privacy laws that regulate how police can use intelligence databases.

Separately, the state of Minnesota turned over limited records showing where local authorities in general have used federal anti-terrorism grants handed out by Washington over the last several years.

Those documents show that a years-long and costly effort to expand law enforcement data sharing in Minnesota known as CriMNet received a boost of at least $350,000 in federal funds during 2004. The grant spending records, which are available for download here, list fairly detailed transactions by county but are limited only to an earlier three-year period since recipients can actually spend the grants long after they’re first awarded and may take some time to do so.

For its part, CriMNet enables officials to swiftly retrieve driving histories and license photos, warrants, protective orders, Minnesota’s gang files and digital fingerprints, as well as details on potential suspects, witnesses and victims, not just data on those who’ve served time in jail.
Police and state agencies located in the Twin Cities also used readiness grants totaling approximately $500,000 to purchase surveillance and crime-busting equipment, from video cameras for Hennepin County, which surrounds Minneapolis, to “data-collection software” bought by Ramsey County, where St. Paul is located.

A March 2009 audit found that Minnesota’s grant overseer, the Department of Public Safety, inappropriately used $6,500 in FEMA funds for severance payments made to employees. The state also didn’t record 17 global positioning systems costing $136,000 in a fixed asset database to keep track of them, the report concluded. The devices were paid for with homeland security grants.

State officials promised to fix the problems in a response letter. But similar issues arose the year before when they struggled to locate thousands of dollars in communications gear bought with federal funds.

Prosecutors called it “chilling” and “shocking.” A high-ranking official in the Detroit, Mich., office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement named Roy Bailey was responsible for supervising the custody and transportation of detainees facing deportation proceedings.

But Bailey allegedly used his authority to establish a crooked and lawless world where two kinds of people existed: “those he favored and those he did not,” as the government would later characterize it.

Business owners and lawyers who bribed him with cash and free services could commit extensive immigration fraud while Bailey ignored it, according to court records. A September 2007 felony indictment alleged that in one instance he took cash, casino chips, clothing and jewelry worth over $10,000 in exchange for allowing a woman to enter the United States and later adjust her immigration status. In another case, he purportedly accepted landscaping work to be done at his house.

Those who could or would not buy his influence suffered considerably, the government contended. Among other things, a failure to cooperate resulted in Bailey doing nothing to stop a detention officer who worked directly beneath him from stealing more than $300,000 in cash between 2000 and 2004 from hundreds of immigrants caught up in a jail facility, court documents charged. The officer later confessed that his thefts occurred as often as two to three times a week.

Not only did Bailey look past the conduct, “he intimidated and actively dissuaded other employees to keep them from reporting the criminal activities to the proper authorities,” prosecutors claimed.

After being indicted, Bailey pled guilty in 2008 to conspiracy and bribery charges, and a judge sentenced him to three years in prison. The subordinate who took money from bags of personal property belonging to alien detainees, Patrick Wynne, was sent to prison for almost five years following an embezzlement plea.

Michigan hasn’t made it easy for the public to determine how well it’s managed tens of millions of dollars in federal homeland security funds received since 2001. In response to a request submitted under the state’s Freedom of Information Act, officials provided just 15 pages of records describing the its allotment of funds.

The Michigan State Police is in charge of grants there, and even though we asked for detailed equipment purchase lists approved by the department, the material turned over contained only generic categories, such as $11 million for “equipment” and $838,000 for “training” planned during 2003.

What specific types of equipment jurisdictions ultimately purchased was not included. You can download those documents here. The records cover 2003 to 2007.

The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general did catch up to Michigan in February of 2008 for a look at how the state had handled anti-terrorism cash. One county purchased an emergency response trailer for $11,000 that was simply “not needed” and parked behind a fire station surrounded by weeds, according to a report.

The audit further found that a $33,000 vehicle was being used by a county emergency management director for daily commuting in violation of grant guidelines. In six counties, federal auditors discovered emergency equipment “that was not immediately accessible or not maintained in ready condition,” including personal protective gear kept in storage boxes that was not assigned or fitted to first responders.

Officials from the state police’s Emergency Management and Homeland Security Division promised in response to the report that they would review the equipment purchases and determine a course of action. But state authorities also didn’t make sure local grantees bought equipment and services linked to actual needs and priorities, a major feature of the grants designed to prevent shopping sprees that do little to improve readiness, according to the audit.

In addition, the report concluded, Michigan had originally designated “substantial funds” from grant programs for learning how to respond to weapons of mass destruction. However, more than half the training cash from one grant account – at least $387,000 – ended up being used for other things instead. The state couldn’t specifically account for how such money was alternatively spent.

Officials countered that grant rules initially barred payments to volunteer and part-time first responders, which many communities in Michigan relied on, so dollars had to be spent elsewhere. But they admitted that documents provided to explain the expenditures “were inadequate.” They added that a new monitoring system for the grants was in place.

Officials in Massachusetts agreed to turn over records showing how the state had used its homeland security grants since 2001. But purchases there weren’t tracked in an electronic list like a spreadsheet as some others have done, so clerical workers would need to Xerox thousands of pages of hard-copy records.

We’d be expected to pay their wages of at least $22 an hour. Massachusetts authorities would also have to redact any security-sensitive information, they said in a response letter, bringing the total cost quoted to $7,244.80.

That wasn’t an expense we could afford, so the state offered as an alternative to send “sample” documents containing a snapshot of homeland security spending in Massachusetts. While not actual invoices from expenditures, we have uploaded some of the documents here.

Meanwhile, there are other publicly available records that give a greater impression of potential mismanagement with federal funds in the Bay State. Auditors discovered in March of 2008 that the Massachusetts Department of Public Health couldn’t find a mass casualty trailer purchased with bioterrorism grants. Another trailer contained equipment that was either still in its original packaging or had never been tested. In other words, the trailers were not in a “state of readiness.”

Massachusetts bought 10 of the trailers for approximately $42,000 each. An audit report also found that periodic drills involving the trailers and emergency-response equipment inside them had not occurred.

“Local and state officials make a grand show of parading their new toys before citizens eager for some official sense of safety,” a subsequent editorial in the Boston Herald complained. “But if the equipment is simply parked in a driveway somewhere, with no continuously updated plan for using it, then what’s the point?”

In response, the health department promised to carry out necessary training and better-monitor the location of trailers.

But that’s not all. An entirely separate audit released the same month found that due to “confusion” and a “lack of coordination,” the state of Massachusetts for two years held up more than $600,000 in disaster aid that was destined for local public housing authorities in need of recovery construction work following a 2006 flood.

Later in the year Massachusetts auditors again reported on the use of homeland security grants. According to an audit, the state’s Executive Office of Public Safety and Security admitted that it spent nearly $900,000 more from the grants on management and administrative expenses than federal rules allowed. They vowed to make up for the overage in future grants.

The audit report also said Massachusetts nearly lost a chance to spend $1.75 million in grants, because it failed to request an extension when the money went unused for a lengthy period of time. Officials conceded that a mistake was made by not pursuing the deadline extension and blamed the problem on “staffing issues.” The federal Department of Homeland Security allowed them to use the money in the end. Massachusetts additionally bought 300 units of mace costing $3,000, but auditors called the purchase prohibited.

The American Civil Liberties Union first uncovered documents in July of 2008 showing that the Homeland Security and Intelligence Division of the Maryland State Police infiltrated non-threatening political protest groups and spied on them for at least 14 months.

The targets included peace activists and opponents of the death penalty, according to intelligence records the civil liberties group obtained after a battle with state officials who resisted a request for two years.

Police spent hundreds of hours conducting surveillance, the records showed. Undercover agents trolled the Internet listservs of groups such as the Coalition to End the Death Penalty using bogus e-mail addresses and screen names, attended private organizing meetings and monitored events held at churches. The spying persisted while case notes from the infiltrators didn’t indicate that any violent protests or other illegal activity was occurring or being planned.

A longtime anti-violence organizer in the Baltimore area, Max Obuszewski, inexplicably wound up in a law enforcement database used for storing and sharing information about high-level drug traffickers. Obuszewski was listed there under the categories “terrorism – anti-government” and “terrorism – anti-war protesters.” Among other things, surveillance logs described a 2005 meeting he had with a U.S. congressman to discuss the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

“For undercover police officers to spend hundreds of hours entering information about lawful political protest activities into a criminal database is an unconscionable waste of taxpayer dollars and does nothing to make us safer from actual terrorists or drug dealers,” a staff attorney for the ACLU of Maryland said at the time.

Gathering and sharing mountains of questionably useful intelligence between law enforcement agencies became a priority after the 9/11 hijackings when the nation learned that crucial information about the movement of terrorists planning the attacks wasn’t transmitted to those in a position to stop them.

The controversy in Maryland illustrates what can happen when police zealously seek to prove they won’t make such mistakes again. Intelligence reports containing the names of innocent Americans were shared not only with city and county police departments in Maryland but also the secret National Security Agency, which has faced its own criticism for engaging in warrantless domestic wiretapping.

The ACLU argued when the story first broke that the tactics were illegal, even under guidelines loosened after Sept. 11 that made it easier for authorities to observe individuals and groups for the purposes of preventing terrorist attacks. If the surveillance activity was legal, law enforcement couldn’t retain documents generated from it unless the material showed potential criminal or terrorist activity, civil liberties attorneys contended. Since the groups spied upon had no such ties, that should have made the conduct improper.

However, some experts supported the Maryland State Police saying that while the behavior may have been perceived as distasteful, it was not unconstitutional and anti-terrorism investigators are better off being safe than sorry.

“In a post-9/11 world, one of the main responsibilities of the Maryland State Police is to protect the citizens of Maryland from threats both foreign and domestic,” the department claimed in a press release. “No illegal actions by the state police have ever been taken against any citizens or groups who have exercised their right to free speech and assembly in a lawful manner.”

But the department did not reveal at the time that its intelligence gathering operations were in fact much larger. Citing new documents, the Washington Post reported in early 2009 that the state police had also zeroed in on human rights activists from the esteemed Amnesty International listing its “civil rights” work in a police file as a possible “crime.”

Intelligence gatherers also maintained a “voluminous” file on the “security threat” posed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and consumers battling a utility rate hike were targeted, too, according to the paper, as were citizen groups encouraging the establishment of bicycle lanes.

The state’s governor, Martin O’Malley, called upon a past U.S. attorney from Maryland, Stephen Sachs, to review the police use of covert surveillance. In the 1960s, Sachs prosecuted two Catholic anti-war demonstrators, the Berrigan brothers, after they stormed a military draft office and destroyed government records.

Sachs concluded in an Oct. 2008 report that there was no justification for labeling as “terrorists” innocent individuals engaged in anti-war and anti-death penalty activism and that no one he interviewed in the state police seemed aware that designating a citizen as such in an intelligence database “could cause serious harm to that person’s reputation, career, and standing in the community.”

Perhaps more damning, the report stated that no one in the department’s chain of command “gave any thought whatever” to the possibility that such infiltration was inappropriate or attempted to justify the police spying by establishing reasonable suspicion of actual criminal activity among the activists.

He wrote in the report:

“I believe that [the Maryland State Police’s] surveillance intruded upon the ability of law-abiding Marylanders to associate and express themselves freely. … Such police conduct ought to be prohibited as a matter of public policy. … The Constitution does not confer unlimited power on government whenever those in power claim that our safety requires it.”

Our own attempts to obtain records under Maryland’s Public Information Act showing how the state has used its federal homeland security grants didn’t make it too far. Officials responded that documents covering the years 2002 to 2005 were available only in hard-copy form and duplicating them would cost a considerable amount of money.

“We are looking at approximately 16 file draws and another 18 file storage (bankers) boxes,” spokesman Ed McDonough told us in an e-mail. “The cost of copying these papers at 25 cents per page, plus the hours spent compiling and copying the records (we would have to hire temporary help as we have a very small grants management staff) would be very high indeed.”

McDonough did tell us that digital records from 2006 and 2007 could be provided, but we never received them, nor did the state answer whether it maintained key oversight documents known as “site monitoring” reports.

In the spring of 2008, local officials across the country in charge of spending federal anti-terrorism grants responded with befuddlement to a new rule imposed by the Department of Homeland Security on anyone planning to apply for the preparedness funds.

In order to be eligible that year, grantees would need to devise a plan for defeating improvised explosive devices, or IEDs as they’re known – not in Iraq where the devices are commonly used against U.S. troops, but in American communities from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Ore.

“IEDs? As in Iraq IEDs?” one local emergency manager exclaimed when the New York Times reported on the curious guidelines. “There was no new intelligence about this. It just came out of nowhere.”

The federal government also directed local grantees that year to devote 25 percent of hundreds of millions of dollars in homeland security grants to a mix of preparedness planning and the purported threat posed by IEDs, which are virtually unknown in the United States.

Confused emergency responders have policymakers like Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine to thank in part.

The small, northeastern state has just 1.3 million people and hardly competes with New York and California as a presumed target of terrorist bombers. But Collins has long been a powerful member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and the senator proudly cites her role in establishing a greater emphasis on improvised explosive devices.

The federal government planned to spend almost $400 million that year alone fortifying the nation’s ports against IEDs and other unconventional attacks, also a priority for Collins. She introduced a bill in 2007 called the National Bombing Prevention Act that would have pumped $25 million annually into the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Bombing Prevention and expanded initiatives to counter IED threats, but the legislation eventually died in committee.

“We need to make sure that bomb squads have the latest and most accurate information on bombing threats,” she said on the Senate floor at the time. “We need to raise awareness of the signs of possible threats, including purchases of pre-cursor materials and other suspicious activities. We need to improve information sharing and coordination of activities among all levels of government as well as the private sector.”

Collins called it good news that the Department of Homeland Security cared about “the importance of bomb prevention” as much as she did when the new grant mandates for local first responders were announced, according to the Washington Times.

Meanwhile, newspapers in Maine commonly publish articles about even the smallest federal grants landing in local coffers – $17,000 for the tiny town of Temple, Maine, to buy its fire department new gear, $34,000 for training simulators in Wilton and $190,000 for Pittston to buy new rescue vehicles. The stories typically correspond to press releases distributed by the senator’s prolific media relations staff.

Policymakers from target-rich states have repeatedly attempted to reform the formula used to distribute anti-terrorism grants after years of complaints that the cash had become a new form of government pork enriching vast areas of the country unlikely to be struck by hijackers. That would mean states with larger population centers and major tourist attractions receiving more while the senator’s Pine Tree State, as it’s known, learned to do with far less.

Experts argued that the grants should be based to a greater extent on risk assessments and how well states conceived their applications for the funds, and to a degree, those changes have occurred.

But Collins continually cried foul and fought to ensure small states were awarded a required minimum of funds regardless of what officials at the Department of Homeland Security determined. Joined by her equally powerful colleague on the Senate’s homeland security committee, Democrat-turned-Independent Joseph Lieberman, the pair has succeeded in limiting the extent of the overhaul. Lieberman represents another small state, Connecticut.

The Portland Press Herald argued in a 2005 editorial during the heat of the debate that Washington shouldn’t award Maine as much, because “the nation would be better off if the men and women most likely to find their communities under attack get first crack at limited funds.”

Records we obtained from the state of Maine show that it pays to have a powerful ally in Washington, and homeland security grants have afforded communities there millions of dollars worth of anti-terrorism and preparedness equipment.

We submitted an open-records request under the Maine Freedom of Access Act to the state’s Emergency Management Agency and received in response files reflecting individual grant purchases. It’s available for download below in an Excel spreadsheet. Our analysis shows that among other things the state spent $572,000 during 2007 from a little-known federal grant called Operation Stonegarden for overtime and other personnel expenses.

The Department of Homeland Security exclusively makes that program available to states with an international borderline, and Maine, which is surrounded on three sides by the Canadian provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick, cited “added patrols” as reason for the spending in records.

Other purchases included multiple laptops, laser-jet printers, software and additional computer equipment; numerous pairs of night-vision goggles costing up to $3,400 each; pricey satellite phones; a $48,000 boat for the town of Standish, Maine, population 9,900 and a $31,000 in-car video system bought by police in Old Town, where an estimated 7,700 people live.

Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal made national headlines in early 2009 when he declared that his state would reject as much as $100 million worth of stimulus funds contained in President Barack Obama’s economic recovery package due to provisions Jindal warned would lead to a tax increase on businesses.

“Democratic leaders say their legislation will grow the economy,” Jindal said in a speech about the stimulus plan. “What it will do is grow the government, increase our taxes down the line, and saddle future generations with debt.”

But what Jindal didn’t mention was that four years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans, the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness actually lost track of all the disaster recovery, emergency preparedness and homeland security funds it’d been placed in charge of overseeing.

The state homeland security office’s annual fiscal report is a crucial document that declares how much Louisiana has received and managed across a litany of federal assistance programs, from anti-terrorism grants to funds for hazard mitigation designed to protect infrastructure against future catastrophes.

Good government starts with good accounting, and authorities can’t ensure efficiency and proper bookkeeping without knowing how much is in the bank, something that would surely be essential to an advocate of greater taxpayer protections. In fact, government officials have to legally swear by the accuracy of annual fiscal reports.

However, auditors found in March of 2009 that for the second consecutive year, the governor’s office made misstatements in its financial report totaling tens of millions of dollars. Two accounting categories contained understatements of a combined $50 million, one of which was supposed to list how much Louisiana owed to applicants of a major federal disaster recovery program.

The governor’s office was given a second chance to revise the report, but one month later after a resubmission of the document, it still contained several inaccuracies that made it unreliable as a source of information about the state’s account balances. Millions in federal funds were variously over-and-under stated.

The office had not adequately trained its accounting staff, according to an audit, and supervisors didn’t review the fiscal report for correctness, a shortcoming that can allow fraud to occur while going undetected, among other things. The governor’s homeland security director responded that the wrong set of data had simply been used for the annual fiscal report and that many such year-end documents are due during the heart of hurricane season when the state’s attentions may be elsewhere.

Jindal when he took office also vowed to rid Louisiana of its legendary corruption. The state’s history of controversial power brokers extends far back to the days of machine politician Huey “Kingfish” Long, notorious for stacking government institutions with cronies who did his bidding in exchange for favorable positions.

Waste, fraud and abuse uncovered by watchdogs, such as Louisiana’s prolific state auditor, show how much the tradition continues – and the uphill battle faced by Jindal.

The federal government’s own costly mismanagement of the Hurricane Katrina response is a story that’s been told by now in numerous reports from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general and congressional investigators at the Government Accountability Office in Washington.

But Louisiana like every other state has received millions of dollars in federal grants to both fight terrorists and prepare for catastrophes since Sept. 11, even if it’s largely been overshadowed by the billions needed to respond to Katrina and rebuild the Bayou State. Like some other states, Louisiana has its own tales of dubious spending practices to tell when it comes to such grants, in addition to the flawed oversight of recovery aid exposed since the storm.

In 2006, for example, a fire protection district in northwest Louisiana’s Bienville Parish decided to use $95,000 from a homeland security grant for new personal protective equipment known as “bunker gear” and designed for firefighters. The district by law needed to competitively bid out the purchase in order to get the best deal possible for taxpayers.

It hired a man to write the bid specifications who also happened to own his own firefighter supply company, which he claimed was the only one to submit an offer to sell the equipment. As it turned out, the bid was never advertised, nor did anyone seek competitive price quotes from another business, so the man in charge of the purchase had an unfair advantage and predictably won the contract, auditors concluded in late 2007.

In addition, he was months late in supplying four sets of the new gear, and local officials eventually learned that the man had purchased it for nearly $2,000 cheaper from another company before selling it to the district with a sizeable mark-up.

Elsewhere, auditors discovered in September of 2008 that the volunteer fire department in Independence, La., spent thousands of dollars in FEMA reimbursements on unauthorized wages and overtime. A federal judge in 2007 sentenced that same town’s police chief in a separate incident to five years probation and ordered him to pay $4,500 in restitution to the federal government after he claimed overtime costs and vehicle usage that didn’t occur.

In the city of Leesville, auditors discovered during 2006 that it was excessively reimbursed by more than $50,000 for work related to Hurricane Katrina. But two years after the excessive charges were identified, the money still had not been paid back. The Homeland Security Department’s inspector general has also carried out numerous audits of local governments that received aid from Washington after Katrina and questioned large costs.

On the other hand, the governor’s office supplied us with one of the best documents we’ve seen in the United States explaining how Louisiana spent its homeland security grants. Many states do not maintain a central source of information to document grant expenditures, such as a spreadsheet listing each and every bomb robot and incident-command truck purchased, who built it, how much it cost and which community uses it. Yet Louisiana gave us one mammoth PDF file available for download below. It’s sorted by jurisdiction, and you can easily scroll through it for a look at where the money has gone.

As a snapshot, our analysis shows that communities across Louisiana spent a total of $1.4 million on several-dozen new Dodge Durangos. All of them are categorized for “terrorism incident prevention” and threats posed by chemical, biological and nuclear agents. Officials told us that many communities chose Durangos because they could be purchased at a relatively reasonable price off a state contract and the trucks are large enough to carry required equipment. They also said the Durangos could be used for things like mobile command and bomb response.

Federal grants also afforded the state $600 worth of jambalaya, gumbo, rice and cornbread during training exercises, plus more edibles for other events including smoked sausage, brisket, dirty rice, baked beans and sandwich trays.

The state’s smallest parish in northeast Louisiana, Tensas, population 5,700, bought with its homeland security grants three Ford SUVs and a GMC Yukon for a total cost of $111,000. The trucks are described in records as “incident-response vehicles.”

Veteran Republican Rep. Hal Rogers of eastern Kentucky’s 5th District has a well-earned reputation for delivering to his constituents a bounty of earmarks – the type of government spending widely maligned by critics as wasteful, unregulated pork.

A former chairman of the homeland security appropriations subcommittee, Rogers also excelled at attracting new jobs to his district from government contractors eager to placate those in control of the federal till.

“His subcommittee holds the purse strings for billions of dollars in homeland security spending, giving him tremendous influence over the 22 agencies that make up the Department of Homeland Security,” wrote Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow in 2005.

Associates of Reveal Imaging Technologies, Inc., contributed more than $122,000 to Rogers's political action committee and promised to move millions of dollars worth of jobs to his congressional district, according to the Post. The explosives-detection company won a contract with the Transportation Security Administration worth nearly half-a-billion dollars. Other homeland security contractors reportedly moved parts of their operations to the Bluegrass State and became donors to the lawmaker hoping for their own coveted access.

Three Kentucky universities were awarded $1.5 million in earmarks to develop a wireless electronic monitoring system capable of ensuring the safe delivery of milk. Other Kentucky higher-ed schools also won appropriations for surveillance systems that recognize “unusual” human demeanor and devices for identifying explosives at shopping malls.

Rogers also established in his district the National Institute for Hometown Security to “put Kentuckians on the frontline of the war against terrorism while also helping to boost our economic development.”

Audits after audit in recent years also have alleged that the state mismanaged cash infusions it received from the federal government for homeland security and emergency response, legitimate or not.

One local bureaucrat in Kentucky’s Laurel County oversaw $530,000 worth of contracts awarded to a woman with whom he had private business ties, a fact he didn’t disclose during the bidding process. She later became his wife. The money was part of a larger FEMA grant totaling $1.9 million specially designated for residents living near U.S. Army chemical-weapons stockpiles. State auditors in 2009 questioned the entire amount of the grant and referred the alleged conflict of interest to the FBI and Kentucky Attorney General’s Office for possible legal action.

The woman’s company under the contract terms was supposed to supply several counties led by Laurel with emergency-response trailers, generators and other readiness gear. But auditors found that the contractor overcharged for the generators by as much as $900 each, and the trailers were “inferior in quality and specifications,” having been smaller than agreed upon, among other things.

Laurel County had other problems with the same grant. According to an audit report, local officials improperly managed the construction of an emergency operations center leading to $220,000 in cost overruns. In response, the county promised to better direct such projects in the future.

Elsewhere in the state, Carter County couldn’t produce sufficient documents showing how it spent $286,000 worth of storm recovery assistance handed out by FEMA. Project files for the clean-up effort “did not include the required information recording that the work was completed, when and where the work was done, and why this work was done,” a 2006 audit found. Carter officials, too, vowed to keep reliable records next time.

Auditors raised questions for several years about how Leslie County in the southern part of Kentucky used hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of disaster aid for repair costs and other work in which little or no documents could be produced showing how it was spent. Each year, county officials assured them new procedures were being put in place so that a better paper trail would exist.

But in 2008, the auditors finally zeroed in on a total of more than $2 million in recovery assistance Leslie County had received from FEMA over a four-year period concluding that what records did exist weren’t enough to prove local authorities had managed the funds appropriately. They referred the unverified expenditures to Kentucky’s Division of Emergency Management asking that it determine whether the money should be paid back.

Other counties were already causing state homeland security officials headaches by then. During 2003, the state cut a check for $7,300 in grant funds to tiny Lawrence County so it could pay for updating the area’s emergency operations plan. But the money never made it into county coffers.

Instead, a local emergency management director opened a new checking account in the county’s name using a tax identification number he obtained, auditors later discovered. On the same day, he removed the entire cash balance and closed the account. “The county has no record of how the cash was expended,” a report disclosed. Nothing was done to resolve the diversion of public funds, and a county executive claimed he was told that emergency managers “could spend the money any way they wanted to.”

That case involved state rather than federal money, but it still illustrates how taxpayer cash designated for disaster readiness can seemingly disappear into a black hole.

Kentucky was also criticized in general for how it chose to use federal anti-terrorism grants that every state was eligible for after 9/11 and for its sometimes unique approach to emergency preparedness.

State officials spent $36,000 to determine whether terrorists were embezzling money from bingo halls. And a Kentucky legislator announced in 2008 that he wanted the state’s homeland security office to post a plaque crediting “Almighty God” for keeping citizens safe from terrorists. “Government itself, apart from God, cannot close the security gap,” the Lexington Herald-Leader quoted state Rep. Tom Riner. “The job is too big for government.”

Responding to a request filed under Kentucky’s open-records law, state officials turned over some documents to us showing how they have spent homeland security grants in recent years. The records are available for download here, and in most cases, you can search inside of them by jurisdiction for an idea of where the money went. Because expenditures from a grant can be made for up to three years after it was first awarded, the 2007 document is a progress report rather than a close-out of final purchases.

It has been difficult convincing Kansas to make available the records showing how its homeland security grants have been spent and managed since 2001.

We first filed a request in August of 2008 under the Kansas Open Records Act looking for lists documenting all equipment and services invoiced and paid for under a series of federal grant programs that all states have benefitted from.

A colonel for the Kansas Highway Patrol, which is responsible for overseeing grant spending in the Sunflower State, rejected the request citing security exemptions:

“I believe the disclosure of this information would jeopardize statewide security measures as coordinated by each Kansas county emergency manager and Regional Homeland Security Council, thus these listings have not been released.”

We weren’t satisfied and believed that like every other state, Kansas had a responsibility to tell the public how it had spent millions of dollars in anti-terrorism funds. Investigative reporter Mike McGraw of the Kansas City Star suggested that we appeal the denial to the state’s attorney general. We did so arguing that our request did not include terrorism-response plans, potentially sensitive lists of major assets or intelligence information about possible threats.

Several months after initially filing the request, we won becoming the first news organization to receive limited information about how Kansas had used preparedness cash between 1999 and 2006. The document is available for download here, but unfortunately, Kansas officials still insisted on excluding certain types of key information, such as jurisdiction (although some county references slipped through).

The document shows that among other things, Kansas spent at least $342,000 on high-tech robots equipped to neutralize bombs. Other purchases included digital cameras, thermal image devices, decontamination shelters, equipment trailers and costly rescue trucks, portable radiation detection, surveillance cameras and more.

As many other states have done, the Kansas Highway Patrol contracted with an obscure but very large company called Fisher Scientific – now Thermo Fisher following a merger – to control equipment purchases made by local communities and ease the state’s administrative burden. The outfit has long done business with government agencies, distributing safety and laboratory equipment to them through a network of suppliers.

Knowing grant amounts would increase substantially after Sept. 11, the highway patrol asked Fisher to develop a web-based catalog from which cities and counties could select the preparedness gear they wanted. And balloon they did. Readiness grants awarded by the federal government to Kansas increased from $670,000 in 1999 to $29 million in 2004.

Fisher already had a contract in place with the state for laboratory supplies, and the patrol realized it could broaden the terms so counties wouldn’t have to competitively bid out their purchases and because the Internet-based purchasing would ensure grantees only bought equipment allowed by federal guidelines.

But auditors in 2006 said the state should have at least “seriously considered” requiring Fisher to compete with other business for such an arrangement. Kansas-based companies and local officials they had previous relationships with also complained that Fisher’s distribution network limited who could capitalize on the new rush to buy preparedness equipment. And sometimes, they argued, items were available for cheaper prices outside of what Fisher offered.

So the highway patrol renegotiated the contract but stayed with Fisher without bidding it to multiple competitors, according to a report from the state’s Legislative Division of Post Audit.

Counties could now select the companies they wanted to do business with. However, the purchases still had to flow through Fisher, a middleman that was allowed to charge a mark-up of five to 12 percent, which sometimes meant thousands of dollars for a single mobile-command vehicle or communications system. From the viewpoint of Kansas counties, “Fisher merely assigns a catalog number and charges a fee.”

The patrol argued that centralizing grant responsibilities with Fisher made the process more efficient and cost-effective. But auditors guessed that Fisher tacked nearly $1 million in special charges onto the price tags of equipment during 2005 alone. They weren’t able to obtain more reliable figures from the company, which countered that it earned discounts on the state’s behalf by making purchases in volume.

“We estimated these fees because Fisher Scientific officials said they couldn’t provide us with this information,” the report concluded, even though the company did maintain detailed lists of third-party purchases. By 2007, the state planned to divide its emergency response efforts into regions rather than counties, and local grantees would not be required to utilize the Fisher contract.

But other states have signed deals to use Fisher’s “Quartermaster” program, as it’s called. California ended such an arrangement quietly in late 2007. When we sent California a public-records request in an effort to learn how much the company may have profited from homeland security grants there, officials responded that no one knew where the documents were located, including original contract files with Fisher.

In Texas, local jurisdictions had a list of options they could choose from, one of them being to purchase through Fisher, the state’s “prime vendor” for readiness equipment, according to published reports. But auditors there in 2005 examined just a sample of invoices and found that local governments using Fisher spent as much as $1 million more than those that relied on another method for comparable gear.

“The reported advantages of purchasing from the prime vendor are not always achieved,” the report determined. “ … The prime vendor’s equipment was sometimes overpriced. Some local jurisdictions were aware of the high mark-up and used the local purchase method instead. One local jurisdiction reported that it saved approximately $52,000 by bidding out equipment locally.”

It turns out that perhaps the city of Wichita should have been put in charge of overseeing federal grant spending in Kansas. Severe winter storms slammed the southern area of the state in 2005, and FEMA provided city leaders with $6.7 million in recovery assistance. The Inspector General’s Office for the Department of Homeland Security showed up in 2009 for a standard look at the funds and gave Wichita high marks. The same can’t be said for many other cities that have received federal disaster aid.

According to a report from the IG: “[Wichita’s] debris removal procurement procedures and contract file maintenance were exemplary; and the city’s contract administration system ensured contractors performed according to contract terms, conditions, and specifications.”

“Intelligence-led policing” became one of the most popular phrases among authorities after the Sept. 11 hijackings. Investigators wanted to compile oceans of information about potentially dangerous people and use super-computer technology to analyze it in search of evidence that perpetrators were planning another attack. They also vowed to exchange critical information among local, state and federal agencies.

Trading data is not a new phenomenon. Guidelines restricting broad intelligence collection and sharing between law enforcement officials are partly the result of illegal spying abuses that occurred throughout the twentieth century.

As part of the post-9/11 drive to make government more aware of terrorist threats, local authorities used over $325 million in federal homeland security grants to establish controversial “fusion centers” in virtually every state as a place where police could electronically swap tips with each other and agencies in Washington.

Civil libertarians, however, worry that aggressive snooping campaigns and outsized databases containing sensitive personal information will lead to innocent people becoming caught up in intelligence-gathering operations and erode privacy rights.

Those concerns are strongly rooted in history, and many Americans alive during the turbulent 1960s remember questionable domestic spying conducted by the FBI, CIA and local police. “Red Squads” were a common feature in city police departments around the United States, known for harassing anyone believed to be a communist sympathizer or other form of political agitator.

But Red Squads grew out of control, and the public became increasingly angry that police were amassing spy files and suspicious-activities reports on thousands of people and groups, many of them harmless neighborhood organizers, elderly peace protesters and civil rights activists.

Intelligence units carried out illegal raids, used paid informers for infiltration, beat demonstrators in the streets and supplied police department brass with ammunition for use against political foes. A cascade of lawsuits and outcry eventually forced the squads to curtail many of their activities or fold up altogether.

During the spring of 1956, leaders from more than two dozen police departments gathered in San Francisco to discuss how they could better coordinate criminal intelligence “not available through regular police channels.” Notably, though, the Law enforcement Intelligence Unit, as it became known, did more than just collect information about suspected violent criminals and gangsters. They made political protesters and “subversives” a major focus of the group’s attention.

American Civil Liberties Union attorney Frank Donner chronicled the LEIU’s trajectory in his 1990 book Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America using documents about its activities released through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Dozens of police departments became involved in the LEIU, and the now-deceased Donner described the group’s core function as “a clearinghouse for file data (‘intelligence’) supplied by its members.” Though made up of police officers paid with taxpayer dollars, the LEIU cast itself as a private organization to avoid lawsuits and investigations inquiring about the contents of intelligence files. It feared the public would disapprove of data kept on political subjects rather than organized criminals, Donner concluded.

In fact, Donner described how one informant supplied information to a police intelligence unit in Des Moines, Iowa, before working for the FBI. “When he was exposed and his identity revealed,” Donner said of the informer, “he was, as a result of an arrangement with the LEIU, detailed to work undercover on political surveillance assignments for police intelligence units in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.”

The Washington Post in May of 1975 reported on the man’s work as a spy when he spoke to Senate investigators about it. According to the paper: “The agent’s description of his operations under LEIU sponsorship conflicts with the organization’s stated purpose of exchanging information on organized crime.” His list of surveillance targets included civil-liberties lawyers.

The LEIU remains a tax-exempt nonprofit today, and the database Donner referred to can be accessed by police through the Regional Information Sharing System, which is funded by the Justice Department. Technology made it possible to automate what were once paper index cards, and many fusion centers now are wired into RISS, among them the Iowa Intelligence Fusion Center.

Founded in late 2004, Iowa’s intelligence outpost is overseen by the state Department of Public Safety and serves as a centralized point for collecting, analyzing and disseminating information. It’s staffed by more than two-dozen full time analysts and investigators as well as an employee from the Iowa National Guard, according to a March 2007 report on fusion centers from the federal Government Accountability Office.

Experts like Russell M. Porter, the director of Iowa’s fusion center, know the ugly legacy of Red Squads could poison the success of new intelligence-collection initiatives if police make any missteps. The LEIU has even advised agencies to read earlier accounts of abuses written by Donner and others to prevent scandals from ending contemporary fusion programs.

“While fusion centers work to improve the vital information sharing capabilities needed to protect our communities, our state, and our nation,” Porter told a Senate committee on Capitol Hill during an April 2008 hearing, “it is critically important that they avoid the historical practices that led to recurring violations of privacy rights and civil liberties.” Porter is also chairman of the Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Units [http://www.leiu.org/], formerly known as the LEIU and now the oldest such organization in the United States.

So how has Iowa performed with homeland security grants? The state’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division turned over some large Microsoft Word documents to us in response to a Public Records Law request, which are available for download here (expenditures from 2004 are in an Excel spreadsheet). You can search within them by county, or use another term, such as product manufacturer.

For the most part, the records reflect final purchases made by communities across the state, from a description of the gear to its final cost. But the entries only range from 1999 to 2005. Preparedness grants were managed in Washington by the U.S. Justice Department until about 2002.

If the “total actual” cost box is not complete, we were told by officials, that likely means the grantee, such as Allamakee County, Iowa, pursued a piece of equipment but didn’t obtain it in the end, either because the supplier was out or they ultimately declined for some reason. Otherwise, the buy went through.

The Iowa Department of Public Safety purchased four ballistic shields costing more than $1,000 a piece using grant funds from 2003, for example. Tiny Muscatine County bought an incident-response trailer with a microwave, refrigerator and shower included. Others acquired hefty pick-up trucks costing between $20,000 and $30,000 each. The list also includes “spotting scopes,” essentially binoculars with a price tag of $1,700, pricey thermal-image cameras and night-vision devices reaching nearly $3,000.

It’s worth noting that Iowa has more to worry about than just terrorists. The Department of Homeland Security distributes aid through FEMA to communities following presidentially declared disasters – like Hurricane Katrina, but also smaller snowstorms and spring flooding.

The Iowa Department of Transportation used a resource management system to determine how much it deserved to be reimbursed from the federal government for materials and labor costs during one recovery effort. Auditors found during 2008 that a flaw in the system led to a whopping overcharge for expenses of $3.6 million. Officials promised to fix the problem in response, but when auditors returned an entire year later, the excess cash had still not been paid back. State emergency managers assured them again that things were being corrected.

Shortly after the Sept. 11 hijackings, the federal government promised it would pay closer attention to how the nation guarded its most precious and vital assets against potential terrorist attacks. Are drinking water delivery systems vulnerable? Could perpetrators bomb a chemical production facility?

Former President George W. Bush issued a directive in late 2003 requiring the newly formed Department of Homeland Security to identify critical assets and coordinate the protection of them. As part of the plan, federal officials needed to develop an inventory of key resources that formed the nation’s infrastructure. That inventory became known as the National Asset Database.

The list began with a reasonable number of 160 items that deserved possible security enhancements. But under pressure from Congress to make it more comprehensive, the Homeland Security Department added hundreds more, from government facilities and transportation hubs to business centers and energy pipelines.

Then state and local governments were asked to provide data on their own critical infrastructure, and the list ballooned to 77,000 “assets.” It wasn’t places like New York, California, Washington, D.C. and Florida with major tourist attractions and national icons that claimed to have the most sensitive assets worthy of increased protection. It was Indiana with a population one-sixth that of California.

Indiana’s list of “key resources” included the Amish Country Popcorn factory in Berne, Ind., where a Ladyfinger One Pound Gift Box goes for $7.95. The state listed 8,600 such “assets,” nearly as many as New York and California combined. Indiana and Wisconsin both reported 77 times more agricultural “assets” they considered vulnerable than their neighbors in the Midwest. The Hoosier State also included 417 nursing homes in its list.

When the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general criticized the database in June of 2006 pointing to the popcorn factory as an example of “poor quality,” state officials responded that they relied on the federal government’s own definition of critical infrastructure, which included food outlets distributing to five or more states.

“Now they want to make fun of us,” a spokeswoman grumbled to the South Bend Tribune.

Hoosiers weren’t alone, however, according to the inspector general. Other states reported sporting goods stores, auto shops, “high stakes bingo,” an insect zoo, a check-cashing store and the Mule Day Parade. States were supposed to take into account potential catastrophic losses, economic impact and national symbolism. But a report found that local officials had “considerable latitude in interpreting what [the Department of Homeland Security] meant by a nationally critical asset.”

Federal homeland security officials in Washington responded that the database wasn’t strictly limited to items considered critical. They also viewed it as a federal repository that enabled a fuller risk analysis by including common assets. But the IG questioned whether having too many was a distraction that made “resource allocation decisions more challenging.”

When it comes to Indiana’s use of homeland security grants, state officials turned over hundreds of pages of documents in PDF form after we submitted a request under the state’s Access to Public Records Act. While Excel spreadsheets we obtained from other states are more convenient, you can still download and search the PDFs for keywords below, such as by local jurisdiction.

Among other things, the state’s purchases included “tactical entry eyewear” costing $120 each for the Allen County Sheriff’s Department SWAT team, night-vision spotting scopes priced at $6,200 a piece and two more “night-observation devices” totaling over $18,000 for use “during tactical response to terrorist operations,” according to records.

The grants also enabled Allen County to seek a $400,000 mobile-command center that it planned to pack with a 42-inch high-definition television, four laptop computers, a DVD player and more.

Delaware County pursued an $80,000 bomb-disposal truck, in addition to a remotely operated robot for disarming explosives that carried its own price tag of $86,000. Authorities there also budgeted $43,000 for two bomb suits and $950 for a pair of “Delta Force” helmets with ballistic face shields as protection during “bomb and terrorist activities.”

The city of Indianapolis committed to outfitting each of its public-health medics with 225 bullet-proof vests for a total price of $90,000.

Inspector General Richard Skinner of the Homeland Security Department has been slowly auditing preparedness funds state by state for the last several years. His office caught up with Indiana in early 2005. After examining about $48 million the state had received over just two years, Skinner concluded that Indiana “did not know how much improvement had been made at the local level in preparing for terrorist incidents and had little basis for justifying future first responder grant funds.”

A quarter-of-a-million dollars in equipment purchases made by local governments were not approved by state overseers as required, the report found, and county agencies were slow to assemble and distribute $4.5 million worth of “counter-terrorist response kits.” Two years later, the kits were still in shipping containers.

That same year, however, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels announced a major consolidation of the state’s homeland security and disaster recovery agencies to fix perceived inefficiencies. Building safety, emergency management, responder training and other offices were placed under one roof – the Indiana Department of Homeland Security.

“We have good people in our operations but one of the most dysfunctional arrangements in America,” Daniels said at the time. “We have multiple security plans and no coordinated spending. This reorganization will result in more safety for Hoosiers and at the same time, use our tax dollars more wisely.”