University “Campus Watch” Citizen Spy Program Partners With Threat Fusion Center To Report Suspicious Activity

Activist Post

A University of Arizona student sent us the following forwarded message from a professor:

We know that threat assessment fusion centers, represented above by The Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (ACTIC), have been set up around the country in order to federalize local communities through public and private partnership programs.  On their website, ACTIC states that in 2006 they launched a Community Liaison Program which now includes “More than 4,000 contact representatives from 300 private and public sector organizations participate” to support “the National Homeland Security Strategies of ‘Strengthening Information Sharing and Collaboration Capabilities.’  In so doing they have enlisted the following Participating Partners:

• Religious groups
• Block watches
• Private security companies
• Tourism industry
• Financial groups
• Utility companies
• Public health organizations
• Educational institutions
• Technology
• Transportation
• Community Groups
• And Many More…

The threat the University of Arizona Police Department states in its letter is couched within the Al-Qaeda reprisal theory, but the threat assessment asserted by other fusion centers already has included suspected homegrown terrorism, which specifically includes universities as a potential source of terrorist recruitment and sympathizers.

Fusion centers are actually a spawn of the Total Information Awareness program banned by Congress in 2003.  It was a program spearheaded by Iran-Contra criminal, John Poindexter, with a logo that left nothing to the imagination about its intentions.

However, the intention remains the same under Fusion Centers, which have been decried by the ACLU for their clear Orwellian structure, as well as being linked to surveillance of political figures, anti-war protesters, activists, and even the ACLU itself.  Nonetheless, the TIA/fusion center program lives on under a new marketing campaign giving it the softer mission as “liaisons” and “partners” within a local community network, rather than a clearly top-down directed surveillance mechanism of the all-seeing eye of the Department of Homeland Security.  At its core it still remains a vehicle through which a vast database of largely dubious information can be compiled by a now terrified public after the assassination of Osama bin Laden.  The University of Arizona Police Department has exploited this recent fervor by stating this right up front as the reason for its grave announcement.  This marks yet another expansion of the See Something, Say Something program kicked off at Wal-Mart, now being prepared to become law.

Most people remain unaware that fusion centers operate completely outside Congressional oversight, after having been subsumed into the NSA under the guise of prototype information systems.  This has, in effect, made the entire initiative a classified “black budget” operation taking on a life of its own.  And buried within their own language, we can see how they are usurping community assets.  ACTIC states their goals quite clearly, with their own emphasis added:

• Establish and Maintain a Strong “Two-Way Information Flow” that Shares Knowledge between Law Enforcement, Local Businesses and the Public.
• Provide a Dedicated Public Safety Liaison to Manage the Program and actively promote the Importance of Treating every business like it was a “Critical Infrastructure Business.”

Critical Infrastructure Business is now the code phrase for the complete federal takeover of any business — private or public — in order to protect National Security interests now known as Critical Infrastructure Protection.  Under the Homeland Presidential Security Directive 7 of 2003 it established:

The policy of the United States to enhance the protection of national critical infrastructures against terrorist acts that would significantly diminish the responsibility of federal, state, and local governments to perform essential security missions and to ensure the general public health and safety. The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 defines critical infrastructures as ‘those physical and cyber-based systems so vital to the operations of the United States that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on national defense, economic security, or public safety.’ More specifically, critical infrastructures are those people, things, or systems that must be intact and operational in order to make daily living and working possible. Source

So, just about everything . . . including universities, as surely they could be loosely interpreted to house, “the people, physical assets, and communication/cyber systems that are indispensably necessary for national security, economic stability, and public safety.”

In fact, this is also at the heart of the new cybersecurity strategy (PDF), which is trying to lay claim to the entire Internet as critical infrastructure — intellectually, politically, and economically — while using the threat of state-sponsored cyberterror to justify a presidential shutdown of a National Asset if systems are threatened, despite the fact that truly key infrastructure runs on private networks and is not connected to the open Internet.  It is a pattern of behavior that knows no bounds.

The open tyranny that has been full throttle in America since 9/11 is now using every tool of propaganda and fiat law to implement its permanence.  Through Suspicious Activity Reports from all sectors, the directive to enlist universities as part of their unpaid citizen spy network is the natural evolution of such an integrated system of total control, and it represents one of the true threats of terror on American soil.