The Pennsylvania spying scandal reveals a deeper problem with homeland security.
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| REUTERS/Hans Pennink Image |
Michael Harwood
Reason
James F. Powers, Pennsylvania’s director of homeland security, was miffed. Somehow an intelligence bulletin discussing the activities of natural gas drilling opponents turned up on an online forum in early September, so Powers emailed the woman who posted it. The bulletin, he wrote her, was meant only for state and local law enforcement and for critical infrastructure owners, including businesses wrapped up in the state’s enormously profitable natural gas drilling industry. But since the bulletin was posted on an unsecured forum, anyone could access it. This was not good, Powers explained, because the bulletin could fall into the wrong hands. “We want to continue providing this support to the Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies,” Powers wrote.
There was one big problem, however: Powers didn’t look at the forum. What he thought was a pro-drilling forum turned out to be the opposite and the woman, retired U.S. Air Force Officer Virginia Cody, a drilling opponent. In just one email, Powers inadvertently revealed that Pennsylvania’s Office of Homeland Security had not only been monitoring the activities of law-abiding citizens who oppose natural gas drilling for fear of its environmental damage, but passing the information on to the companies involved in the drilling. Powers had chosen business interests over Pennsylvanians’ rights of free speech and association.
There was more. The state’s Office of Homeland Security didn’t generate the intelligence bulletin–a private contractor Powers hired did. Since 2009, the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR), a private intelligence firm with offices in Philadelphia and Jerusalem, was paid over $100,000 in a no-bid contract to create intelligence bulletins on possible threats to Pennsylvania’s critical infrastructure.
Apparently, the threats were everywhere. Aside from anti-drilling activists, the 137 bulletins ITRR produced reported on the activities of anarchists, animal rights activists, anti-war activists, black power activists, Federal Reserve critics, Tea Partiers, even groups associated with Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell’s own education policies. In one ridiculously absurd bulletin, ITRR warned that “anarchists, anti-prison ideologues and Indian rights activists” were going to attack the federal prison in Lewisburg by clogging the prison’s phone lines with calls. In ITRR’s reports, anyone with a political cause or complaint, whether left or right, was eyed as a potential security threat.
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