Hi Bradshaw, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, it's Anti-War Radio.
You know what I like about good journalism?
How bad it makes the regular kind look.
Contrasts, it's fun, the cognitive dissonance.
I dig it.
And so, I've been reading this series at penlive.com.
That's the Patriot News in Pennsylvania.
And it's by Donald Gilliland.
And it's about the Department of Homeland Security monitoring the kinds of people that you would think would be outside their purview.
If I can say it without overstating it.
Welcome to the show Donald, how are you doing?
Good, thanks for having me on.
Well, I really appreciate your work on this and I appreciate your time on the show today.
So, this is some pretty outrageous stuff I think.
I believe the first article here in the series, and there's seven or eight of them I guess, is State Tracks Anti-Marcellus Shale Drilling Groups.
Notifies Law Enforcement.
So, could you please give us the brief overview here?
Sure, the story really broke in the beginning of September.
And we didn't break the story.
I believe ProPublica and the city paper in Philadelphia were the first to actually have the story about tracking Marcellus Shale.
Essentially, up in northeastern Pennsylvania, there was a woman who was an ex-Air Force officer who was concerned about Marcellus Shale drilling, was involved in a couple of groups that opposed the drilling, or at least were asking significant questions about it.
And now, pardon me, Marcellus is a place or a company?
Ah, no, no, no.
Marcellus Shale is a geologic formation that underlies about two-thirds of the state.
And there are a number of shale deposits around the country.
And it's the most recent source for natural gas that's been discovered.
And basically they drill 4,000 to 7,000 feet down into the ground.
They pump millions of gallons of water and chemicals and sand down into the ground to fracture the shale and release the natural gas that comes back up out.
Most people are familiar with it from the film Gasland, which was on HBO here a few months ago, won an award at Sundance Film Festival.
There are some questions about what they call frack water, the millions of gallons of water they pump down into the ground, questions about whether or not that can come back up and pollute people's water wells.
There have been a number of confirmed instances in Pennsylvania across the state where during the drilling process natural gas migrates into the aquifers, and all of a sudden people discover that natural gas is coming out of their faucet at home, enough natural gas that they can actually light their water on fire as it comes out of the faucet.
So that's a huge issue in Pennsylvania at the moment.
There are a number of groups that are very well organized and have been protesting against the drilling, as well as some of the groups aren't necessarily against the drilling so much as they think the natural gas should be taxed as it is in other states.
There's a whole range of issues around marshalless shale.
In other words, this is no marginal fringe thing that nobody cares about except some yahoos or some dangerous people.
No, no, no, no.
This is grassroots, regular folk all across the state.
It's the number one political issue in Pennsylvania.
And yet every time they hold a public meeting there's a bunch of undercover cops there?
Well, no.
I think that's probably overstating it.
Essentially what you had was you had a state office of homeland security that is charged by the federal government to identify credible, significant threats to critical infrastructure in the state.
And what they did was they contracted with this private company based in Jerusalem with an office maybe in Philadelphia, post box in Philadelphia anyway, to provide intelligence to meet this federal mandate.
What they did was they took this supposed intelligence from this private contractor, turned it into a newsletter, and then emailed it to 800 or more people three times a week.
And those people were local law enforcement, county sheriffs, municipal police departments, and many private corporations if those corporations had some tangential connection to what they thought was critical infrastructure.
So the key is this private contractor.
Pennsylvania was the only government contract they had.
All the other work they do is intelligence for corporations.
And so their focus, from what I've been able to determine in reading several thousand pages of reports and emails, their focus is primarily on activist groups that may embarrass a company, that may show up out front and start protesting, that may in some instances, particularly with the petrochemical industry, show up and try to shut down a road to a coal mine or something like that.
And that's really their focus.
So from the very beginning in these reports that Homeland Security was sending out all over the state, from the very beginning there's a focus on regular activists who may have a problem with not only Marcella Shale, but they were following the Brandywine Peace Community, Anti-War Peace Community down in southeastern PA.
They were following a whole range of groups across the political spectrum.
It wasn't just liberal-leaning groups.
They were following Tea Party groups as well.
And what they would do is they would list, by the end of the contract, they were listing all of the meetings that they could figure out.
And we're talking local township meetings.
All of the meetings that they could determine anti-drilling groups were going to appear at, and not even protest, just appear at and possibly ask questions.
There's no indication that the local police actually went there and watched them.
And the Homeland Security folk justified it by saying the local police need to know what's going on in their community.
But the fact is these reports were also being sent to private corporations, including corporations that are drilling in the Marcella Shale.
And there's a sense, particularly toward the end of the contract, that the state was spending taxpayers' money to provide lists of the meeting activities, the activities of groups that were opposing the business activities of Marcella Shale drillers.
Would I be right to guess that this is the kind of thing that cops aren't generally allowed to do, but if a private business collects all this kind of intelligence on people, that's not illegal, but then they just turn it over to the state?
There's an element of that, yes.
Now, it depends on what kind of policeman you're talking about, and it depends on what kind of agency.
I think the Pennsylvania State Police probably are allowed to do this sort of thing on a limited basis.
Now, at the federal level, the rules have been relaxed significantly since 9-11.
They were relaxed just before the Obama administration took over.
And to my understanding, the Obama administration hasn't pulled it back such that, for example, the FBI can initiate an investigation simply if they think someone or a group is likely or may commit a crime in the future.
It's become sort of the classic footprint slope, and the bottom line in this instance is what the state was supposed to be paying attention to was real threats to infrastructure.
If somebody's planning to blow up a pipeline, that's not what they were looking at.
Hold it right there, Donald.
We've got to go out to this break.
Everybody, it's Donald Gilliland from PennLive.com.
We're talking about Homeland Security and a private corporation keeping their tabs on people like you.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Donald Gilliland from The Patriot News.
That's PennLive.com.
And we're talking about this kind of weird public-private intelligence partnership, Homeland Security, and something called the ITRR, keeping tabs on all sorts of political groups in Pennsylvania, including pro-public school activists, I think.
Donald, is that right?
Yes.
This is some underpowers that were created to protect us from Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The irony there is that they were actually protesting in support of Governor Rendell's initiatives.
The initiative was facing some political pushback from Senate Republicans, and the ITRR reports include this rally in support of the administration's own policy.
It gets that nutty, yes.
And as you were saying before the break, these powers, this is protect our nuclear power plants from attack somehow, or make sure that we have good fences.
It's about critical infrastructure, exactly.
And really the upshot of this, looking at it from 20 paces away, it's really about the allocation of resources.
What are we spending our money on?
How are the people who are supposed to keep us safe and protect the infrastructure, what are they spending their time and resources doing?
And in this instance, they were spending their time, resources, and our money paying attention to people that pose no threat whatsoever.
Well, and if not outright rounding people up or something out of some kind of nightmare, they're still intimidating people.
One of your stories here is about some kind of cops, I'm not sure which, state police, going to the home of a young peace activist and staying around for hours, I think, you know, intimidating his mom or at least trying to?
Yeah, basically the kid was an activist.
I mean, how do you like that?
Go to a peace protest and they're going to come and mess with your mom.
Yeah, he was an organizer.
He sent out an email to his friends in Pittsburgh asking them to meet up.
President Obama was visiting Carnegie Mellon the following day.
Reading the internal emails from Homeland Security, which we got through a write-to-no request, that email went onto the Internet in some fashion within about an hour of him posting it, sending it to a friend.
It was picked up by this private consulting firm, ITRR, immediately emailed to the head of Pennsylvania's Homeland Security Office, who then forwarded it to a number of contacts in the state police in Pittsburgh as well as the FBI.
And within a matter of hours, a couple of state police troopers appeared at the door of the kid's mother's home, on the opposite side of the state.
And according to the mother, they were very antsy, they were very aggressive.
She said they were acting like her son might be on the grassy knoll.
They needed to know his whereabouts immediately.
The son says, listen, they've been following me for a couple of years, they know I'm in Pittsburgh.
His take on it is basically they went to his mother's house to put pressure on him.
I talked to both him and his mother.
And just to be clear, he doesn't live with her and they knew that?
No, no.
The opposite end of the state.
Not just the opposite end of the state from where he was going to do the protest, not just the opposite end of the state from where he lived at all?
Yes, yes.
Okay, just to be clear about that.
Yep, yep.
And you also have a story about a young Ron Paul activist who's an anti-government camera activist.
What were they doing to him?
That's actually a very good instance where they didn't do anything to him other than they listed him by name in one of the bulletins.
It's the context in which they named him because he hasn't done anything other than get the location of public cameras through right-to-know requests.
It's public information.
And he's mapped them on his website.
Everything that he did is completely legal.
But they placed him in the context of terrorists using such cameras to scope out an area before making an attack.
And they go from instances in the Middle East and in a couple of places in Europe and all of a sudden say, well, here's a Pennsylvania example, and they name the kid by name in this bulletin.
Bulletins that are sent out all over the state to local municipalities, local police departments, health care companies.
And this guy, once he saw the bulletins, realized, wait a minute, I don't know who all has read these, and some of those folk may be my neighbors, may be people who control aspects of my life, my bosses, that now have a question in the back of their heads about, am I really a dangerous person?
Well, and, you know, even if this guy was so dangerous as to encourage other people to climb up a pole and smash a camera, that might be some kind of Class A misdemeanor or something.
But that's not terrorism.
That's not preparation for a revolution or something.
I mean, that's civil disobedience.
And it would seem, you know, at least I guess I'm pretty young to feel so old, but it seems like that would be a very American thing to do, would be to say, you know what, a camera at Texaco is one thing, but government cameras all over our country, that's how it is in 1984, where they're standing outside and there's cameras everywhere, so they've got to whisper out of the corner of their mouth.
Who wants to live like that?
Maybe it's perfectly okay to think that that entire program is bogus from coast to coast.
Does that make me a terrorist for thinking, like, hey, when I was a kid, we didn't have to have government cameras everywhere and the sky didn't fall?
The standard response to that kind of argument from the pro-camera people and practically from the sort of law enforcement can-do-anything camp is if you aren't doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about.
And these bulletins are a good example of that.
I'd like to turn that around on them.
Look at how worried they are about us.
It must be their guilty conscience.
And that argument has been made a lot in the last month and a half, yes.
But, you know, you have law-abiding citizens who really, in some instances, are having their reputations tarnished in these bulletins, and they haven't done anything wrong.
And it's one of those cases where just because you aren't doing anything wrong doesn't mean they aren't watching you and doesn't mean that there may not be consequences.
Well, and interesting, too, that Pennsylvania is where Tom Ridge was the governor, Minister of Homeland Security, first the office, then the head of the Department of Homeland Security.
And it turns out that the Homeland Security cops in Pennsylvania contract all their stuff out to an Israeli company to figure out what's going on in their own state.
And that's kind of a larger theme.
I don't know if you've really reported on that about the larger state.
The national security state isn't just the national security state.
It's the national security corporate state.
And all these symbiotic public-private quasi-market partnerships, they call them.
This is kind of treading on things, I guess, like we talked about before.
Private companies can get all kinds of intelligence on you, and it's okay because what are they going to do?
They can't lock you in jail.
But then they just turn all that over to the cops, and then we see what happens.
There's actually quite a history of that in the United States going back to the 50s.
And in most instances, when that becomes prevalent, some fairly ugly things happen because it's very clear that the quality of intelligence being supplied by this private contractor in particular was not that good in many instances.
And once it finds its way into the official security infrastructure, it's treated like real information.
And if the original intelligence sucks...
Like a captain arriving at Guantanamo.
All the guards assume he must be a really bad guy to be here.
Right.
Yeah, there it is.
It's in black and white right there, documented in a document about these dangerous people, the gay pride parade and the pro-public school agency committee.
Now the justification, and you can think of it what you will, the justification of it was they wanted the police to know primarily for crowd control if something were happening in their backyards.
That's the standard justification.
Now I should say that the contract has expired, it's not being renewed, and it looks like the state police are taking over the role of looking for threat to critical infrastructure.
Well, I feel very relieved about that.
All right.
Well, thank you very much, Donald.
That's great reporting you did there.
Thank you.
That's Don Gilliland, PennLive.com.
