Date: August 7, 2005 5:28:57 AM PDT
Subject: [Spy News] State boosts domestic intelligence
State boosts domestic intelligence
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
Security officials say California slowly is turning the corner on domestic
intelligence, creating more useful information, moving it faster and
focusing it on international terrorism.
"There's been a sea change in this," said Gary Winuk, chief deputy of the
governor's Office of Homeland Security.
In the wake of the Madrid and London bombings, security experts say
intelligence and public awareness are the main defense again the likeliest
terrorist attacks.
Yet for almost four years, California wandered in a kind of
homeland-security- intelligence wilderness, its analysts regurgitating
largely useless information and preoccupied by gangs, drugs and left-leaning
activist groups, all easier intelligence targets than terrorists.
Police and sheriffs were convinced that federal agents were holding back
important information, and they set off on their own domestic intelligence
operations.
Turf wars broke out as the California Highway Patrol and this year, more
secretively, the California National Guard made power plays for their own
intel centers and control of some of the most sensitive information on
people, industry and government.
But that chaotic period seems to be ending, and law-enforcement officials
say they are getting more valuable information faster.
"I think the speed and quality of the information we receive has improved
and on the local level it's more filtered with more of a nexus to
terrorism," said Commander Maria White of the BART police.
"It's absolutely different and better than it was a few years ago," said
Michael Grossman, commander of the Office of Homeland Security at the Los
Angeles Sheriff's Department. "Mainly, the people who are doing it are
getting to know one another."
In the last 18 months, the California Highway Patrol, the Office of Homeland
Security and the California Department of Justice agreed to revamp the
state's immediate post-Sept. 11 intelligence creation, known as the
California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, into a more serious, joint
operation called the State Terror Threat Assessment Center, or STTAC, where
analysts from as many as 15 local, state and federal agencies work together.
"That isn't to say there aren't jurisdictional rivalries and everyone always
plays well in the sandbox," said Winuk, "but there's a lot of improvement."
Analysts stopped monitoring domestic political groups, as they did before
and in the combat stages of the Iraq invasion, and focused on international
terrorism.
Today, instead of filling the e-mail in-boxes of police chiefs with rehashed
news reports on drugs, gangs and crime, STTAC analysts try to pass along
terrorist tradecraft — indicators of terror financing, of target
surveillance, attack planning.
They pass along the latest designs for improvised explosive devices, the
roadside bombs found in Iraq.
They try to gauge the activities of Hezbollah in California. They study the
tactics in the Beslan school takeover, the Madrid train bombing and the Bali
nightclub bombing.
If a police officer finds someone photographing a chemical plant in early
morning hours, the officer now can run the photographer's name through the
STTAC, which keeps copies of the multiple terror watch lists. A report on
the incident is filed, and if the center's "Predictive Indicators Analysis
Unit" sees a spike in photographing of chemical plants, the center may
recommend higher security patrols.
California law-enforcement authorities say federal intelligence agencies and
the Department of Homeland Security also are doing a better job of removing
classified sources and spying methods from intelligence and sharing it
nationwide.
The state still has a hodgepodge of different intelligence entities, from
intel analysts in local police and sheriff's offices to regional Terror
Early Warning Groups to Los Angeles' Terror Threat Assessment Center to the
FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces to California's STTAC.
In September, local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies in Los
Angeles plan on putting all their anti-terror intelligence analysts under
one roof, the state's first true regional intelligence center.
"Having these fusion centers will allow us to take all these intelligence
boutiques and turn them into a mall," said John Miller, chief of
counter-terrorism and criminal intelligence for the LAPD. "It will start
connecting dots and turn out a product that makes sense."
Still, in more than a dozen interviews with people engaged in
homeland-security intelligence, most of them in California, no one expressed
confidence in being able to detect an attack beforehand and thwart it. None
was willing to offer measures or indicators of success.
When close friends and family said they didn't know the July bombers in
London had turned to violence, California intelligence officers say they
offer no promises that they can thwart an attack here.
"There are just so many places to attack, and at the end of the day if there
are people with a backpack full of explosives that we're not able to stop,
they're going to succeed," Winuk said.
"I sleep better these days," he said, "but I still don't sleep well."
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