http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_2921461?rss 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." Contact Ian Hoffman at [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------ Yahoo! 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