A bomb explosion at an Oregon bank Dec. 12 that killed two police officers and seriously injured a third has raised questions about why officials didn't utilize sophisticated and costly equipment purchased by the state to prevent precisely these incidents from occurring. Officials plan to ask the FBI to help determine what went wrong.

One of the two men killed in the Woodburn, Ore. blast was a bomb expert with the Oregon State Police. Also killed was a Woodburn police captain. The city’s police chief lost part of his leg and remains hospitalized. Two suspects have been arrested in the case.

Reporters have revealed that state police failed to deploy at the scene an Explosive Ordinance Detection vehicle purchased for its bomb squad with the help of a 2006 federal grant, but no further details about the equipment were previously made public.

Records obtained from the state by the Center for Investigative Reporting show that the Oregon State Police in 2004 alone spent more than $600,000 in federal homeland security grants on bomb mitigation and armored-response equipment that apparently wasn't used to aid in ensuring the safety of the three men.

The purchases include the ordinance detection vehicle, a 28-foot long International assembled by Braun Northwest Inc., a Washington state-based company that specializes in emergency equipment. The vehicle cost $170,000, according to records.

"Our response has been that we're not going to go into details at this time because we don't know all the facts about the equipment that was there," Lt. Gregg Hastings, a spokesman for the state police, told CIR Dec. 19. After a criminal investigation is complete, officials plan to ask the FBI for help in conducting an internal review.

Hastings concedes that the ordinance-detection vehicle, based in Salem about 18 miles away, was not on the scene. "We have a lot more to learn here and we need to sit down with the FBI," he said.

Records obtained by CIR show that the Oregon State Police spent $427,000 from the grant funds on two bomb robots described in the documents only as F6A models, similar to this here manufactured by defense giant Northrop Grumman.

The state police spent another $265,000 on an armored SWAT truck known as a Lenco B.E.A.R, of which there are two models here. You can see Flickr photos of the department’s actual SWAT vehicle at this link. Images of two different bomb-response trucks owned by the state police, including the International, can be seen here on the department’s Web site.

The records show that the state police spent an additional $334,000 on more general equipment designed for defeating explosive devices, but those expenditures are not itemized in the grant documents CIR obtained.

In all, records show that since 2002, the Oregon State Police Department has been awarded approximately $8.8 million by the federal government in homeland security grants for a variety of purchases including search and rescue gear, personal protective equipment and hundreds of thousands in new interoperable communications improvements.

Other emergency personnel in the region have tools that could have been used to carefully diffuse the bomb. The Salem Fire Department, located not far from Woodburn, has spent more than $300,000 in homeland security grants since 2002 on 15 ballistic helmets, a $17,400 bomb suit, a $183,000 robot and $28,000 worth of X-ray equipment, according to state records.

Bomb robots can neutralize an ordinance device by triggering it with a water cannon or shotgun shell. The bomb can also be detonated safely after being placed in a containment vessel, one of which the state police department owns.

Hastings said that the Salem Fire Department was not involved in responding to the initial calls regarding bomb threats made at two neighboring Woodburn banks.

The police bureau in Portland, Ore., situated about 30 miles from Woodburn, possesses at least $219,000 worth of bomb-mitigation equipment purchased with 2003 homeland security grants including a $166,000 robot. The Portland Office of Emergency Management made $38,000 in such expenditures using 2004 grants, while the Port of Portland purchased a $40,000 Ford Expedition for bomb-response purposes with 2003 grant funds.

According to an affidavit and news accounts, the bomb squad technician killed in the Dec. 12 explosion believed the device was a hoax after a false-alarm call was made earlier that day about a bomb being located nearby at a Wells Fargo location. In a move that surprised some bomb experts interviewed by the Oregonian newspaper, the expert attempted to open the green metal box and examine its contents for evidence after a bank manager found it.

The technician had conducted an X-ray examination of the box and concluded it was harmless.

Hal Lowder, an explosives expert based in Atlanta, told the Oregonian that because police sometimes receive a high volume of calls involving hoax devices, they can be lulled into a routine that causes them to lower their guard. "That's why we always stress keeping your fingers out of it," Lowder told the paper.

"An X-ray is just not 100 percent," Lowder told the newspaper. “You may miss something because there's so many variables. It sounds like he made a judgment call, just a bad call. ... I hate to say bad things, but taking a bomb apart is just not done anymore." Specialists added that perpetrators sometimes lure police into a bomb’s destructive range by planting a mock device.

Within days of the incident police arrested 57-year-old Bruce Turnidge and his son Joshua, 32, for the crime, although no motive has been established. According to news accounts, the Turnidge family helped found the Salem Academy Christian schools. Police were searching the father's 750-acre farm Dec. 16 for more evidence. Each man has been charged with several counts of aggravated murder, assault, possession and conspiracy.

According to an affidavit, investigators obtained purchase records and surveillance footage from two area Wal-Mart locations that allegedly linked Joshua Turnidge to items used in the bombing. The evidence cited in the affidavit includes two disposable cell phones, airtime cards for the phones and a can of green spray paint. Numbers associated with the phones were reportedly used in threatening calls made to a Wells Fargo bank warning that if the building wasn't vacated, “all of them would die.”

Services were held on Friday and Saturday respectively for Woodburn Police Capt. Thomas Tennant and Oregon State Police Trooper William Hakim. Woodburn Police Chief Scott Russell remains hospitalized in serious condition.

Computer systems and other equipment used by customs and border officials, the U.S. Coast Guard and transportation security personnel for homeland security operations at Los Angeles International Airport are vulnerable to theft and tampering, according to a report by the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security.

The report, heavily redacted for national-security reasons, noted that telecommunications equipment and servers used by the agencies are left unobserved and contain poorly protected passwords. It includes a photo of a wide-open door leading to a server room used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The door is always left open because the room doesn't have a ventilation system sufficient enough to keep it cool, according to the report.

"Anyone entering the server room would have access to ICE back-up tapes, server, router, and switches because they are not stored in a locked cabinet," the IG found.

The access controls at an ICE field office in El Segundo, Calif., which assists with investigations of illegal exports, are weak, the report concluded, and employees have wide access to multiple files increasing "the risk of loss or theft of ICE mission-sensitive data."

"Unauthorized personnel may have the ability to write, alter, or delete data that reside on shared resources."

Also, according to the report, a data system maintained by the TSA is configured to allow anonymous access to one of its servers, meaning a hacker could log in without proper credentials. “Malicious code" could be placed on another of the TSA's systems containing shared data. The TSA also didn't have water sprinklers or fire extinguishers in a server room and telecommunications closet, while relying on a simple portable fan to keep the heat off IT equipment in a separate area.

Several federal agencies adopted the use of new databases after 9/11 containing detailed personal information about Americans and foreigners, the idea being that the more they knew about national and international travelers, the likelier authorities would be able to spot a rogue airline passenger before he or she struck. But the portions of the report made public last week don't reveal which systems used by the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration, ICE and others are susceptible to a cyber assault.

The report points to an incident last year in which customs officials suffered a major network outage at LAX, one of the world’s largest airports, that stalled operations for hours and disrupted the travel plans of 17,000 passengers. The airport's terminals filled with travelers waiting to be processed, others were forced to remain sitting on airliners for hours following international flights and some planes had to be redirected to other airports.

An aging IT infrastructure at the airport exacerbated the outage. According to the Los Angeles Times, airport employees had to distribute food, water and baby diapers to stranded passengers and refuel planes to keep their air conditioning systems running. Inspectors say that another agency, Customs and Border Protection, has installed new hardware since then to prevent a recurrence.

But additional problems remain. In November of 2006, customs authorities installed a high-speed connection for wireless Internet access at LAX, but a year later federal agents who were supposed to be able to use the system to better communicate couldn't to do so because of technical problems. No one interviewed by the inspector general could say whether it had ever been used. A room containing IT equipment for use by CBP personnel had shoddy electrical wiring, missing ceiling tiles and dust.

The IG's conclusions were released on the same day that a group of security consultants from one of the world's most tightly controlled airports near Tel Aviv announced they’d completed an assessment of LAX. Past reports by the team haven't been made public, but according to a Contra Costa Times story about the most recent review, the airport has made "significant progress" since 2006, implying that safety measures weren't strong previously.

It's not clear if the release of that news, with its improved outlook on security at LAX, was intended to coincide with the inspector general's less sanguine report.

In mid-September, two-dozen law enforcement groups, mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area, gathered for an annual event that organizers billed as the single largest homeland security training exercise of its kind in the United States.

The meeting, known as Urban Shield, was held in Dublin, Calif., 20 miles southeast of Oakland, and featured tactical teams dressed in SWAT helmets and boots participating in real-world scenarios as a test of their ability to handle a hostage crisis, prison riot, aircraft takeover and other emergency situations. Drills included the use of a full-size FedEx jetliner, an Amtrak train and a Navy ship.

Local volunteers lent a realistic feel by acting as victims and hostages. Manufacturers specializing in police equipment paid for "platinum" and "silver" sponsorship titles in exchange for the right to display their corporate logos and schmooze with potential clients—Taser, firearms-maker Sig Sauer, the private security and logistics firm Blackwater Worldwide and various distributors of safety and first-response equipment.

On Urban Shield's website, Greg Ahern, sheriff of the East Bay county of Alameda, singled out one supporter in particular for a "generous contribution" the company made that led it to being designated Urban Shield's chief sponsor: British defense giant BAE Systems.

But BAE's presence at Urban Shield 2008 isn't what landed it in the news recently. Two weeks after the event, the U.S. Justice Department announced that a BAE subsidiary known as Armor Holdings Products agreed to a $30 million settlement over claims that it knowingly manufactured and sold defective bullet-proof vests.

"This settlement will help ensure that first responders receive the highest quality ballistic protection," Gregory Katsas, as assistant attorney general, said in a statement when the settlement was announced Oct. 7.

A BAE spokeswoman did not return a call from CIR seeking comment, but the company in press accounts has denied wrongdoing and asserted that it settled the case merely to avoid costly litigation.

Justice officials had alleged that Armor Holdings was aware the vests contained so-called Zylon materials that "quickly degraded over time and were not suitable for ballistic use." The federal government purchased vests from Armor Holdings in addition to reimbursing state and local law-enforcement agencies for them through a Justice Department grant program.

A component of the vests that contained Zylon was produced by two other companies, which then supplied it to Armor Holdings. Those providers, Fortune 500 company Honeywell and the Japanese firm Toyobo, were sued by the Justice Department this year and last year respectively. The cases are ongoing. Justice officials also sued three additional companies linked to the Zylon body-armor industry in cases that netted more than $16 million in settlements.

As part of the latest settlement, which was arranged without a lawsuit being filed, Armor Holdings agreed to cooperate in a multi-agency probe of the vests that today involves participation from 11 federal offices including criminal investigators from the Army and Air Force, the FBI, Defense Department auditors and the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General.

The Zylon case joins another encounter BAE had with the Justice Department last year. Since June of 2007, officials there have been investigating whether payments made to members of the Saudi royal family amid the multibillion-dollar sale of fighter jets amounted to illegal bribery.

Armor Holdings stopped selling vests containing Zylon in 2005 before BAE bought the company for $4.5 billion two years later. But the British newspaper Financial Times reported Oct. 8 that the settlement "could result in embarrassment for the UK company, which has made Armor's acquisition a central plank of its drive to establish itself in the US defense sector."

Al jazeera on Britian’s probe of BAE and the Saudis

In 2006, before the United States awarded it a major vehicle purchase, BAE Systems was the tenth largest company doing business with the federal government, earning $4.5 billion in contracts during that year alone, according to the Project on Government Oversight. The Armor Holdings settlement pales next to the subsidiary's $2.3 billion in 2006 sales, let alone the impact on parent BAE, which that same year earned $24 billion in revenues.

In fact, it was another division of Armor Holdings that beefed up BAE's U.S. defense portfolio. Armor Holdings was already a major player in manufacturing newer model Mine Resistant Ambush Protected [MRAP] vehicles—heavily armored four-and-six wheelers jacked high off the ground with enormous tires. The acquisition by BAE occurred just as the Defense Department, battered by a ceaseless stream of roadside bombs and ambushes in Iraq and Afghanistan, greatly expanded its demand for them. The new partners thus were recently awarded $2.2 billion by the Army and Marine Corps to build 3,500 of the vehicles, according to BAE corporate filings.

"Politically, the US is now starting the run-up to the next presidential election in November 2008," the company told investors in its last annual report released in late March of this year. "Both parties remain supportive of national security and consequently, whatever the outcome, support for defense spending is expected to remain robust."

BAE's sponsorship of Urban Shield makes clear that the company is particularly eager to forge greater relationships with law enforcement and homeland security professionals in the United States as Congress continues to make preparing local police for national security threats a major spending priority. Lawmakers this fiscal year appropriated $2 billion more for homeland security and emergency preparedness grants to local governments than President Bush originally requested in his budget.

"My understanding is that they're interested in getting into the field of homeland security," Ahern, the Urban Shield coordinator and sheriff of Alameda County, said of BAE in a CIR interview. "Because Urban Shield is a tactical exercise, they wanted to be a part of it."

Indeed, BAE recently boasted in a press release that it supplied police in Denver and St. Paul with equipment and training used to quell disturbances by political demonstrators at the Democratic and Republican national conventions. The gear included riot-control suits, flex-cuff restraints, "hard-knuckle gloves," gas masks, helmets and utility belts. The two cities had received $50 million each in special grants from the Justice Department to cover security preparations.

"We take pride in helping ensure that the American men and women who work to protect our citizens and communities are properly equipped and efficiently trained for crowd control situations," BAE division president Scott O'Brien said in the statement.

In September, the company made another major announcement that it had purchased for $986 million the British intelligence consultancy Detica, which specializes in analyzing large volumes of data, also known as data mining, for anti-terrorism and homeland security purposes. BAE specifically wants to utilize Detica's capabilities in the United States, a press release stated.

As for Sheriff Ahern and Urban Shield, he said the event gives law enforcement professionals a chance to field-test equipment being offered by manufacturers so they can decide for themselves how reliable it is. Ahern is still negotiating with BAE over how much the company will pay for its sponsorship of the event. He said it could range in value from $25,000 to $100,000. He also said BAE offers more than just bullet-proof vests.

"BAE is a very reputable company and they have tactical equipment that they believe is very good for law enforcement."

It was only a matter of time perhaps before stories began surfacing that fearful Americans, casting a wary eye on Wall Street, were stockpiling supplies in anticipation of a second Great Depression.

We have all the right ingredients, after all.

Stir together America's colorful tradition of rugged individualism and survivalist tendencies, the misplaced paranoia leading up to Y2K, and the very real fear that understandably pervaded the country after Sept. 11 and you get a story that surfaced Sept. 30 from a small daily newspaper in Marysville, California.

When journalists weeks ago began comparing the credit squeeze on Wall Street to the Great Depression, historians and economists called them crazy and sensationalistic. It's nowhere near as bad today as it was back then, the response went. Anyone alive at the time can tell you that. Too many people just don't have the historical context to understand how bad it's truly been before. There's no Dust Bowl occurring and no one should expect a new Great American Novel to top Steinbeck.

The media did overstate things in the beginning, unable to avoid the irresistible reference point. But things kept getting worse, and while it didn't originally look like the most significant financial crisis in America compared to other moments like the 1970s recession or the dot-com bust, the end of last week saw Washington talking about insuring large bank deposits to prevent a run on them and new records were set in both percentage and point drops for the Dow Jones average.

In that spirit, the Appeal-Democrat of Marysville, a town with fewer than 12,000 people located 40 miles north of Sacramento, reported in a story headlined "Preparing for financial apocalypse” that residents were buying up survivalist gear fearing a return to breadlines and jobless hobo folk singers.

A surplus-store owner heard customers say they were putting up security fences and beginning to grow their own food. They’re also stockpiling dried goods and ammunition.

"I've been selling ammo cans by the pallet," Tom King, owner of Sutter Surplus Sales, told the paper.

An online seller of Meals Ready-to-Eat, water filters and other survival supplies told the Appeal-Democrat that sales have skyrocketed.

“In the last two weeks we've sold 200 percent above normal levels in just about everything,” said the company's sales and marketing manager, Jonathan Dick, according to the story.

It seems possible that any recent increased demand for emergency food and equipment nationwide at least would have more to do with the various natural disasters that occurred over the summer like a wave of wildfires in California and Hurricane Ike in Texas. FEMA is buying out wholesale suppliers to support victims who are now homeless.

But at King's Marysville store and for the online supplier interviewed by the Appeal-Democrat, customers are openly citing the steady stream of bad news from Wall Street as the reason why they're buying duffel bags and dehydrated edibles.

"We had a record day yesterday," the paper quoted Dick saying, referring to the Monday before Congress authorized the bailout. "It's not just extremist people. There's a lot of uncertainty out there right now."

Many customers at the Marysville store "mention the current financial crises as their primary reason to stock up on such items."

"'They think the polarization between the haves and have-nots is going to be very extreme,' King said. And when limited resources become even more valuable, 'they'll need to stay mobile.'"

Preparedness video from the Department of Homeland Security

Source Documents

• New FBI guidelines for investigations in full

• Memo discussing the changes distributed to Justice Department staffers (9/29)

• Testimony of FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (9/23)

Testimony on the changes from FBI Director Robert Mueller:
• Senate Judiciary Committee (9/17)
• House Judiciary Committee (9/16)

• Historical analysis of the guidelines by the Electronic Privacy Information Center
Wall Street's $700 billion bailout reasonably dominated the news cycle last week. But something else occurred on Friday just as Washington prepared to leave for the weekend, and the announcement has civil libertarians in an uproar.

The Justice Department finalized a new set of more lenient guidelines regulating what tactics FBI agents can use for criminal and national security investigations.

Elements of the proposed changes generated attention after Democratic lawmakers heard testimony about them in August and worried publicly in a letter to the Attorney General's Office that they could lead to abuse. The Justice Department also presented the changes to advocacy groups inviting the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and others to read but not copy them before they were released.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey and FBI Director Robert Mueller then declared in a joint statement Friday that they'd "consulted" with civil liberties groups and Congress prior to making the changes final implying that the effort was supported across the political spectrum.

But that apparently wasn't the case. Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy promptly blasted the changes complaining that the bureau ignored bipartisan requests to share the actual guidelines with Congress and that the FBI had already abused its authority to use so-called national security letters, which forced the turnover of private information or data on individuals without authorization from a court.

Leahy also argued that the Justice Department can do a better job balancing necessary zeal in fighting terrorism with constitutional protections that should restrict agents from launching widespread probes of groups and individuals that haven't violated the law.

"The Attorney General is once again giving the FBI broad new powers to conduct surveillance and use other intrusive investigative techniques on Americans without requiring any indication of wrongdoing or any approval even from FBI supervisors," Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.

The Washington Post reported that the Justice Department was asked to wait until the next president takes office before making any drastic changes to bureau guidelines, but the current White House, which is similarly overhauling how other law-enforcement agencies can collect domestic intelligence as Bush's tenure comes to a close, rejected that idea.

The bureau's definition of "assessment" is what seems to startle some observers the most. An assessment is different than a full-blown criminal or national security investigation, the latter of which requires reasonable suspicion, or "factual predication" as the bureau calls it, that a crime has occurred.

Groups or individuals targeted for an assessment may simply resemble to an agent a risk to public safety without any advance information indicating that was the case. It's not clear, then, how the bureau determines what groups or people should be spied upon if they haven't broken any laws and whether that process is arbitrary.

"[The FBI] cannot be content to wait for leads to come in through the actions of others, but rather must be vigilant in detecting terrorist activities to the full extent permitted by law, with an eye towards early intervention and prevention of acts of terrorism before they occur," the new guidelines state.

Among the powers agents now have for an assessment:

• Conduct surveillance without an otherwise required court order

• Examine records maintained by federal, state and local government agencies, which are typically not accessible to the public, like police databases profiling past criminal suspects.

In particular, the powers allow agents to "collect information relating to demonstration activities," according to the guidelines, for the purpose of protecting "public health and safety" before a major event, like the party conventions that occurred in St. Paul and Denver. The bureau can gather intelligence to determine where political demonstrators are lodging during the event, how they're traveling there, where demonstration activities are planned and how many people will attend, all without advanced proof that a national-security threat exists.

Agents can also access commercial databases containing large volumes of personal information on U.S. citizens, like those maintained by the private company ChoicePoint, which specializes in serving government agencies.

The bureau, for its part, says the old rules led to confusion among agents who were limited to varying techniques for intelligence gathering depending solely on whether an investigation was given a "criminal" or "national security" label.

"Under the new guidelines, the investigative steps that the FBI may take in a particular investigation will not be driven by irrelevant factors, such as the type of paperwork the agent uses to open the investigation," Mukasey told a crowd during an August anti-terrorism conference in Oregon. "The revisions also aim to eliminate distinctions in the existing rules that make it, in practice, harder to gather information about threats to the national security than it is to conduct 'ordinary' criminal investigations."

The Post echoed Mukasey in an editorial Sept. 29 supporting the proposed changes arguing that they give the bureau as much flexibility to deter terrorist strikes as it's traditionally been afforded for basic criminal cases.

"The bureau and the Justice Department did not have to seek Congress's input before putting the guidelines into effect; they should be commended for voluntarily doing so and for seeking feedback from religious and civil liberties groups," the paper wrote.

The ACLU, however, points out that the previous rules were established in the 1970s after congressional investigations made public the extensive and illegal harassment and surveillance by the FBI of political and social activists including Martin Luther King Jr. The program was known as COINTELPRO and revelations about the breadth of its counterintelligence activities tarnished the bureau's image for years.

"The new guidelines provide no safeguards against the FBI's improperly using race and religion as grounds for suspicion," ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said in a statement Friday. "They also fail to sufficiently prevent the government from infiltrating groups whose viewpoints it doesn't like. The FBI has shown time and time again that it is incapable of policing itself and there is good reason to believe that these guidelines will lead to more abuse."

The news site Salon.com last week discussed the rule changes with ACLU policy counsel Mike German, a former FBI agent of several years. You can listen to the interview online.

Meanwhile, in other homeland security news, the Army Times reported Sept. 30 that a military combat brigade has been given a dedicated assignment on U.S. soil "as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks."

According to the story, "[The brigade] may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive attack."

The news was largely overlooked by the mainstream press, but the blogosphere lit up in response questioning whether the domestic deployment of a military unit violates the 19th century-era Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act, both of which were designed to limit the authority of the federal government to use the military internally for law-enforcement purposes. Congress in recent years has battled with the White House over the president's right to declare martial law and use combat troops for suppressing lawlessness within the United States.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Oct. 1 did publish an op-ed on the matter from left-wing radio journalist Amy Goodman, who was arrested for obstruction with two producers amid demonstrations at the recent Republican National Convention. Dozens of other journalists were arrested as well.

Private companies operating in California are helping to fight the war on terror by handing over unknown information to law-enforcement authorities they believe could be evidence of a potential national security or general criminal threat.

That's according to the sheriff of Los Angeles County, Leroy Baca, who testified before a congressional subcommittee Sept. 25 on police intelligence and information sharing between federal and local law-enforcement bureaucracies.

Baca helps lead the Los Angeles Joint Regional Intelligence Center, one of nearly 70 so-called "fusion centers" that were quickly established across the country after 9/11 and now exist in 49 states. Coordinators say the centers, subsidized with at least $380 million from the Department of Homeland Security, will help defeat the intelligence weaknesses regarded as having enabled the attacks in New York and Washington.

Privacy advocates, however, are skeptical that fusion centers have strong enough provisions in place to safeguard the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens. The American Civil Liberties Union has published reports calling into question how deeply proponents of fusion centers and anti-terror collaboration want to pry into the private lives of everyday people in search of terrorists.

At many fusion centers the movement to promote information sharing has included encouraging private corporations that control large domestic assets like major energy producers and industrial manufacturers to participate by reporting tips when they see something considered suspicious.

"Through their large sphere of influence they provide thousands of eyes and ears via corporate security departments who have shared dozens of incidents of investigative interest to the JRIC," Baca told the House Committee on Homeland Security.

An employee from the Boeing Company, a major contractor with the federal government, last year told the same House panel that the private sector should be given access to a breadth of government information "both classified and unclassified." Boeing has an employee stationed at a fusion center in Seattle.

The ACLU warns that companies with access to sensitive government information could be compelled to use it for retaliating against critics, competitors or employees who try to blow the whistle on corporate misconduct. A report the group published in December says the FBI's infamous 1970s-era counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO provoked private companies to harass or fire employees who were also outspoken political and social activists. Discovery of the program's frequently illegal activities by later congressional probes led to new rules governing the conduct of agents at the bureau.

"While law enforcement officers undergo rigorous training, are sworn to serve their communities, and are paid public salaries, private companies and their employees are motivated to maximize profits," the report reads. "Private companies could be used as proxies to conduct activities that the government would otherwise be prohibited from engaging in."

Sheriff Baca created a Homeland Security Advisory Council after Sept. 11 comprised of "senior corporate leaders" in Los Angeles and Orange counties from which the terror leads given to authorities apparently came. Forty-five corporate executives are members of the council and the list includes current and former employees of Fox Broadcasting, Southern California energy giant Edison International, media conglomerate Viacom, a Disney corporate security vice president (and former FBI agent), the head of American Correctional Solutions, a privatization company that contracts with government agencies to provide medical care to prison inmates, top real-estate developers, Hollywood entertainment companies and major banking interests. Alongside them on the council are past local, state and federal government officials including one-time Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan and a former U.S. judge.

"Creating links ahead of time and building the private sector into the existing government structure creates new capabilities that enhance our community's ability to prevent, respond to, and recover from a disaster," the council's website reads.

As for California fusion centers, there are now three others located in Sacramento, San Diego, and San Francisco in addition to the one in Los Angeles. But they're far less visible to citizens than any standard local police station, and they place a greater emphasis on conducting domestic spying by sifting through large volumes of often disparate information in search of patterns—a practice known as data mining—as opposed to investigating a crime after it occurs.

The first center in California was established two weeks after Sept. 11 by former Gov. Gray Davis, and among other things, it creates regular intelligence bulletins and special reports on individual groups containing background information and "violence potential," according to a Government Accountability Report from last fall.

The concept of information fusion represents a trend that swept law enforcement in the United States after Sept. 11 in which authorities collect domestic intelligence using an array of sources to pre-empt both national security threats and more common criminal acts like fraud, drug trafficking and gang violence.

The centers are designed to host multiple state and federal law-enforcement groups from the FBI and immigration authorities to state prison guards and local police personnel where they can exchange information housed in secure criminal databases or mine other banks of information such as credit reports and insurance claims.

So the credit crunch incinerated your job? The Department of Homeland Security is looking for a few good men and women. The work isn't glamorous, but you could leave behind a legacy of saving taxpayers billions of dollars.

The federal government's newest bureaucracy is persistently and vastly short the procurement officers it needs to ensure efficiency in the massive contracts it hands out to private companies who perform work on behalf of the public, from recruiting thousands of airport screeners to building temporary housing for victims of Hurricane Katrina, two government watchdogs told a congressional subcommittee last week.

Homeland security officials also turn to the private sector for help too quickly due to a sense of urgency or desire to make things easier resulting in contracts that impose few demands on private companies that earn hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to make the country safer, the duo added.

"We should not allow expediency to completely and consistently overrule sound business practices," a DHS deputy inspector general, James Taylor, told a House subcommittee on oversight Sept. 17. "When that happens, we fail to get the right products and services at the right times for the right prices."

A common theme in many of the audit reports criticizing DHS in recent years is that the dogma inside the Beltway after Sept. 11 encouraged preventing another attack or at least bracing for one at all costs. But hindsight shows how often the Homeland Security Department's haste has at times caused it to broker contracts that are counterproductive to its mission let alone negligibly effective.

The subcommittee last week presented a table illustrating $15 billion in various DHS contracts believed to be plagued by wasteful spending or mismanagement or both, like Boeing's $1.5 billion agreement to string sensors and cameras along newly constructed towers on the nation's borders with Mexico and Canada, known as the Secure Borders Initiative.

In one twist of irony, homeland security officials sunk $52 million into a financial management system called eMerge2 that was supposed to fix accounting and contracting weaknesses in the department. It ultimately had to be scrapped in December of 2005 with "little to show for it," a report from the Government Accountability Office concluded. The tab included $18 million just in contractor costs. Because DHS had originally intended to spend as much as $229 million on the project, the GAO considered it a good idea for homeland security to cut its losses despite how much had already been invested.

"The agency has made little progress since that time and has missed an invaluable opportunity to address existing financial management problems," the report said.

Meanwhile, Deputy Inspector General Taylor testified last week that DHS hardly has even half the bare minimum of personnel it needs to properly manage the contracts, and 40 percent of those federal employees are eligible for retirement in five years. That means the department is much farther away from an ideal level of contract specialists.

And those figures, from April of this year, are considered to be an improvement since the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2003, the largest reorganization of the federal government since World War II. The department today has some of the biggest procurement needs of any other agency at the federal level having spent $12 billion last year alone on everything from airport security systems to Coast Guard ships. For entrepreneurs, the government's promise of security in the homeland is a colossal market opportunity unto itself.

Hiring more bureaucrats to enforce the federal government's litany of contract regulations may smack of a knee-jerk response to free marketeers who want Washington to invest greater trust in its private partners. But the lack of oversight, observers say, has led to widespread waste in a fledgling department that commits a whole 40 percent of its $47 billion budget to private-sector contracting for goods and services.

A GAO director, John Hutton, piled on to the inspector general's testimony during last week's congressional hearing telling the subcommittee that DHS has poorly planned many of its outsized contracts with private businesses and doesn't clearly define what the companies are supposed to accomplish.

"While there are benefits to using contractors to perform services for the government – such as increased flexibility in fulfilling immediate needs – we and others have raised concerns about the federal government's increased reliance on contractor services," Hutton told the committee. "Of key concern is the risk associated with a contractor providing services that closely support inherently governmental functions: the loss of government control over and accountability for mission-related policy and program decisions."

Among the other more infamous examples of perceived contracting mishaps by DHS that government auditors described during last week's hearings: