Thomas Cincotta

Thomas Cincotta is the former civil liberties program director at Political Research Associates. A criminal defense lawyer, he led the Denver chapter of the National Lawyers Guild [www.nlg.org] (NLG) in support of peace groups and others during the 2008 Democratic National Convention, and connected progressive lawyers with other community efforts around sentencing reform, immigrant rights, and police misconduct. He also represented migrant farm workers and served on the board of El Centro Humanitario.

Suspicious Activity Reporting Invites Racial Profiling, Erodes Civil Liberties, and Undermines Security

The intelligence lapses that failed to prevent the September 11 terrorist attacks prompted an overhaul of U.S. domestic and foreign intelligence systems, including the creation of an expansive new domestic security infrastructure. A key part of this…

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Is the Obama Administration Serious about Anti-Muslim Demonization in Law Enforcement?

On August 4, 2011, the White House released a new strategy to counter violent extremism. The Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) expressed support for the plan, Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States, which…

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John Guandolo: Another Counterterrorism Expert Exposed

PRA’s groundbreaking exposé of how tax dollars fund anti-Muslim trainings for police and counterterrorism personnel won the attention of news outlets and policy makers at its release this spring. We’ve been keeping the pressure on the Department of…

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FBI Using Next Generation of Big Brother to Cajole States into Targeting Immigrants?

Post-9/11 congressional mandates for better interagency information sharing have often been taken in a direction that undermines community safety and threatens personal privacy. According to new government records released to the public on July 6,…

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Manufacturing the Muslim Menace

Private Firms, Public Servants, & the Threat to Rights and Security

The product of PRA’s comprehensive, nine-month investigation, Manufacturing the Muslim Menace (pdf) details a systemic failure to regulate content…

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FBI Raids Reveal Repressive Apparatus Run Amok

A recent Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s investigations of certain domestic advocacy groups from 2002-2006 found that the agency considered routine civil-disobedience violations, such as trespassing or vandalism, potential terrorism. For…

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The FBI is Seeking Extended Powers to Snoop into our Electronic Communications

It’s well known that the FBI has historically abused its power to investigate non-criminal Americans—in the 1960s, the FBI relied on informants and undercover agents to burglarize the offices of the Socialist Workers Party and other movement…

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‘Little Guantanamos’

As Guantanamo is in the agonizingly slow process of shutting its doors, another kind of facility seems poised take its place on U.S. soil. Communication Management Units (CMUs), special divisions within American prisons nicknamed ‘Little Guantanamos…

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Behavior Profiling: Ineffective and Expensive Security Theater

Behavioral profiling, the latest trend in pre-emptive policing, has been used in America’s airport terminals since 2003 when the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program was implemented by the Transportation Security…

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FBI JTTF Agent Hands Private Data Over to Corporate Security Guards

A Texas City police officer, Cpl. Tom Robison, detained freelance photographer Lance Rosenfieldduring the first week of July 2010 for taking pictures of public signs. The law enforcement harassment of Mr. Rosenfield resembles hundreds of similar…

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Suspicious Activity Reporting Expands to LAX and Amtrak: A Recipe for Racial Profiling

In an expansion of the national Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (SAR), law enforcement and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials recently tied both Amtrak and Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) into the initiative.…

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Praying as Suspicious Behavior in the Henderson 7 Case

Since 9/11, practicing Islam has been unfairly viewed as suspicious in some circles, including among many in law enforcement. On December 20, 2009, in Henderson, Nevada, a concerned caller notified police that seven Muslim men were praying in a gas-…

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Don’t give the President an “Internet Kill Switch”

On June 10, 2010, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and his cosponsors Senator Thomas Carper (D-DE) and Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) introduced the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. This bill, which would give the president power to…

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Suspicious Activity Reporting To Be Linked Nationwide

The Department of Justice has quietly released the final report on a two-year pilot program on “Suspicious Activity Reporting.” This program, the latest product of the domestic security overhaul following September 11, 2001 is cause for alarm,…

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Pre-Emptive Prosecutions - Forum Explores Provocation to Get Terrorism Convictions

On March 25, 2010, a forum at NYU School of Law explored the role of agents provocateurs in several high-profile terrorism cases. Powerful testimony from the families and lawyers for defendants in several cases, raised an important question about…

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Muslims Feel Targeted by FBI, Question Contact on Campus

According to students at the University of Texas-Dallas, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation approached them on campus and at work to inquire about their beliefs and affiliations. Without a reasonable suspicion that individuals were…

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TIPS Reduce: LAPD to expand iWatch Program

The Los Angeles Police Department encourages the public to spy on neighbors and file suspicious activity reports about innocent (non-criminal) activities that seem out of place through its “iWatch” program. A new report by Political Research…

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Recipe for Profiling: Boston Transit Police Study the "Legal Wing of Jihad in America"

Why are Boston Transit Police Studying Islam? While reading the February/March 2010 issue of the industry magazine Counter Terrorist (a publication of Security Solutions International), I came across a troubling advertisement.

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Platform for Prejudice

How the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative Invites Racial Profiling, Erodes Civil Liberties, and Undermines Security

Thomas Cincotta’s report is a comprehensive investigation of the post-9/11 “information sharing environment” among law enforcement, explaining how Suspicious Activity Reporting violates civil liberties without yielding any greater security.…

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Misplaced Priorities in U.S. Counter-terror Strategy

The recent attempted bombing of NWA Flight 253 in Detroit underscores the fact that the main terrorist threat to U.S. persons is from foreign terrorists linked to Al Qaeda. Every official review of U.S. intelligence failures that led to the 9/11…

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Intelligence Fusion Centers: A De-Centralized National Intelligence Agency

In a 2007 article for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Colonel Bart Johnson explained how state-level intelligence “fusion centers” collect data from a range of sources and connect “seemingly unrelated” incidents that could be precursors of…

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Torrance: A Genesis Fable for Fusion

A string of robberies in southern California in 2005 by two people with an interest in violent jihad has taken on mythic importance in the drive to develop fusion centers; it has become a creation story with ideological force. Counterterrorism…

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Bipartisan Call for Oversight

The Constitution Project, a bipartisan think tank, called on President Obama in the first month of his administration to curb the ambiguities and excesses of fusion centers.

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Public Accountability for Fusion Centers

Amidst widespread concerns about the far-reaching surveillance capacities of intelligence fusion centers, citizens groups are moving forward with demands for public oversight and privacy protections.

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Napolitano Embraces Her Inner Cheney

Last week, Janet Napolitano reaffirmed America’s unfocused approach to domestic intelligence and counterterrorism in her July 29, 2009 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. The Secretary of Homeland Security embraced the word “terror,” a word…

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From Movements to Mosques, Informants Endanger Democracy

In February, 2009, members of the Islamic Center of Irvine learned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had hired Craig Monteilh, a 46-year-old fitness instructor and convicted con man, to infiltrate their mosque and keep it under…

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Army Civilian Employee Spied on Peace Activists

The discovery this month that anarchist “John Jacob,” an activist in anti-militarist organizing in the Pacific Northwest, is really civilian Army intelligence analyst John Towery II, shows that those concerned about civil liberties must remain…

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Can Extreme Surveillance Keep Us Safe?

Eridiana Rodriguez vanished during her shift cleaning the office building at 2 Rector Street in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District on Tuesday night, July 7. After four days, one hundred police scoured the building and discovered the body of this…

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FBI Secret Surveillance and Secret Policies

If history is any guide, lax oversight and secrecy are a recipe for abusive political intelligence gathering by the FBI. Pervasive official secrecy continues to threaten our national values under the Obama administration, in spite of a declared…

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Connecticut State Police Keep Tabs on Greens

Connecticut state troopers’ surveillance of Green Party activists serves as the latest warning of whether we should allow government to conduct political intelligence and engage in “preventive” policing. A May 31, 2009 article in the Hartford…

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Provocation Masquerading as Anti-Terror Policy?

A word of advice to activists and people praying at mosques. If a guy offers you a free stinger missile, he’s probably an informer. If he offers you free IEDs, he’s probably an informer. If he asks you to pledge an oath to his foreign terrorist…

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More Informants, More Fear

On May 17, the Des Moines Register reported that the FBI planted an informant in an Iowa City “anarchist collective” planning to “disrupt the Republican convention.” Those advocating undercover surveillance say the government should spy upon…

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Homeland's Lexicon of "Extremism"

In May 2009, Homeland Security released — and quickly retracted — a “Domestic Extremism Lexicon,” one in a series of reference aids designed to provide operational and…

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Defending Convention Dissent in St. Paul

On May 15, 2009, Judge Wilson of the Ramsey County District Court granted RNC defendant Sean McCoy’s motion for a new trial. So far, St. Paul has prosecuted ten defendants on 34 charges without a single conviction involving arrests during the…

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Boston Police Snoop at Celebs - Who's Next?

So Boston police troll the Criminal Record Information system to find personal information about local movie stars and sports heroes. We know that from a state audit released on May 6, 2009.

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Government Sets Sights on Extremists

Hot Air Leads to Violence? Homeland Security apparently thinks so. The Department of Homeland Security recently warned law enforcement that disenchanted, angry Americans are like kernels of corn under heat, ready to pop at any time.

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Thought Police Patrol Virginia

If the Virginia Fusion Center (VFC) isn’t careful, people might think its intelligence analysts are America’s thought police. Take a look at its 2009 Threat Assessment, which talks about “subversive thought” as a marker for violent terrorism and…

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Getting the Facts on Guantanamo Detainees

According to a Rasmussen Reports poll released on April 3, 2009, 75 percent of voters say that safety is more important than fairness in determining what countries the US government sends freed Guantanamo inmates. While some element of N.I.M.B.Y.…

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Texas Fusion Center Casts Wide Net

The North Central Texas Fusion Center (NCTFC) recently issued a Prevention Awareness Bulletin alerting law enforcement to beware of “significant” threats posed by a Muslim civil rights group, the antiwar organization ANSWER, and International Action…

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Remembering Giuseppe Conlon on St. Pat's Day

All I need to know about the war on terror I learned from “In the Name of the Father,” the story of the Guilford Four. After a pub bombing south of London in 1974, British police rounded up three men from Belfast and a young Englishwoman.

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Fusion Centers: Just Part of the Problem

Props go to The Muckracker, a blog of the Center for Investigative Reporting for drawing attention to Obama’s $260 million budget request for fusion centers. Its critique of the reality show “Homeland Security USA” is also prescient, well-deserved…

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FBI: Preventing Violence or Provoking It?

On March 16, David McKay goes on trial for a second time. The jury must decide whether an FBI informant named Brandon Darby induced McKay to make Molotov cocktails on the eve of the Republican National Convention.

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$260 Million for Fusion Center Analysts

Obama wants to hire thousands of intelligence analysts for state fusion centers to the tune of $260 million. Liberty Beat thinks there are better ways to fight terrorism than sifting through commercial databases, “suspicious activity” reports,…

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Levi Come Back, We Just Can't Live Without You*

Here is another item for President Obama’s to do list: reinstate curbs on the FBI’s spying power. Attorney General Edward Levi established guidelines limiting the Bureau to American targets “engaged in or believe to be about to engage in criminal…

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Homeland Security Helped Maryland Spy on Activists

We’ve know since the Summer of 2008 that the Maryland State Police spied on activists and their lawful political activities from 2005 to 2007. Troopers entered citizens into a database in which they labeled 53 individuals as “terrorists.” Now we…

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Race-Based Roundup Revealed

Immigration advocates have long asserted that ICE raids at workplaces and in neighborhoods sweep people up based on race, rather than facts about individuals violating immigration laws. ICE’s internal investigation of a Baltimore sweep now reveals…

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Thomas Cincotta

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