The Cops Are Watching You (Page 2)

A couple of exits around the Maryland beltway from the State Police office, just off Security Boulevard, sits the large, squat building that houses the Baltimore field office of the FBI and its 200 special agents. In the lobby, no one has gotten around to putting up a picture of the new FBI director, but hanging in an office is a worn-looking photograph of J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the Palmer raids in the 1920s and who headed the FBI for half a century. Inside, Mike Clemens is looking for real estate. Clemens, a veteran FBI agent who arrived in Baltimore just in time for September 11, began assembling Maryland's JTTF within weeks of the attacks.

Begun in Chicago and New York in the 1980s, JTTFs proliferated in the 1990s, growing to about three dozen by last year. In the wake of September 11, Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that all fifty-six FBI field offices would have a JTTF in place within a year. Modeled on antidrug task forces that began in the 1980s, the JTTFs were designed to bring state-of-the-art investigative techniques and technology to state and local police and a wide range of federal agencies, under the leadership of the FBI, in a mission aimed at both international and domestic terrorism.

In an interview, Clemens offered a rare glimpse into the scope and makeup of one of the FBI's terrorism task forces. He currently oversees three squads of ten FBI agents each: one dealing with international terrorism, one domestic terrorism and one cyberterrorism and computer crimes. The Maryland JTTF unites the FBI with police departments around the state; it includes officers from the Maryland State Police; from the city of Baltimore; from Baltimore, Montgomery, Prince Georges, Anne Arundel and Howard counties; and from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Customs, the Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and other agencies, for a total of fifty to sixty full-time antiterrorist specialists. The real estate that Clemens needs is an off-site operations center for the task force, one that will include a large training facility for Maryland police officers.

"It's very obvious now, as reflected by President Bush's war on terrorism, that this effort is going to go on for a long time as a substantial, investigative effort," says Clemens. Like Mitchell, Clemens forthrightly acknowledges that domestic antiterrorism investigations could easily run afoul of Americans' civil liberties if the FBI and police are not careful, especially when it comes to protest groups. "There's a fine line," he says. "There has to be a reasonable indication that they are involved in violent activity or subversive activity that would rise to a level of a violation of the law." Then he catches himself at the use of "subversive." "Well, not subversive, but violent," he adds. "Are they just a radical group that does a lot of yabbering, exercising their First Amendment rights, or is it more?"

To determine which, the FBI--working in conjunction with state and local police--often gathers a significant amount of information on groups that end up having no proclivity toward violence, Clemens says. "We have general intelligence files on domestic terrorist groups," he says. "There are all sorts of those files. And again, you get into that fine line. We identify a group, develop sources inside it. Maybe we make fifteen contacts or more over a period of six months, and if they are all negative, we just leave them alone."

Meanwhile, across Maryland, police departments are building intelligence units and cementing ties to the FBI. In Baltimore, the police have added more officers and money to the intelligence unit. The city hired a retired FBI agent with antiterrorism experience as a consultant on intelligence matters and posted intelligence officers from the Baltimore Police Department to New York and Washington. In Montgomery County, which abuts Washington, "quite a bit has changed for us," says Deputy Police Chief Rob Barnhouse. He adds that "everybody in our department since 9/11 has responsibility for homeland security," feeding into a five-person intelligence squad and the county's permanent liaison with the JTTF. In Baltimore County the antiterrorism unit is tracking groups from the Ku Klux Klan to globalization activists. "We never like to talk about the intelligence unit," says Bill Toohey, a spokesman for the county police. "It just monitors things."

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