View full size

Pennsylvania made national news in September for all the wrong reasons.

The Patriot-News reported that Pennsylvania's Office of Homeland Security had been tracking groups engaged in lawful, peaceful protests, including groups opposed to natural gas drilling, peace activists and gay rights groups. An embarrassed Gov. Ed Rendell, who said that he had been unaware of the program until he read the newspaper, issued an immediate order to halt it.

It turns out the homeland security office or its private consultant were doing more than just monitoring law-abiding citizens.

They were comparing environmental activists to Al-Qaeda.

They were tracking down protesters and grilling their parents.

They were seeking a network of citizen spies to combat the security threats they saw in virtually any legal political activity.

And they were feeding their suspicions not only to law enforcement, but to dozens of private businesses from natural gas drillers to The Hershey Co.

Internal e-mails from the Homeland Security office reveal a determined effort to recruit local people receiving its intelligence bulletins — municipal police chiefs, county sheriffs, local emergency management personnel — into its network of citizen spies.

The goal was to get those locals to start feeding information to the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, a private “intelligence” contractor working with the state’s Homeland Security office.

In an e-mail to ITRR in June, former OHS Director James Powers explains, "Thus far, we've pushed information to the customer and haven't actually requested feedback regarding the sites/cities mentioned" in the bulletins.

“We’re not looking for them to dump everything on us that occurs in their jurisdiction,” he writes, “only that which relates to the critical infrastructure. In turn, we’ll provide it to you for the analysts to review and make further findings.”

However, the definition of “critical infrastructure” employed by Powers and ITRR was clearly very broad. The bulletins were, in fact, loaded with information about legal and peaceful activities by activist groups of all political persuasions.

ITRR’S contract expired in October and, following the revelations in September, Rendell ordered it not to be renewed. The governor declined to fire Powers, but Powers resigned a few weeks later.

State lawmakers held a single hearing on the tracking of these groups. Some want more answers.

And while the state’s contract with ITRR was not renewed, the programs continue.

ITRR continues to monitor law-abiding citizens for its corporate clients.

The Pennsylvania State Police is hiring five new analysts for its Criminal Intelligence Center to take over the role of identifying threats to critical infrastructure.

Using the State Police is “a better avenue,” said Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, R-Butler, whose own rallies were listed in the intelligence bulletins as a “moderate threat.”

“At the same time, as they move these operations in-house, they need to ensure checks and balances are in place,” he said.

'Shades of Al-Qaeda'

From the very first page of the very first bulletin published by Homeland Security, ITRR focused not on groups with a clear terrorist agenda such as Islamists or Neo-Nazis, but on political activists.

The contractor argued that even though groups are non-violent, they can conduct “demonstrations and campaigns that can close down a facility and embarrass a company.”

Pennsylvania was ITRR’s only government client. The contractor made the lion’s share of its money serving private corporate clients.

Regular readers of the bulletins could easily begin to view activists as a threat. The bulletins freely mixed references to actual terrorist activity abroad with warnings about the non-violent, lawful activities of Pennsylvania citizens.

A July 30 bulletin that discusses “jihadist threats in France” quoting Al-Qaeda, also warns that natural gas drilling events “may draw unruly crowds.”

The bulletin warns of “flashpoints for confrontations over natural gas drilling” and provides a list of meetings “singled out by anti-drilling activists.” The list includes township supervisors meetings, county commissioners meetings and a possible Pennsylvania Forestry Association meeting in Mechanicsburg.

The bulletins also freely label activist groups to make them sound menacing — sometimes inconsistently.

The July 30 bulletin claims that “areas of significant drilling activity in Pennsylvania have also been the scene of eco-terrorist vandalism to drilling equipment.” It warns local law enforcement agencies to “remain aware of the potential for large, sometimes hostile confrontations between landowners, anti-drilling environmentalist militants and gas drilling employees.”

The very first bulletin mentions a planned training for anti-drilling activists in Ithaca, N.Y. by “The Ruckus Group” — actually the Ruckus Society, founded in 1995 by former Greenpeace activists.

That bulletin says “training provided by the Ruckus Group does not include violent tactics.” However, the next bulletin suddenly changes tack, calling the group a “non-profit entity providing training to anarchists in methods of destroying gas pipelines.”

“They’re not focused on illegal activity — they’re focused on people organizing, and clearly everybody’s in bed with the drilling industry,” said Witold Walczak, legal director for ACLU of Pennsylvania.

“It’s one thing for private industry to hire groups like ITRR to gather information, but for the government to get involved — you’ve got a nasty menage-a-trois going on here and the citizen activists are the ones getting fracked.”

How did the leaders at ITRR view legal political activity? In a May 3 e-mail sent to Powers, ITRR co-founder Mike Perelman writes:

“The Internet is an incredible force multiplier — example: I doubt that the Rainforest Action Network or the Ruckus Group number more than 25 people each. But they have incredible reach, sophistication, and influence on local groups.”

Perelman immediately followed with this description: “Shades of Al Qaeda!”

Powers was suspicious that political activism equaled drug dealing.

On Aug. 25, Powers e-mails Perelman saying, “Somewhere out there is a nexus between the drug traffickers and those criminals desiring to harm us — whether at the local level or organized, home-grown, splinter-cell would-be terrorists. Have our analysts uncovered any indication of drugs and all the protest group activities they’ve been reporting?”

Perelman responds, “I don’t think we’ll see much organized drug activity from the anarchist/eco groups. Not because they’re clean, but because they’re paranoid. They know they’re always one step away from ‘police repression.’¤”

He adds that ITRR had not been looking for connections with the drug world, but, “We could try and tease out some information if we started with a couple PA trafficker names to track and cross reference through our database and live communications.”

Coffee and donuts

In August, as the time drew near for ITRR’s contract renewal, Powers shifted the planning for a network of citizen informants into high gear. He sent a long e-mail to his “ITRR Colleagues” entitled “The Missing Piece — Input from the Field.”

Powers tells ITRR, “We are extremely pleased with the product ITRR has developed/delivered thus far — a superb job by all involved — whoever they are!”

He goes on to say, “The piece that we still miss, however — and have no ability or authority to fix — is the input from the ground-level stakeholders here in PA.”

Powers had told all recipients of the bulletins that their input would be “valuable” to ITRR.

“I am not pleased with what I have received from the field,” he writes, “but I know it’s neither a result of your efforts nor caused by personality/Southern drawl. We’ll continue to attempt to cultivate these relationships and trust in order to facilitate the flow of information from these groups to the (Tactical Action Monitoring Center in Jerusalem) via this office. Consider this another task for the person you wish to add to the upcoming contract.”

Despite the initial reluctance of local authorities, Powers would not give up on the idea.

“Hopefully I can use my CIP Advisory Group to provide you some internal, security-related data that may be of interest,” he writes. “I feel there is valuable, untapped information out there that may be of use to your analysts/researchers.”

He got prompt responses from ITRR’s Pennsylvania case worker Erik Miller as well as both founders of ITRR, Mike Perelman and Aaron Richman.

Perelman, who had been discussing the issue with Powers for at least a month, compliments Powers for being “ahead of the curve.”

“I can picture a person in your office arranging county by county (brief) training sessions that would educate people on intelligence, the cycle, their role, etc.,” writes Perelman. “Every time you and I have met people in the field, it has resulted in ground-up information sharing.”

Miller agrees, and adds, “I see the problem from a social-interaction perspective. Perhaps people are reluctant to share sensitive information with an unknown email account. On the other hand, by meeting with people, looking them in the eye, shaking their hand; that I think is the beginning to better information flow.”

Richman writes: “We should be able to outreach to the various sectors, bring them in for coffee and donuts and present them with a presentation that explains their role in the intel cycle. We explain to them what the adversary may be doing to ‘use’ the specific sector. Not just to target the (critical infrastructure), but how the adversary plans, trains, recruits .... We would give them a business card with a number to call, an email to send for anything that is not an emergency and meets the ‘shopping list’ of suspicious indicators and warning signs that we submitted to them.”

Guilt by inclusion

At a state Senate hearing, Powers testified, “We never targeted groups. We never targeted individuals.”

But they did.

One young man is listed by name in a Homeland Security bulletin — part of a two-page analysis of how terrorists make maps of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras.

“Like career criminals, terrorists of all kinds often carry out pre-operational surveillance to determine, among many other things, the location and number of CCTV surveillance cameras in their target location,” the bulletin says.

It reviews the case of a “suspected anarchist terrorist” with such a map killed in Greece, and describes other “anarchist” CCTV mapping activities in the U.S., Canada and Britain. Noting that much of the mapping is done through Freedom of Information requests, the bulletin then highlights a Pennsylvania example:

“Pennsylvania Revolution — a website self-described as ‘inspired by the ideas of individual freedom, personal liberty and the constitution of the commonwealth and of the United States.’”

The bulletin explains that since August 2009, the Pennsylvania Revolution website has been attempting to map all the known CCTV cameras in Pennsylvania and already lists the location of over 400, including Lancaster City and PennDOT traffic cameras.

The bulletin then identifies the owner of the site: Scott Davis.

Davis, a 28-year-old resident of Lower Paxton Twp., is a conservative organizer. He is a tea party activist and former state coordinator for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. He is also a systems engineer in the information technology department of The Patriot-News.

He never guessed that mapping the publicly-available locations of CCTV cameras would brand him a potential terrorist.

“Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a terrorist,” he said. “In my research in the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, I believe the country has turned for the worse — and this is proof.”

Davis fears his association in the bulletin with violent terrorism could be used against him in any number of ways — future job employment, local police scrutiny, in court.

“Until it happens, you don’t know what the outcome would be,” he said.

He said his first concern was his 2-year-old daughter, and noted that corporations — including health care companies — were on the client list for the bulletins.

“What Powers doesn’t get is that simply being named in a bulletin that discusses terrorist activity and that’s put out by an agency with ‘Homeland Security’ in the name, tarnishes the people people being discussed, even if nothing bad is said about them,” said Walczak of the ACLU. “It’s really guilt by inclusion.”

“I consider it defamation of character,” said Davis. “I’ve never broken the law aside from a few speeding tickets.”

Ironically, just a month after the CCTV bulletin is issued, Perelman grouses to Powers that “those damned cameras are everywhere.” He is referring to an assassination carried out by Israeli intelligence agents in Dubai; they were photographed by CCTV cameras just before they electrocuted and suffocated a Hamas leader.

'A form of harassment'

Although Scott Davis did not experience retribution as a result of being named by Homeland Security, it appears that another young man did.

Alex Lotorto, a 23-year-old living in Pittsburgh sent an email to friends just before 7 p.m. on June 1, asking them to meet him that night on the Carnegie Mellon campus. He hoped to organize a demonstration as President Obama visited the school the next day.

Three hours later, Perelman sent Powers a copy of the message, with Lotorto’s name and cell phone number. Powers immediately forwarded it to a host of law enforcement contacts in Pittsburgh and at the FBI.

On the opposite side of the state, Lotorto’s 57-year-old mother, Alexandria, opened the door of her Pike County home to find two State Police officers demanding to know the whereabouts of her son.

“They said Pittsburgh police commanded them to find out where this Alex Lotorto was right now,” she explained.

“I said, ‘He’s in Pittsburgh .... and he’s probably trying to get President Obama’s attention by holding up a sign. That’s what he does. He’s been doing it for years.”

“My son is a very passionate young man,” said Lotorto. She described Alex as a gifted student and a former choir boy with “a strong sense of fairness.”

Lotorto said the officers were young and “very aggressive” at first.

“They were behaving as if they only had minutes to find him .... like he was on the grassy knoll,” she said.

They told her when someone threatens the President, they have to act quickly. That upset Lotorto, who was recuperating from quadruple by-pass surgery.

She said she told the officers her son was “holding a sign, and that’s every American’s right.”

“Alex is 25 percent Lebanese because of me,” she said. “That doesn’t make him an Arab threat. He doesn’t know anything about the culture and he hates the food .... His father and I are good citizens. Good Christians.”

Lotorto told the officers, “This is a form of harassment.”

But she also invited them into her home, sat them down and talked with them for 20 minutes or so. She said, in the end, they called Pittsburgh in her presence and told officials there to lay off the kid.

Her son sees it a bit differently. He thinks the police were sent to his mother as a way of putting pressure on him. “They know I live (in Pittsburgh) .... Why would they go to Mom’s house?” he asked.

Lotorto acknowledges that he calls himself an anarchist, but adds he has never been in a group that planned any violence.

“I believe in people power more than government or corporations,” he said, “but it has come to the point where anyone who actively takes a position that challenges power .... you’re a terrorist.”

His mother — who says she once protested the war in Vietnam — is proud of him, despite some of the “crazy” things he’s done.

“We try to reason with him,” she said. “When you’re in your 20s, you know it all, and your parents are kind of dumb .... but I wish more of our youth were as passionate as he is. There’d be some changes in how things are.

“I’m disgusted they’re spending money following Alex when there are all these creeps blowing things up,” she said.

Mike German, a former FBI agent who quit to work for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the government is wasting time and money following the activities of Americans who are breaking no laws.

“After 9-11 there was an erosion of the rules and guidelines that were built to protect Americans’ privacies, because there was this mistaken idea that it was the rules that made it hard for the FBI to find the bad guys,” he said. “But what we’re finding is that when you take away the rules, then what happens is that innocent people get spied on.”

The U.S. Department of Justice recently released a report critical of the FBI spying on law-abiding citizens, including in Pittsburgh.

“When you look at all these cases it’s a complete waste of resources,” said German. “These rules weren’t designed just for privacy; they also were for keeping these agencies focused on their mission.

“It was the erosion of these rules that opened the door to this kind of political spying,” he said. “The agents targeted these groups because they didn’t like them.”

'Absolutely no sense'

Information funneled to ITRR would have done more than alert state law enforcement. ITRR’s primary business was supplying “intelligence” to corporations.

The company refuses to name its clients, saying only that they range from “Fortune 100 companies to small security companies.”

The contractor says its products are used by the power industry, companies with international maritime assets, companies owning parts of America’s critical infrastructure, organizations supporting missionaries in the field, the pharmaceutical industry, and organizations tasked with security for international sports events.

When the scandal first broke, ITRR released selections from its past bulletins that were redacted “to protect client privacy.” Comparing those to the full reports reveals that ITRR considered Monsanto, Koch Industries and Massey Energy among its clients.

UPDATE: After the original story was published, Koch Industries contacted the Patriot-News to say their records indicate no association with ITRR. Melissa Cohlmia, Spokesman for Koch Industries, said, “Neither Koch Industries, nor any of its subsidiaries, have ever retained the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR).”



Pennsylvania’s Homeland Security Office distributed its bulletins to private businesses as well. Among the more than 2,000 email addresses of potential recipients disclosed during a Senate investigation was a list of 733 contacts considered to be the “Pennsylvania Intelligence Community.”

That category included email addresses for people at The Hershey Co., Gannett Fleming, Bayer, Dennis McGee and Associates, Highmark, Tyco Electronics, Harsco Corp., PSECU, Eastman Chemical, and Rite Aid.

There was a separate category of 42 contacts for the “Marcellus Shale Community.” Most of them are county emergency management contacts, but some at the Marcellus Shale Coalition (a trade group), individual drilling companies and a lobbying firm.

Whether Powers considered the business benefits of ITRR’s “intelligence,” he had become convinced that the information in the bulletins was critical to law enforcement. Powers spent the summer refashioning the bulletins — editing them heavily — to make them more “user friendly” to people “in the field.”

In an interview the day before Rendell read about the program in The Patriot-News and halted it, Powers was clearly proud of that effort.

Comparing himself to the Tommy Lee Jones’ character in the film “The Fugitive,” Powers said, “I don’t care” which side of the issue someone is on — or if they’re innocent. “My concern is public safety.”

There are several emails from local law enforcement officials thanking Powers, telling him they liked to know what was happening in their backyards and appreciated that someone in Harrisburg was paying attention.

Being prepared for protests was a good thing in their minds, and in Powers’ — regardless of whether or not there was an actual terrorist threat.

Powers stuck by that argument after the program was revealed.

“I wrote (the bulletins) and tailored (them) for the guy on the ground who has a three-person police force, and a volunteer fire force and a mayor who serves in two other capacities as well,” Powers testified during the Senate hearing. “It was not about terrorism. It was about all hazard situational awareness. Nobody ever called these groups terrorists or threats.”

“None of that makes any sense to me at all,” Senator Kim Ward, a Republican from Westmoreland County, told Powers. “That we would go monitor private citizens and private groups and they’re not a threat to us .... it’s just for awareness.

“It makes absolutely no sense, and it does make me think, ‘Where are we living?’ "

This story has been updated from an earlier version.