After September 11, 2001, Congress ordered the creation of an "information sharing environment" to improve communication between law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Instead of better "connecting the dots," the government and law enforcement executives developed a problematic system to generate more data dots concerning everyday activities. This counterproductive effort threatens to erode community trust and clog intelligence pipelines with junk data derived from racial, ethnic, religious, and ideological bias. While information sharing is a worthy goal, the shift in focus to "non-criminal activity" can only make the task harder; it is problematic for a democratic society from the standpoints of both safety and civil liberties.

Having recently completed a two-year pilot project in twelve cities nationwide, the Department of Justice and Director of National Intelligence are prepared to link up local “Suspicious Activity Reporting” (SAR) programs into a national network and deploy it to all 72 intelligence fusion centers.

 

In this report, which includes a case study of Los Angeles' SAR-processing center, PRA:

• Exposes the structural flaws that promote a reliance on existing prejudices and stereotypes;
• Explains how the program erodes our Constitutional civil liberties;
• Places the SAR Initiative in the context of a vast domestic intelligence matrix; and
• Questions the basic soundness of the new “Intelligence Led Policing” paradigm
  

• Executive Summary & Recommendations (PDF)
• Full Report (PDF)
• Press Release (PDF)