The privacy policy lays out several rules for how the center collects and retains information, much of which is submitted to the center by partnering law enforcement agencies. Among the restrictions: The source of information must be "reliable and verifiable." (The center recently removed a form on its website that allowed users to anonymously submit terrorism tips.) A case file involving First Amendment protected activities cannot be opened unless there is specific information indicating the individual or organization "has, is about to, or has threatened to" commit a crime. Information must be collected "in a lawful manner," and must be kept accurate and current."

Media attorney Mark Anfinson previously told the Minnesota Independent he thinks it’s a strong policy. However, "It’s still just a piece of paper. It’s a pretty good piece of paper at this point. I think it’s well balanced in terms of law enforcement needs and these other concerns, but it doesn’t enforce itself, and so the second part of the equation is still to be solved, which is will the Department of Public Safety and MNJAC follow their policy?"

Most law-enforcement databases are protected with software that automatically keeps a record of every search that’s performed. That way supervisors can easily monitor who is accessing what information.

A records-management system at the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center (MNJAC), however, relies on employees to manually record searches. Data-policy consultant Robert Sykora calls it “an anxiety-provoking flaw” that leaves part of the system open to abuse.

Upgrading to a self-auditing records system is one in a series of recommendations being made by a privacy-policy committee that MNJAC assembled earlier this year. The 10-member committee includes attorneys, law enforcement officials and privacy advocates.

Today, the center’s governing oversight board will consider adopting a privacy policy drafted by the advisory committee.

The draft policy proposes, among other things, that MNJAC accept information only from reliable and verifiable sources, that it refrain from opening cases that involve First Amendment-protected activities unless linked to a specific threat or crime, and that the center regularly purge outdated, inaccurate or otherwise useless data. (Here’s a PDF of the draft privacy policy.)

MNJAC is one of more than 50 “fusion centers” set-up since 9/11 to help local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies share information. Some blame the “siloing” of information for intelligence failures leading up to the attacks — most notably in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the would-be 9/11 participant whose unusual behavior at an Eagan, Minnesota flight-training school was not shared by the FBI with other intelligence agencies.

The concept is to serve as a “funnel point” for information, says MNJAC director Mike Bosacker (pictured). The centers collect and analyze reports from various partners in hopes of spotting trends or patterns individual agencies might miss.

The centers were seeded with federal homeland security grants but are run by local and state governments. They initially focused on terrorism only, but most have since expanded their mission to include others crimes and hazards.

While fusion centers vary significantly in size and scope, one constant is the ire they’ve raised among civil liberties and privacy advocates.

“The lack of proper legal limits on the new fusion centers not only threatens to undermine fundamental American values, but also threatens to turn them into wasteful and misdirected bureaucracies that, like our federal security agencies before 9/11, won’t succeed in their ultimate mission of stopping terrorism and other crime,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a report (PDF) called “What’s Wrong With Fusion Centers,” released in December.

Sykora, a Minnesota ACLU board member as well as member of the MNJAC privacy-policy committee, is chief information officer for the State of Minnesota Board of Public Defense. He’s currently on a leave of absence and working as a consultant for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), which oversees MNJAC.

He prefaces his critique of MNJAC by noting all of the employees he’s worked with have struck him as “decent, honest, hard-working people.” That said, however, effective safeguards like automated search logs are designed to monitor the people you don’t know, he says.

The importance of tracking of who’s accessing what information was illustrated in the news earlier this month. A veteran Minneapolis police officer was indicted for allegedly selling information from a nonpublic police database to someone he thought to be gang member for $100. It’s not only money that leads to such abuses, Sykora notes. Sometimes it’s curiosity. Or spite.

“The angry boyfriend or angry girlfriend scenario is so frequently behind abuses of information that it’s almost comical. Someone’s resentful of their ex-partner’s new partner so they check out the new partner, and they shouldn’t use the system for that,” Sykora says.

By law, certain law-enforcement databases that receive federal funding are required to have software that automatically records searches, Sykora says. Most fusion centers, including MNJAC, have voluntarily agreed to follow that law, which is 28 CFR Part 23.

“I think it’s important that MNJAC find a way as fast as it can to build in an automated audit system, both because common sense demands it and the federal standards they’ve agreed to abide by demand it,” Sykora says. “I know they want to do it, but there are funding and time constraints that have made it impossible to date.”

MNJAC launched in May 2005, but it’s only existed in its current form since last June. That’s when it hired Bosacker, a retired captain from the Eden Prairie Police Department, and transferred the center from Minnesota Homeland Security and Emergency Management to BCA’s umbrella. The move allowed MNJAC to be classified as a law-enforcement agency, which relieved it from some of the state’s data laws that were hindering information sharing.

The center has 12 employees, including Bosacker, an operations manager, liason officers and analysts who collect and review reports submitted by 14 participating agencies. They are both metro and outstate police and sheriffs departments, as well as the FBI and a few state agencies. It’s headquartered on Washington Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, on a different floor of the same building that houses the FBI’s local office.

It’s a relatively small fusion center. The number of full-time employees at fusion centers range from three to 250 and average about 27, according to a Congressional Research Service report issued in January. So far, Minnesota’s fusion center has been exclusively paid for by federal grants. Larger fusion centers have been supplemented by state funding, according to Bosacker.

MNJAC’s annual budget is less than $1 million. It won a $1 million federal grant in 2005 that also covered start-up costs. In 2006 it received $800,000, and in 2007 it was awarded $1.8 million, which is expected to cover the center’s expenses through about spring 2010.

“No decisions have been made in regards to any legislative work at this time,” Bosacker says. “It’s a little early for us to be looking at dollars. It’s up to our oversight group to decide what that agenda might be.”

A memorandum of understanding signed by the partnering agencies (PDF) outlines the regular responsibilities of the center. They include producing two weekly bulletins, one for law enforcement only and another for other government and private sector partners. Earlier this year, for example, it produced a summary of copper theft trends to share with local investigators and others affected.

MNJAC’s primary responsibility is working with the FBI to maintain a web-based data-sharing system called ICEFISHX. It’s a folksy acronym for Intelligence Communications Enterprise for Information Sharing and Exchange. It’s the system that allows law enforcement agencies to upload information.

“Generally, what we’re looking for is a police report, because we want to have that report vetted through a local law enforcement agency,” Bosacker says.

Bosacker says the center does not solicit or mine random data. The type of information going into ICEFISHX is the same as what’s collected by traditional law enforcement agencies, he adds. Almost anything an officer does generates paperwork. The only difference is that in the past, many of those records would have sat in a drawer or on a computer drive, inaccessible to others. MNJAC is gathering those pieces and reviewing them to see if they might fit with a larger puzzle.

That’s a fundamental change for law enforcement, though, points out Chuck Samuelson, director of the Minnesota ACLU. And it’s a change that doesn’t sit well with him.

“I have a visceral problem with government being in the data collection business without more of a focus,” Samuelson says.

The role of police in this country has traditionally focused on solving crimes, Samuelson notes. In his view, MNJAC turns that equation upside down: Instead of investigating crimes that have already happened, it’s investigating crimes that haven’t happened yet.

“When you get in the crime-prevention business rather than the crime-solving business, it gets real fuzzy,” he notes. “Let’s not go down that road unless you can demonstrate that this is going to make us markedly safer.”

It’s the same argument made by the ACLU report: There is scant evidence fusion centers will make us safer but plenty to suggest they’ll impede on rights.

The privacy committee was created by MNJAC to recommend policies for collecting data in a way that respects civil liberties and privacy expectations.

“I want to make sure we’re operating in a way that’s sustainable, because I think this is real important,” Bosacker says. “This is important for the state and the citizens, and I want to do it in a way that we can keep operating.”

Samuelson reluctantly served on the committee, but says his main question — should we have a fusion center in the first place? — wasn’t part of its scope.

“You’re not going to get an endorsement from me for this,” Samuelson declares. “The privacy policy, if you just view it alone, is just fine. And this is not the worst fusion center model that exists in the country. I’m feeling almost like Harry Truman. I’m from Missouri. Show me. Why would I want this?”

Others who served on the committee were more positive about its impact.

“I went into it with some skepticism,” says Mark Anfinson, a prominent Twin Cities media attorney. “There’s often a propensity in government to co-opt one’s potential opponents and adversaries, and it’s a good strategy. By bringing your opponents and adversaries into a process, you can mute their possible future criticism of what you’re doing. I was thinking that might be what was going on, but I concluded it was not at all the case.”

The privacy committee appeared to be a sincere attempt by MNJAC officials to educate themselves about the concerns being raised, Anfinson says. And the result is a privacy policy that, if the board approves it, is a good step toward addressing the concerns.

“It’s still just a piece of paper,” Anfinson cautions. “It’s a pretty good piece of paper at this point. I think it’s well balanced in terms of law enforcement needs and these other concerns, but it doesn’t enforce itself, and so the second part of the equation is still to be solved, which is will the Department of Public Safety and MNJAC follow their policy?… But I’m optimistic based on my observations during the committee process that it will be observed and respected.”

Sykora says one of his two main issues has already been addressed. Until recently, anyone could anonymously submit suspicious activity reports through the center’s website. After Sykora brought his concerns to Bosacker, the site was changed to allow only vetted, approved sources to upload information.

“We’ve already made what I consider a pretty significant step toward avoiding abuses,” Sykora says.

“There’s constant tension between civil liberties and effective law enforcement. As you’re trying to find that balance between going too far one way and going too far the other way, there are just a thousand little discussions you have to have about how best to tune it, to keep it as something that can preserve safety without ruining civil liberties.”

Obama opposes the gas-tax holiday and has said it would only save an average driver about $30 all summer. I haven’t checked out his math, but I don’t see any way in which the McCain-Clinton idea addresses the causes of oil inflation or gets us any closer to a long-term energy solution. It’s like taking a Tylenol to mask the symptoms of something so you can keep doing what you were doing.

“When the summer is over,” Friedman writes, “we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.” His column continues with a description of the important renewable-energy credits that are about to lapse because of inaction and disagreement in Congress. Read it here.

When Minnesota passed one of the nation’s most aggressive renewable electricity standards last year, there was reason to think the law would signal to the renewable energy industry that Minnesota is a good place to do business. It requires that utilities generate 25 percent of electricity from sources like wind, solar or biomass by 2025.

So far there hasn’t been a windfall, and that’s in part because of the intense competition among states to attract “green” manufacturing. As demand increases for wind turbines and solar panels, some predict a wave of new domestic manufacturing jobs.

Our neighbors to the south have perhaps put more into courting these jobs than any other state. Iowa’s governor is known to roam trade show floors. Its economic development office has two employees working exclusively with wind firms. It has an office in Frankfurt, Germany, near many of the major turbine manufacturers. It exempts turbines and other equipment from sales tax. A $100 million “Iowa Power Fund” rewards innovation in renewables and energy efficiency.

So, why can’t Minnesota do what they’re doing?

It’s a question Dentley Haugesag said he gets on a regular basis. Haugesag is Minnesota’s economic development specialist for the wind industry, and he admits Iowa is a formidable competitor.

“Instead of talking about doing it, they’re actually out there doing it,” Haugesag said. “My hat is off to them. They’ve been very successful.”

Continued: Click “Read more”But that success isn’t necessarily Minnesota’s loss, Haugesag said. Wind turbines are made up of lots of parts — things like gears, electronics and hydraulic systems — and some of those parts are already being made in Minnesota for turbine manufacturers in Iowa.

That supply chain is central to Minnesota’s wind strategy, Haugesag said. The state hasn’t committed the resources to chase down turbine manufacturers in Europe, so instead he’s focused on helping existing companies tap into the growing market for wind turbine parts.

Haugesag has been touring the state to meet with manufacturing companies that have the capacity to make various turbine parts. He came up with about 60 that were interested, and information about them is being compiled into a web database that will be unveiled at this year’s wind energy industry conference in June.

So, say you’re a turbine manufacturer and you’re looking for a company to make some gears for you. You could search “gears” and get a list of all the Minnesota companies that are up to the task. The database will also be a tool to convince larger turbine manufacturers that Minnesota would be a convenient place to set up shop.

“This will go farther than Minnesota. This will go farther than Iowa. It might go even global, because now, with the weak dollar, it’s certainly feasible to ship components offshore,” Haugesag said.

It’s a strategy that was born of frugality, he admitted, but added he doesn’t think it’s a bad strategy. It’s maybe a bit like comparing the Minnesota Twins to the New York Yankees. The emphasis is on developing existing talent instead of spending big to bring in star players.

“This is kind of a ground-up approach,” Haugesag said. “I think we’re going to get a lot done. It just might take a little longer, but I think it might be more securely based.”

An opportunity blows past

Last November, Dutch wind-turbine manufacturer Vestas announced its intentions to open a research and development center in the United States that would come with about 80 high-paying jobs. The unusual announcement, via press release, set off a marketing war among more than 30 states hoping to attract the research center.

In Minnesota, Rep. Jeremy Kalin, DFL-North Branch, and Rep. Aaron Peterson, DFL-Appleton, saw an opportunity for Minnesota to attract “green” jobs to the state, and they started organizing an effort to win the company. Gov. Tim Pawlenty reportedly contacted Vestas on his own, and the state’s Department of Employment and Economic Development started preparing its pitch and organizing a letter-writing campaign. The governor, the mayors, University of Minnesota leaders, and others all wrote to the company, according to Haugesag.

Then, a couple months ago, as the state was completing its final proposal to Vestas, the Dutch company announced it had narrowed its choice to five states. Minnesota didn’t make the cut.

“The frustration from a lot of us at the Capitol is that not making the short list wasn’t a [matter] of not being the right state to do it, but actually just not having the right effort out there to sell the state,” Kalin said. “I think folks from the state were really expecting it to be a formal, RFP, old-school 20th-century process, and the business world doesn’t work so much like that anymore.”

While Haugesag said an “energetic” effort was made to win over Vestas, Kalin said the incident is a example of why the state’s effort to attract “green” industry needs to be better organized and better funded.

Kalin said there was confusion during the Vestas process about who was taking the lead. It turned out it was legislators, he said, “because there’s not really capacity in the executive branch — or not commitment — to be a real player at this high level.”

The Vestas miss, as well as conversations with the Blue-Green Alliance, a coalition of the Sierra Club and United Steelworkers, helped prompt Kalin and Peterson to submit a bill that would increase the amount of money and attention spent on recruiting green-collar jobs to Minnesota.

“We need to be on top of this, and we need to be moving as quickly as we can,” Kalin said.

House File 3999 would start a task force similar to the one recently organized by the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul. It would also open existing business infrastructure and job skills development grants to any company that helps the state meet its environmental goals. And it calls on the commerce and economic development departments to partner on a report identifying how all existing grant and loan programs can be used to target the “green” economy.

Kalin said he’s very optimistic the measures will pass this session.

“Right now we all need to work together to identify how we can overcome some challenges in making Minnesota a leader across the board in the green economy,” Kalin said. “As a business venture, and the state is a business venture in some ways on this stuff, we have to do this together, and we have to be all on the same page.”

Each summer, thousands of wind-energy power players gather for a three-day conference featuring speeches, workshops and exhibitions from the biggest names in the industry. For states like Minnesota that are eager to attract wind-energy jobs, it’s a chance to make pitches to the major turbine manufacturers, many of which are based in Europe but are expanding to meet growing demand in the United States.

A typical strategy involves setting up a trade show booth and dispersing economic development employees with stacks of glossy folders touting financial incentives and quality-of-life issues. A handful of states such as Iowa, however, are upping the ante and dispatching governors to personally schmooze company officials at the events.

“That’s pretty hard to compete with. It’s pretty clear who you’re going to meet with first, and who you’re going to remember,” said Rep. Aaron Peterson, DFL-Appleton, who would like to see Gov. Tim Pawlenty follow the lead of some of his peers and play a more personal role in recruiting wind and other green manufacturing jobs to the state.

The use of governors to recruit wind companies is an indicator of the huge potential some see in the future “green economy.” As more states approve laws favoring energy efficiency and renewable electricity, the transition is expected to create a surge of demand for technologies like wind turbines, solar panels and the components that go into them.

And that means jobs. Potentially lots of them.

Continued: Click “Read More”The mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul last week unveiled their strategy for attracting these “green-collar” jobs to the region. Some are questioning, though, whether the mayors’ effort will be limited in what it can accomplish without greater support from the state, and in particular from the governor’s office.

Pawlenty has supported some important renewable energy legislation and made the issue the focus of his time as chairman of the National Governors Association. He’s also, however, reportedly spent about one of every three days this year outside the state, much of it campaigning for John McCain. Some think he needs to spend more time stumping for Minnesota as a place for green jobs.

“What we’re looking for is the governor to get on board with green job creation. We haven’t heard that from him yet,” said Gerry Parzino, a representative of the United Steelworkers. Parzino’s organization will be canvassing fairs and other events across the state this summer seeking to build political support for a state-level green-jobs initiative. “We feel it has to go above [cities] and come down from the state.”

The governor’s communications office did not return a phone call for comment on this story.

Here’s are a few examples of what other governors are doing and how it’s paying off:

• Iowa Gov. Chet Culver manned the Iowa booth for an entire day at last year’s annual wind energy conference in Los Angeles. He also regularly leads delegations to Europe to meet with wind firms. Culver’s commitment follows in the footsteps of his predecessor, Tom Vilsack, and has helped lure five wind turbine manufacturers to set up facilities in the state, bringing 1,500 jobs and $185 million worth of investment.

• Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer was a keynote speaker at last year’s wind energy conference and has met personally with wind turbine manufacturers. Last month, German turbine manufacture Fuhrlander announced plans to build a $25 million plant in Butte that will employ 150 people and up to an additional 600 in the future.
• Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell’s state hosted a green jobs conference earlier this year. After meetings with Spanish wind firm Gamesa, the company decided to spend $84million building its U.S. headquarters in the state.

Rep. Peterson said he thinks it’s critical for Pawlenty to be more involved if Minnesota is going to be successful in attracting similar investment.

“If the governor’s not involved, Rybak and Coleman can do all this stuff. That’s great. The unions can talk about it, and everybody can get fired up about it and have a series of meetings that never end,” Peterson said, but “you need the governor to, for lack of a better way of putting it, to wine and dine these people. They’ve got lots of options of states that want them come to their state. You need to recruit them at the highest, highest level.”

Tuesday: Minnesota has a “ground-up” strategy to generate green manufacturing jobs, but some think the effort could use powering up.

Their publicists released a short and vague announcement: “Attention Canadians! Tonight’s Atmosphere performance in Toronto at the Opera House has been canceled due to border restrictions put in place by the order of the Canadian government and her queen. We regret the inconvenience. This show will be rescheduled for a later date.”

The Wall Street Journal wrote last fall that musicians are having increasing difficultly getting visas to perform across borders, even as the Internet makes their music more accessible around the globe. Are Slug and crew caught up in the same security trend that kept Brit Amy Winehouse from attending the Grammys?

Aggressive hedge-fund investors have played a significant and underreported role in bidding up the price of grocery store items, the article says, in a scheme one analyst equated as “evidence that capitalism is literally consuming itself.”

Farmers and grain wholesalers have long used futures markets as a way to minimize short-term price fluctuations caused by things like storms or drought. At the Chicago Futures Exchange, the regulars are “mainly farmers and silo operators.”

In recent years, though, many index fund managers have looked to food commodities as a way to boost profits, the article says. So now, instead of just grain wholesalers bidding for farmers’ crops, you have a group of deep-pocketed fund managers bidding, too.

One commodities dealer says the trend demands an ethical discussion. Food has become so expensive that prices are sparking riots around the equator, which is the cover story of this week’s Economist. One paragraph in particular stopped me in my tracks:

Click “Read More” to continue reading…

… In Haiti, protesters chanting “We’re hungry” forced the prime minister to resign; 24 people were killed in riots in Cameroon; Egypt’s president ordered the army to start baking bread; the Philippines made hoarding rice punishable by life imprisonment …

Why aren’t we hearing more about this? Well, as Stephen Colbert put it, “When you’re covering a landmark presidential campaign, little stories sometimes fall through the cracks. For instance, the small matter of a massive global food shortage”…

In a telephone survey last month, 37 percent of 1,012 adults interviewed said they worry a “great deal” about global warming. That’s virtually unchanged from 19 years ago, when 35 percent responded the same way.

The findings call into question both the impact of and the interest in the deluge of news media and pop culture coverage of “green” issues in recent years.

“The trend data suggest that despite the growing attention to and emphasis on global warming in recent years, there has been no consistent increase in worry about it since Gallup began asking the question way back in 1989,” a Gallup analysis says.

More Americans claim to understand global warming today than did in previous polls. That figure is up to 80 percent compared to 53 percent in a poll 16 years ago.

Strangely, the percentage of Americans who say global warming “will pose a serious threat to you or your way of life in your lifetime” — 40 percent — is higher than the percentage who say they worry about it a great deal.

The Gallup poll appears to be consistent with a Pew Research Center survey last year that measured American’s political priorities. Among a list of 21 issues, global warming ranked dead last for Republicans. Maybe that’s to be expected, but less than half of Democrats surveyed said global warming was a top priority. For Democrats, global warming was fifth from the bottom, tied with illegal immigration and just a few points ahead of morality.

Below the jump, see the Gallup chart on global warming attitudes over time.

Continued: Click “Read More”
]]> http://minnesotaindependent.com/3698/gallup-poll-most-americans-not-too-worried-about-global-warming/feed http://minnesotaindependent.com/3689/in-defense-of-doing-something http://minnesotaindependent.com/3689/in-defense-of-doing-something#comments Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:58:44 +0000 Dan Haugen http://www.minnesotaindependent.com.php5-9.websitetestlink.com/?p=3689

Here’s for all the cynics out there: Michael Pollan, author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” argues in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine why seemingly small, individual steps to save the planet are worth taking:

Continued: Click “Read more”

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

The Minneapolis City Council voted this morning on logistics for adopting instant-runoff or ranked-choice voting in the city, but the ordinance cleared without unanimous support and only after significant debate on an amendment to count mismarked ballots.

Instant runoff lets voters rank candidates in order of preference. Council member Cam Gordon introduced an amendment that would continue counting a voter’s ballot if he or she skipped a ranking. For example, a ballot that ranks Candidate A first, Candidate B third and Candidate C fourth. Gordon’s amendment would assume the voter meant to mark the candidates first, second and third. “In my opinion it’s pretty clear, and it’s not a guessing game,” Gordon said.

The amendment eventually passed, but not without a warning from the city’s elections director, Cindy Reichert. “It assumes that we know what the voter meant,” Reichert said. She gave an example of a voter who marked Candidate A first and then only marked Candidate D fourth because “this is the last person I want.”

Council President Barbara Johnson and Council nenbers Sandy Colvin Roy and Lisa Goodman opposed the amendment. Council members Diane Hofstede and Don Samuels were absent.

“We’d make up the voter’s mind. It’s stunning to me,” Johnson said.

After the ordinance passed, the City Council gave city elections staff permission to release a request for proposals seeking elections equipment from venders that complies with the new ordinance. According to a referendum passed by voters in the city, officials are required to have instant-runoff voting in place by the 2009 city elections.