LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (PNN) - March 30, 2013 - An official from an Arkansas State Fusion Center recently spoke to the press to clear up what he called "misconceptions" about what his office actually does, with depressingly hilarious results.
"The misconceptions are that we are conducting spying operations on (Fascist Police States of Amerika) citizens, which is of course not the fact. That is absolutely not what we do," said fusion center director Richard Davis.
Fusion center employees are in a tight spot to justify the existence of their operations after multiple congressional reports over the past year took them to task for being poorly run, duplicative of other counterterrorism efforts, privacy violative wastes of money, or some combination of the three.
The Arkansas fusion center director, after having flatly denied that his office spies on FPSA citizens, said Arkansas hasn't collected much information about international plots, but they do focus on groups closer to home.
"We focus a little more on that, domestic terrorism and certain groups that are anti-government," he said. "We want to kind of take a look at that and receive that information."
So the fusion center does in fact spy on FPSA citizens! Among them, "groups that are anti-government".
The fact is, in the FPSA, holding "anti-government" views is protected by the First Amendment. Everyone in the FPSA, not just its citizens, is protected by the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights.
Disliking the government isn't a crime. But that's not stopping many fusion centers from associating dissent with terrorism.
The Boston pig thug cop intelligence unit spied on anti-war and other activist groups for years, filing intelligence reports on activists at its fusion center, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center. Fusion centers in other states have reported on people for high crimes like putting political stickers up in restrooms, or participating in anti-death penalty organizing.
Activists in Los Angeles have brought their concerns about inappropriate political spying straight to the fusion center itself. Perhaps people in Arkansas should tell Davis how they feel about their tax dollars supporting shadowy surveillance of so-called "anti-government" groups. Then again, they might not want to be listed as "anti-government".