Napolitano at a DHS press conference in March.

The young Department of Homeland Security funded numerous domestic surveillance programs in the Bush Administration, and privacy rights groups are concerned about how new Secretary Janet Napolitano will manage this inheritance.

While the Obama Administration has promised a transparent government, privacy watchdogs see the increasing availability of technology that can track millions of citizens as risk to the Fourth Amendment freedom from illegal search and seizure.

In an effort to alleviate these concerns, Napolitano announced the decision to stop development of spy satellite programs proposed in 2007, which would have given state and local law enforcement access to satellite footage.

“This action will allow us to focus our efforts on more effective information sharing programs that better meet the needs of law enforcement, protect the civil liberties and privacy of all Americans, and make our country more secure,” said Napolitano in a press release Tuesday.

Another example of DHS information sharing can be seen in the “fusion centers” run by individual states, which compile surveillance into databases accessible to law enforcement agencies nationwide. According to the Department of Homeland Security, funding these programs began in 2002, to promote terrorism awareness and prevent more attacks like the bombing of the World Trade Center in 2001. There are now 58 databases nationwide.

Along with tracking suspected terrorists and criminals, data mining has also been used to track anti-war protest groups, which were included as a risk to national security on recent DHS terrorist watch lists. Recent examples include protests in March, which called attention to the anniversary of the Iraq War, according to Elaine Brower, an organizer with anti-war coalition World Can’t Wait.

“In major cities like Philadelphia and Denver, police have tech squads that take pictures and video of protestors’ license plates and everything they else can take pictures of,” said Brower. “That feeds into their fusion centers, so police in other cities know where else demonstrators have been.”

Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union want these fusion centers closed, claiming they cannot compile data on citizens without a warrant or suspicions of wrongdoing.

“They have switched surveillance from being targeted at specific terrorists to bulk collection that collects information on everyone, whose innocence is ruled out later,” said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel with the ACLU. “There is no evidence that these sort of programs work, that by grabbing everything you can put it into a magic computer somewhere and a terrorist will come up… We’re not trying to muck up information-gathering, we’re just trying to make sure [police] don’t cross that constitutional line.”

These concerns now rest with Napolitano, who was a leading voice for expanding government security as former governor of Arizona.

While she opposed a physical border fence, she supported a security network, known as the virtual border fence, to guard against drug crime and illegal immigration from the nearby Mexican border.

Napolitano instituted license plate tracking with speed cameras, called for electronic tracking of driver’s licenses with radio frequency chips and developed grids of security cameras in some areas near the border.

Some citizens in towns with border surveillance camera networks such as Green Valley, AZ, have complained that the cameras have vantage points into their bedroom, according to Alessandra Soler Meetze, executive director of the ACLU in Arizona.

“Napolitano has embraced tech to the detriment of Arizonans, and I have no doubt she’s going to continue to support domestic surveillance technology,” said Meetze. “Arizona is a real libertarian state where people don’t like the government in their face and business, so she should have been a real ardent supporter of privacy rights, but she wasn’t. Some elected officials see technology as a panacea.”

Along with calling for the closure of fusion centers, Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., hopes that Napolitano will temper her enthusiasm for technology.

“We call the DHS ‘Big Brother’s Laboratory’,” said Rotenberg. “These fusion centers operate on no legal basis and skirt state open government laws…Countries have the rights to police their borders, but that could be expanded to a rationale that those powers are limitless, so that’s something to keep an eye on.”

While Napolitano admitted at a March 13 news conference certain DHS programs have not worked well, she believes that the agency has passed its birthing pains and new technology is the key to its effectiveness.

“I believe that Fusion Centers will be the centerpiece of state, local, federal intelligence-sharing for the future,” said Napolitano at a conference on March 13. “We will make sure that we have effective law enforcement in this country while respecting the rights of American citizens, and that means the rightest of the rights of American citizens.”

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