The Collin County Observer

Forrest Wilder of the Texas Observer has been researching the North Central Texas Fusion System. In today's Observer he reports on the loose and vague system that purports to keep us safe in the War on Terror.

Bill

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Dr. Bob's Terror Shop

The strange and scary story of the North Central Texas Fusion System.

Forrest Wilder, The Texas Observer
April 03, 2009

One morning in February, more than 2,000 cops, fire marshals, and public health officials in the Dallas-Fort Worth area received a memo—stamped “For Official Use Only”—that contained shocking information: Middle Eastern terrorists and “their supporting organizations” had gained a stronghold in America. The memo warned:

A number of organizations in the U.S. have been lobbying Islamic-based issues for many years. These lobbying efforts have turned public and political support towards radical goals such as Shariah law and support of terrorist military action against Western nations. ... [T]he threats to Texas are significant.

Who were these Osama bin Lobbyists who had convinced Americans to support terrorism? Citing a grab bag of right-wing blogs and news sources, the memo lists the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the International Action Center, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism—“ANSWER”—and former Democratic U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. It also suggests that a class on Islamic finance taught at the Treasury Department “indicates the possibility that the government hopes to secure recycled petrodollars in exchange for conforming to Shariah economic doctrine.” The memo ends by calling on law enforcement to “report” the activities of the organizations.

The missive reads like a rant by a paranoid conspiracy nut. In fact, the so-called “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” is a weekly product of the North Central Texas Fusion System, a terrorism and crime-prevention intelligence center run by the Collin County Department of Homeland Security. The system gathers and shares information for a 16-county area that includes Dallas and Forth Worth. The bulletin is written by the architect and operator of the fusion system, Bob Johnson, a former chief scientist for defense contractor Raytheon Co. Johnson has a background in data mining, the controversial, computer-aided practice of trolling massive quantities of data in pursuit of patterns and links.

At Raytheon, Johnson oversaw a short-lived project in Garland for the U.S. Special Forces Command that mined public information as well as classified files to sniff out Al-Qaida. The program, identified in congressional testimony as Able Danger, generated attention in 2005 and 2006 when former Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican, claimed that Able Danger had identified Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, before the terror attacks. Weldon asserted that Johnson had told him that he personally had identified Atta. The allegations fired up 9/11 conspiracy buffs, but were dismissed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Inspector General of the Department of Defense.

Among his critics in Texas, Johnson is better known as “Son of Sam”—the son of U.S Rep. Sam Johnson, the conservative Republican congressman who has represented Collin County since 1992.

In 2004, Collin County tapped ADB Consulting LLC, which stands for Anita and Dr. Bob, to build the fusion system. Anita Miller, also a former Raytheon employee, is Johnson’s wife. On the couple’s personal Web site, anitaanddrbob.com, which has since been taken down, they wrote that they were “ecstatic” to “be implementing a system similar to what we have advocated since before 9/11 for the security of our homeland. For us, the Fusion System is a dream come true!”

Their dream has been profitable. Since 2004, Anita and Dr. Bob have received $1.1 million in no-bid contracts. At least $80,000 of that money has been passed along, in the form of a subcontract, to Anita’s brother, Elbert Bassham, who runs a one-person consulting firm listed at a Marfa post-office box that he shares with a beauty salon.

“I’m not aware of any other fusion center that has a husband-and-wife team building, running, and managing it,” says James Paat, CEO of Sypherlink Inc., an Ohio-based data integration company that lost the subcontract. In a 2007 letter to Collin County, Paat accused ADB Consulting of rigging the scoring process and asked that the contract be rescinded.

Funding for the fusion system comes from state and federal Homeland Security grants as well as Collin County funds.

“It certainly has the stench of corruption,” says Mohamed Elibiary, an interfaith leader from Plano who has called for more oversight of fusion systems. Collin County put management of the fusion center up for competitive bidding in March, but County Judge Keith Self says the system is so customized that it’s unlikely that anyone else can run it.

Contacted by the Observer at his home in Santa Fe, Johnson said he wouldn’t respond to media inquiries. Asked whether he has a responsibility to taxpayers to answer questions about the system, Johnson responded, “I have a responsibility to Collin County; that’s all.”

The February bulletin isn’t the only questionable Johnson product. He has designed tools that purport to measure, at any given moment, the threat of terrorism at the global, regional, and local levels. The World Terrorism Metric relies on computer models that crunch vast quantities of raw information culled from the Internet. The threat level is presented on a gauge; the needle moves as the terror risk increases or decreases.

Johnson claims the output is unbiased. The assumptions built into the model are certainly inventive. Factors include the price of a barrel of oil (divided by three), the level of democratic activity as measured by the number of business-related words in Internet news stories, and the movement of options contracts (Johnson trades options on the side). Happily, in February the North Central Texas gauge registered a threat level of zero.

It’s tempting to dismiss the fusion center as one man’s risible, if expensive, computer science project. But the U.S. Department of Homeland Security took the menacing February memo seriously enough that it sent a three-person team to train North Texas fusion personnel on federal rules. In 2007, a former senior intelligence analyst for the Collin County fusion system described the center to an online trade publication as the “wild west,” a place where analysts could try out new technologies before “politics” caught up with them.

So what, exactly, is Dr. Bob building in there?

read the rest of the story here....