Lieutenant Michael Johnston, director of the state police’s intelligence unit, the Maine Information and Analysis Center (MIAC), on Thursday led a group of reporters down the bare corridors of an administrative building on the outskirts of Augusta.
Entering a windowless office with a cluster of cubicles at its center, he pointed to a flatscreen TV on the wall. “This is always on the news. We keep it balanced. CNN and FOX,” he said.
Reporters had just spent the previous hour in a nearby conference room asking Johnston if his agency is indeed biased. The agency has been revealed to have collected intelligence on public demonstrations by groups with certain politics while not giving the same attention to other demonstrations of a different ideological bent.
During the meeting, a state lawmaker also grilled him on MIAC’s nearly $800,000 annual budget, asking whether the agency was even necessary for public safety.
MIAC is part of the Department of Homeland Security’s network of state-run “fusion centers” created after 9/11 to gather and disseminate intelligence to law enforcement and private-sector clients about potential terrorist threats. The fusion center has come under increased scrutiny after a data breach last month revealed the agency had tracked anti-racism protests across Maine. Analysts shared unsubstantiated rumors from extreme right groups with their corporate partners, including Avangrid, Hannaford’s, ExxonMobile and Bath Iron Works.
Johnston, with Maine Department of Public Safety officials, invited reporters inside the agency’s headquarters to dispel its characterization as a “spy” organization.
“I think sometimes people have an impression of us that we’re some sort of extension of the [National Security Agency] — that we’re doing mass surveillance,” he said. “This is a bunch of kind of cubicle dwellers, for lack of a better term. We don’t have a collection arm. We’re not engaged in the collection of human intelligence.”
Fusion center didn’t track right-wing ReOpen protests
MIAC director Lieutenant Michael Johnston speaks with a reporter in the fusion center office on Thursday. | Dan Neumann, Beacon
Documents from MIAC contained in the “BlueLeaks” data breach, a trove of files hacked from more than 200 law enforcement agencies nationwide and published online in June, showed that police were closely tracking anti-racist demonstrations that sprang up across Maine in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. They monitored locations, tactics, sponsors and likely attendance of rallies in situational awareness reports titled “CIVIL UNREST DAILY REPORT,” which were shared with local law enforcement and private-sector partners.
In May, details emerged from a whistleblower lawsuit by Maine State Trooper George Loder, who alleged the agency collected information on anti-CMP corridor organizers and volunteers and counselors with Seeds of Peace, a camp for young people from conflict areas.
However, the leaks did not reveal that the fusion center was collecting information on the “ReOpen Maine” demonstrations that were organized by Maine Republicans in April.
On Thursday, Johnston confirmed that the fusion center did not monitor those protests, even with far-right groups like the Proud Boys and armed militia groups like the Three Percenters involved in ReOpen protests in other states. In Michigan, armed protesters occupied the state house, carrying nooses and Confederate and swastika flags.
“We still supported law enforcement, but we didn’t think it necessarily lent itself to daily situational awareness,” he said, explaining that the ReOpen protests were confined to one area and didn’t involve multiple police forces, unlike the anti-racism protests.
Reporters asked if the differing responses to these public demonstrations was because, unlike the ReOpen protests, Black Lives Matter protests have challenged police legitimacy through calls to move money from their budgets to other community needs. Public Safety Commissioner Michael Sauschuck said it wasn’t.
“We don’t look at it like it’s far right or far left. We’re trying to coordinate things to the best of our ability,” Sauschuck said. “On one Friday, we had 15 to 16 [anti-racism] protests that were happening all over the state. Many of those communities, many of those police departments were in fact asking the Maine State Police for assistance. They didn’t know how many people were coming.”
‘It’s just bad intelligence’
Sauschuck and Johnston also said that instances of fusion center analysts assessing and choosing to share intelligence from right-wing sources that turned out to be false also did not necessarily indicate a political bias within the agency.
The fusion center has shared a report on piles of bricks set out at anti-racism protests in Boston that originated from a far-right Facebook page run by a pro-Trump biker, as well as a report on a satirical website, “protestjobs.com,” warning police that protesters were being paid by unknown sources to cause violence.
“It’s just bad intelligence,” said University of Southern Maine criminology professor Brendan McQuade, author of the 2019 book, “Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision,” which documents the rise of fusion centers as part of the mass surveillance infrastructure built after 9/11.
“You need to explain how this can happen,” McQuade told Johnston, “You said intelligence products are peer reviewed. It doesn’t reflect well on that.”
Johntson didn’t say if any corrections were issued after those false reports were shared, or if specific changes had been made to prevent it from happening again. He did say political bias wasn’t tolerated.
“You start out by picking the right people and having a robust hiring process. And then you also have procedures and policies in place that make sure that that behavior is certainly not tolerated,” he said.
‘What is it that you actually do?’
When asked by reporters, Johnston said the fusion center did not, as a matter of policy, collect any quantitative data on whether and how often their work contributes to criminal convictions. He said their success as an agency is mainly established qualitatively.
In a PowerPoint presentation, Johnston detailed two instances where potential crimes were brought to the attention of the fusion center by community members and resulted in an arrest. One came from a tip about a 25-year-old man who posted videos threatening to commit a shooting at a Walmart. Another involved an anonymous man who was apparently prostituting underage girls through social media.
“I’m sure these posts were reported to local law enforcement,” said state Rep. Charlotte Warren (D-Hallowell), the House chair of the legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee.
After the data breach, activists and some lawmakers including Warren voiced support for defunding the fusion center.
“What is it that you actually do that’s not being done by other organizations?” Warren asked Johnston.
“You’re asking is the juice worth the squeeze? I think it is,” Johnston said, “but I think it’s a question best put to some of the police departments we support.”
Warren further shared her thoughts in a social media post following the media tour. “I’ve spent hours and hours earnestly trying to learn how they make Mainers safer. Their public safety functions are duplicative at best and present serious privacy issues at worst. It’s time to close it and use the money elsewhere,” she wrote.
Top photo: Fusion center director Lieutenant Michael Johnston gives reporters a tour of the agency’s headquarters. | Dan Neumann, Beacon.
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