Hi all,

Just a quick update: Our trip to the Grants Administration Office in Middleton which was scheduled for today had to be rescheduled due to a broken air conditioning in the building. We will now be going on Wednesday, July 7th.

Updates will follow.

Carolyn

Greetings! I’m Carolyn McVeigh, a senior undergraduate Political Science major at Stanford University. I am fortunate enough to be one of the summer interns working with the Information Society Project (ISP). Specifically, I am assisting the Media Freedom and Information Access (MFIA) group with their quest to increase government transparency and the public’s right to know. I will be posting blogs throughout my time at the ISP to update on our research findings and to document the process of our achievements in attaining more liberal media and information access.

On Monday I will be joining a few members of MFIA on a trip to the Grants Administration (GA) at the Department of Public Safety in Middleton, CT. The GA is responsible for the management of all federal and state grants and acts as the “central conduit for all grant related program issues.” Our objective is to determine the specifics of the allocations of the 2003 Department of Homeland Security Grants (DHS). We hope to obtain information from the documents that will inform us of whether or not the grant money was distributed appropriately.

In particular we will be focusing on the 2003 sub grant to the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security (DEMHS), the State Administrative Agency for Homeland Security Grant funding. DEMHS has administered more than $125 million in federal funding to enhance homeland security and “all-hazard preparedness” across the state. Additionally, DEMHS is working with local agencies to “establish, equip, and train five Regional Response Teams capable of handling any type of Terrorist occurrence.” All of these plans are created to comply with the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and supportive of both the State’s and National strategies. The 2003 DEMHS sub grant had a state budget exceeding $2.4 million and a local budget surpassing $300,000. We expect to find out the specifics of the allotting of this money and the legality of such activities.

By pairing grant dollars with homeland security and emergency management programs, SPGA (Strategic Planning and Grant Administration) helps to further the agency’s mission of “directing and coordinating all available resources to protect the life and property of the citizens of Connecticut in the event of a disaster or crisis.” We will be looking to establish whether or not the DEMHS sub grants were budgeted in a manner that properly sought to achieve such objectives.

On a similar note, Connecticut is home to one of our nations 72 Fusion Centers. They are state, local and regional institutions created to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different state, local and federal law enforcement agencies. The range of their mission has rapidly expanded with the support and encouragement of the federal government; they are now meant to cover “all crimes and all hazards.” It seems that several Fusion Centers are partaking in intelligence activities that raise civil liberties and privacy concerns. There is a severe lack of proper legal structure with Fusion Centers that makes their fundamental mission of preventing terrorist activities very difficult. Since the mission of DEHMS and Fusion Centers are parallel, by looking into the 2003 grant spending, we may acquire knowledge that sheds light on the impact of Fusion Centers. Perhaps we will gain information that strengthens the belief that Fusion Centers are both intrusive to our civil liberties and ineffective as anti-terrorism facilities.

I will update everyone about our findings on Monday!