Intelligence database worrying some

AUSTIN — After a commercial airline pilot testified before a government agency against the construction of a nuclear power plant, the Department of Public Safety intelligence division investigated him as a potential terrorist who might fly his passenger-loaded airplane into such a plant.

The First Unitarian Church of Dallas hosted talks by a gay-rights group and was labeled by DPS intelligence as the "sponsor of radical-left groups."

The manager of a West Texas Chamber of Commerce announced that he would challenge the House Appropriations Committee chairman's re-election. The man immediately lost his job, and the DPS created a dossier on him and his wife that was circulated at the Capitol.

The DPS at the time was building a massive intelligence computer database on Texas residents that would be shared among law enforcement agencies. Then-Gov. Dolph Briscoe put a halt to it, saying it appeared to lack safeguards against an invasion of privacy.

All of that occurred in 1974 and embarrassed the DPS nationally. The agency destroyed the intelligence files and apologized to the Dallas church. But now the scandal is all but forgotten, and some civil libertarians fear that it could be repeated.

In the current world of terrorist threats, the Legislature this year expanded police surveillance powers and declined to put tighter controls on an intelligence computer database being built at the insistence of Gov. Rick Perry's office.

Political aspect

Two-thirds of the House voted to remove management of the computer from Perry's staff and give it entirely to DPS, but the measure was not part of the final border security law, Senate Bill 11, signed by the governor. Civil libertarians remain concerned that the database will be misused in the future, particularly if managed by a political office such as a governor's.

"I do not take lightly the issue of backpack nuclear bombs. So we need to do a better job," said state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, an opponent of the new database. "But the over-reach we're seeing here is phenomenal."

Perry's director of homeland security, Steve McCraw — the driving force behind the Texas Data Exchange (TDEx) computer — declined to be interviewed.

Perry spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger said the computer is meant to be nothing more than a centralized system to allow law enforcement agencies across Texas to share data that already is being kept by individual police and sheriff's departments.

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