The Oregon Court of Appeals has reversed a trial court’s dismissal of Farrell-Smith v. Oregon Department of Justice. The plaintiffs are suing the Oregon Department of Justice (ODOJ), the Attorney General, and the Chief Counsel of ODOJ’s Criminal Justice Division over their questionable authority to operate a domestic intelligence unit called the Oregon TITAN Fusion Center: Terrorism Information Threat Analysis Network. This is one of many nationwide intelligence hubs developed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to assess or anticipate threats post-9/11. The plaintiffs allege that TITAN surveils politicians and activists based on their views, instead of on any suspected criminality: and this is outside TITAN’s executive mandate.
Plaintiffs have presented evidence TITAN routinely monitors activists that oppose the Jordan Cove Liquified Natural Gas Pipeline, without a “criminal nexus” for these investigations. TITAN is also improperly colluding with a private PR firm (Teneo) and a pipeline-funded sheriff’s unit to gather information while bypassing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requirements. Privacy is also being violated when TITAN applies software to track on social media those who use the Black Lives Matter hashtag. And plaintiffs object to ODOJ’s secrecy in blocking public scrutiny and media record requests about demonstrations (i.e., Women’s March) by invoking broad “criminal intelligence” exemptions.
The trial court rejected the case partly because it interpreted the lawsuit as a request to shut down TITAN, whereas the Court of Appeals adjusted this aim to this being a challenge to the legality of TITAN’s cited operations. The case is asking: is it legal for a government agency to collect intelligence on citizens despite a lack of a suspicion of criminality? The appellate answer is that ODOJ is bound by the powers Oregon has assigned to it, or investigating: organized crime, public corruption or searching for investments of criminally implicated funds. Investigating outside these boundaries means TITAN is acting without a legal mandate. TITAN attempted to defend its actions by using loosely related laws, such as ORS 181A.250 that is inapplicable because it prohibits the collection of data based on political, religious or social views. The court rejected that obtaining a grant or a letter of acknowledgement from Governor Kitzhaber gave TITAL a special mandate.
There have been several federal lawsuits by civil liberties groups making FOIA requests to expose DHS-supported fusion centers spying on non-criminals. For example, a 2008 FOIA request revealed the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center (MCAC) had investigated anti-death penalty and peace groups; the outcome of litigation was forcing the dismantling of the research files MCAC had gathered. And in 2025, ACLU v. Department of Justice was dismissed after a FOIA request succeeded in proving FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and DHS fusion centers were investigating non-criminals by grouping radical causes with minorities and “domestic terrorism”. This Oregon case is a first state litigation that challenges the legality of such agencies to investigate non-criminals, as opposed to merely seeking FOIA data that this illegal surveillance exists. Legal scholars hope that if this Oregon case continues to see positive outcomes, it might help dismantle the 79 fusion centers across the U.S.
The lack of past accountability over these fusion centers might stem in conservatives’ successful attempts to redefine “communism”, “socialism” and other pro-justice and pro-humanist causes as amoral and thus equivalent to illegal. Mis-programmed voters tend to mis-define “communism” as totalitarianism or a lack of individual rights. They have been taught to assume there is something amoral about supporting equal rights for all, including racial and economic rights. It is in the interests of all humans to support other humans, but this re-programming turns this rational goodness into the opposite. The beneficiaries of this reversal are monopolists and pro-totalitarian rulers who prefer to limit rights: the opposite of the stated objective. Fusion centers are a present Big Brother experiment: it is an extreme form of totalitarian socialism of the Soviet variety. If DOJ’s entities are investigating non-criminals for conservatives’ political gains, they are not spending this time investigating the true criminals. Resources are being wasted to support one of two of America’s parties, while letting criminals continue criming to the detriment of us all.
