Race and its influence in law enforcement activity has once again returned to the national stage as the government pushes through with the prosecution of a former federal agent. Terry J. Albury, 39, a former counterterrorism officer in the FBI, was charged last month with leaking classified documents on programs of the Bureau that targeted minority communities for surveillance and intelligence collection. Albury, who is black, claims that these programs discriminated against minorities and treated them unfairly and with disrespect.
During court proceedings, no specific news outlets were named that had published stolen documents. The best guess as to where the information was released was a series of stories posted by The Intercept in January of last year that detailed the methods in which the FBI assesses and manages informants. The story references a secret document dated Aug. 17, 2011 that deals with assessing informants and recruiting them by identifying their “motivations and vulnerabilities.”
The evidence against Albury was pretty damning from the beginning. The FBI identified 27 documents—16 marked classified—that The Intercept published, and found that Albury had accessed more than two-thirds of them. Additionally, surveillance footage from Albury’s office showed him taking pictures of his computer screen on several occasions.
Last week, Albury plead guilty to “unlawful disclosure and retention of national defense information,” each of which is a felony under statutes of the Espionage Act. Under his plea agreement, Albury faces a likely sentence of between 37 and 57 months in prison, but the decision will be up to US District Judge Wilhelmina Wright, who did not set a sentencing date.
Complicated Motives
Albury’s case is an interesting one. The former FBI agent seems to have been genuinely motivated by a desire to right some perceived wrongs that were committed by his former employer, not a personal vendetta to expose the federal government. Albury served the United States with distinction domestically during his substantial career, and overseas where he was deployed in Iraq for a tour, conducting fieldwork and intelligence coordination for FBI counter-terror efforts. According to his lawyers, Albury’s actions were driven by a “conscientious commitment to long-term national security and addressing the well-documented systemic biases within the FBI,” and he felt a duty to do so, being the only African-American FBI field agent in Minnesota.
The question that really needs to be asked about the Albury case is: What exactly was the former agent hoping to achieve through his actions?
Albury clearly believed that the policies of the FBI in its intelligence gathering work were illegitimate and unjust. But did Albury want to protest specific tactics and strategies being used by the Bureau or completely undermine the agency’s counterterrorism work?
We may never know what specifically Albury had in mind. Certainly no answer to the above question has been made clear thus far in the course of legal proceedings.
What is clear, however, is that the Albury case is being used as fuel for the “racist law enforcement” narrative that has been espoused in the United States over the past several years.
Trends within the FBI have had an important place within the broader police discrimination debate. This is partly because of the simple fact that the agency is the highest law enforcement organization in the country. But it is also due to the unique missions the FBI has to undertake, such as intelligence collection and the targeting of national-level groups for investigation.
Late last year, the public began to learn of the FBI’s designation of “Black Identity Extremists,” or BIE, to categorize various activist groups. According to an FBI report on the topic, BIE ideology promotes violence against law enforcement to retaliate against “perceived police brutality against African Americans.” Not surprisingly, the very fact that this designation even exists caused an uproar. Outlets from the New York Times to the Huffington Post decried the concept of BIE as absurd and nothing more than an idea crafted to legitimize the harassing of activist groups by the federal government. BIE has also gotten flack from the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE). The organization’s leaders have asserted the BIE designation has “no value” in helping law enforcement objectives.
Albury’s case has given support to claims of discrimination in the FBI and is being touted as more evidence of the Bureau’s systemic “race problems.”
Unfortunately, these assertions of a racist FBI have two profound flaws: A complete disregard for a substantial history of incidents connected to black identity activists and the false belief that methods of intelligence strategy and threat assessment are based on ideology.
Let’s attempt to break this down.
First, even proponents of black identity groups and their goals cannot escape the fact that their ideologies have been connected to violence and aggression. The track record spans several years and includes incidents all over the United States, including violent protests at universities, attacks on police officers, and multiple incidents of protesters calling for the killing of police officers.
To this the critic will respond: “but these incidents do not reflect the goals of most black activists and these actions have nothing to do with the ideology of their organizations.”
Yes. That is absolutely correct. Violent incidents may have nothing to do with the actual ideology they are committed in the name of. But it doesn’t matter.
Which brings us to the second point.
The FBI, like all law enforcement agencies, whether at the local, state, or federal level, is fundamentally unconcerned with political ideologies. Political leanings of individuals can of course be factors in determining their threat level and how exactly they are investigated, and, to be frank, this is a factor that anyone with a smidgen of sense would hope is weighed. If an individual regularly espouses support for ISIS on public internet forums, for instance, should that fact be ignored in deciding how much of a threat he poses to the public? Sentiment toward jihadism isn’t in essence the problem, obviously; rather, expressing those opinions is a major indicator as to how dangerous this person may be.
When addressing activist groups, all security professionals (governmental or private) have to make assessments on just how much of a threat is posed by a given group, regardless of their politics. Very often groups with philosophies that would seem completely benign on the surface are in fact extremely dangerous. The world of animal rights activism, for example, has produced some of the most extreme militant groups imaginable.
In summary, ideologies don’t matter from a security perspective. Actions do. Once a pattern of actions becomes strongly connected to a certain ideology, that creates a reason to be concerned with groups that espouse that ideology.
In light of this, we can understand that claims that Black Identity Extremism is a “fictitious phenomenon the FBI created” are a tad extreme to say the least. This reality becomes even starker when considering that the FBI actively seeks to minimize racial prejudice within American law enforcement agencies and continues to heavily invest in racially diversifying its own ranks.
Terry Albury clearly had some ethical misgivings about certain tactics being used to target people for intelligence collection. And anyone that cares about the integrity of American law enforcement should at least be open to hearing those concerns. Maybe Albury had gone to his superiors and was ignored. Maybe he felt his actions were the only way to get his point across.
Whatever Albury’s personal considerations were, the case of the former agent cannot and should not be used to delegitimize the entire method of group threat assessment employed by agencies in America and around the world. Law enforcement is often a messy business, and the fallible humans in charge of implementing this effort will make mistakes in its application. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
