Infragard | Infraguard | Intraguard

Image via Wikipedia

Infragard | Infraguard | Intraguard | Infoguard | Infragard United States Federal Government

InfraGard is a program run by the United States Federal government, which partners Federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies with private corporations, so that they can share intelligence information with each other. As of December 2009, there were over 34,000 corporations and government agencies who were members.

Infragard began in the Cleveland, Ohio, Field Office in 1996, and has since expanded to become a national-level program, with Infraguard coordinators in every FBI field office. Originally, it was a local effort to gain support from the information technology industry and academia for the FBI’s investigative efforts in the cyber arena, but it has since expanded to a much wider range of activities surrounding the nation’s critical infrastructure.

The program expanded to other FBI Field Offices, and in 1998 the FBI assigned national program responsibility for InfraGard to the former National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) directed by RADM James B. Plehal USNR and to the FBI’s Cyber Division in 2003.

Since 2003, InfraGard Alliances and the FBI said that they have developed a TRUST-based public-private sector partnership to ensure reliability and integrity of information exchanged about various terrorism, intelligence, criminal, and security matters. It supports FBI priorities in the areas of counterterrorism, foreign counterintelligence, and

In early 2008, Matthew Rothschild reported in the journal The Progressive that there were 86 chapters and 23,000 InfraGard members in various businesses involved in critical infrastructure in the United States, and that several InfraGard members had stated that they had been told in private that in the event of martial law being declared in the United States, the InfraGard members would have the right to “shoot to kill” and would not be prosecuted for this. The FBI has denied this, stating that “InfraGard members have no extraordinary powers and have no greater right to ’shoot to kill’ than other civilians.”

The Progressive also reported the concerns of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that there “is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations — some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers — into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI”.(Wiki)