The mouthful of a name contains the basics of the system. It is based in Europe, will be rolled out in phases, and, compared to the Bush-era system it replaced, was sold as an adaptive approach to some of the political and technological realities of European missile defense. It is the first missile defense project to be embraced by NATO allies, who historically have been left cold by the American faith that high-speed warheads can reliably be struck by other missiles hundreds of miles above the earth. Officially, consensus-run NATO has gotten religion. In Chicago, all 28 Alliance members will stand behind the outrageous lie that the first of the system’s four phases has achieved “interim operational capability.” NATO brass will declare with a straight face that a foundation has been laid for the next three phases scheduled between now and 2020. The U.S. is so excited it couldn’t wait for Chicago, and last week Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery said that Phase 1 — a triad of Aegis ships equipped with interceptor batteries, a command-and-control base in Ramstein, Germany, and a radar in Turkey — now “provides an initial capability to provide some level of defense of Europe against a threat emanating from the Middle East.”

Montgomery’s claim is one of the most expensive cons ever to grace the wires of the Armed Forces Press Service. Last month the Government Accountability Office issued a devastating reality-based report on Phase 1 of the NATO system, itemizing a litany of “performance shortfalls, unexpected cost increases, schedule delays and test problems.” The GAO report echoed a more detailed analysis released in September by the Defense Science Board, an in-house Pentagon advisory team of preeminent basic and applied scientists. The DSB report concludes that the U.S. and NATO missile defense systems share the same heel of Achilles: Rudimentary decoys and debris render them useless. This is a point the Pentagon scientists make with some force, going so far as to use a rare government-report exclamatory. “If the defense should find itself in a situation where it is shooting at missile junk or decoys,” they write, “the impact on the regional interceptor inventory would be dramatic and devastating!”

In other words, if the nation launching the missile deploys rudimentary decoys, which everyone believes it would, the U.S. and NATO systems will be neutralized, their billion-dollar bullets reduced to raging mechanical bulls charging red flags and clowns in a barrel while the theoretical warhead continues along its arc. Almost as a side note, the DSB report notes that the radars built for the NATO system, the ones touted as “operable,” are too weak to even locate the missiles in the first place.

Nothing in the GAO and DSB reports is that surprising. The Missile Defense Agency is the CitiGroup of the military-industrial complex — a corrupt Too Big To Fail institution that never should have existed in the first place but for some bad legislation from the late Clinton era. The epic levels of waste involved in missile defense is unique even by Pentagon standards. “Missile defense has been exempted from many procurement rules and is subject to much less oversight than your standard defense program,” says George Lewis, of Cornell University’s Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. “Together with the rush to deploy rapidly this has led to buying before flying.” At the moment, three of the four types of interceptors procured for the U.S. system have been forced to suspend or delay production. According to the recent GAO report, the cost of testing interceptors for the U.S. system has shot over the last decade from less than $250 million to more than a billion dollars a shot.

But unlike other Pentagon pet projects infamous for criminal cost overruns, missile defense can never be finished. This is its beauty. It is a perpetual-motion defense sector profit machine, one that never stops chasing a dream over the horizon point in the the MDA’s logo. Missile defense exists on an endless continuum of new development contracts for next-generation radars, sensors, interceptors and lasers. A foolproof system will always be more necessary than ever, and just around the corner, almost within reach, despite what the scientists and the evidence may say. And until then, at least we’re doing our best to provide what Admiral Montgomery calls “some level of defense” against emerging missile threats.

But what does “some level of defense” mean when it comes to nuclear missiles? And how much is that fractional security worth? These questions have dogged missile defense since the early 1980s. Many billions of dollars later, the answers are the same: “not much” and “nothing.” The technology remains as far as ever from providing the mythical airtight “gas mask” that a young Richard Perle dangled before a credulous Reagan, the political godfather of Strategic Defense.

“Missile Defense proponents say an imperfect system increases uncertainty in the enemy’s mind and that’s good enough,” says Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based nuclear weapons analyst and a columnist for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “But the uncertainty is all in the other direction. The number of warheads you have to deliver for deterrence is likely very low. The number could be one, or less than one. A certain probability that a nuclear bomb will land on your megopolis is a sufficient.”

Since the start of ground-based interceptor tests during the first Bush administration, missile defense “successes” have taken place under tightly controlled circumstances using pre-programmed flight paths and decoy-less targets that bear little relation to their likely real-world counterparts. Although rigged in plain sight, the tests are heralded as proof that the system will one day offer absolute protection from ICBM and medium-range missile attack. Those who have watched missile defense’s zombie-like march are hopeful that the Defense Science Board report may mark a turning point.

“The Defense Science Board report is an absolute killer,” says MIT’s Theodore Postol, a leading missile defense critic and a former scientific advisor to the Navy. “The boosters are ignoring it, but finally the Defense Department has acknowledged this crucial fact of physics that sensors can’t penetrate the surfaces of targets and are stymied by decoys and debris. To believe in missile defense, you have to believe in an adversary sophisticated enough to build ICBMs but not sophisticated enough to release decoy balloons around warheads. Viewed through a scientific lens, missile defense makes no sense and has never made sense. It’s an elaborate fraud.”

Richard Lehner, a spokesperson for the Missile Defense Agency, which manages contracts up and down the missile defense chain, claims that the DSB report has been grossly misrepresented. In fact, he says, the thrust of the report is that the technology is “on the right track.” Regarding the decoy problem, Lehner assured me the Missile Defense Agency’s Countermeasures Program is hard on the case. I asked him how much the Pentagon was spending on developing sensors that can tell the difference between nuclear warheads and balloons. “That’s classified,” he said.

Unclassified is the Russian response to the U.S. and NATO missile defense programs. The history of missile defense is the story of a fantasy complicating reality. Not long after Edward Teller dazzled Ronald Reagan with visions of space lasers, the president’s infatuation with SDI torpedoed a grand abolitionist deal with Gorbachev at Reykjavik. For the last 15 years, missile defense has been a reliable stumbling block in arms control negotiations and a constant irritant in relations with Moscow. It is partly because of NATO’s missile defense system that there will be no meeting of the NATO-Russia Council in Chicago.

This was not quite the plan when Europe signed on to the system. The birth of NATO missile defense was timed to Obama’s “reset” with Moscow and sold to allies as a joint system involving Russian participation. That hasn’t materialized, and despite the show of a united front in Chicago, Europe is by far the less eager partner in the system. On Friday, chairman of the Munich Security Conference Wolfgang Ischinger penned an editorial in the International Herald Tribune urging NATO to put missile defense on hold pending meaningful Russian involvement. “It would be wrong,” wrote Ischinger, “to kick the project of a joint missile defense shield into the long grass and move forward on B.M.D. [ballistic missile defense] without Russia. B.M.D. as a game changer: yes. B.M.D. as a game breaker: no.”

This is where many people ask why the Russians or anyone else even care about a profoundly flawed technology that is so easy to outsmart and defeat. “The answer is simple,” writes Yousaf Butt of the Federation of American Scientists in the National Interest:

Their military planners are hypercautious — as are the ones in the Pentagon — and must assume a worst-case scenario in which the system is highly effective. Missile defense will therefore strengthen the hands of overcautious, misinformed, opportunistic or hawkish elements within the Iranian and North Korean — as well as Russian and Chinese — political and military establishments. Both unknowable future circumstances and pressures from hawkish internal constituencies will pressure all these regimes to increase deployed nuclear stockpiles and military expenditures.

The Russian nuclear arsenal still sits on a hair-trigger and remains the most dangerous in the world. Not because the Russians are itching to launch an attack, or even because the button is guarded by human beings capable of error. What makes Russian nuclear psychology so important is their relative blindness. Russia has no satellite cover and majorly degraded radar cover. If something shows up on their screens resembling incoming missiles, they have a 15-minute decision window. Recent years have seen an increased threat of accidental nuclear war based on radar misreads and miscalculation. In Moscow bunkers, there have been close calls involving sunlight reflecting off of clouds and Norwegian weather satellite launches. Any policy that decreases trust with Moscow and makes them doubt their deterrent is a net loss for NATO’s stated mission of maintaining European peace and security.

“On the Russian side, there are easy-to-understand concerns,” says Postol. “From a military point of view, they see the U.S. building a vast radar system on its borders, and sometime in the future maybe the U.S. could put nukes on the interceptors. It creates a lot of uncertainty on the planner. On the political side, it’s another broken promise that fuels distrust. Misperceptions are destabilizing on both sides. Missile defense complicates the situation even though it doesn’t work. Politically and technically, it’s the worst of both worlds.”

Which brings us to a second irony in Chicago care of missile defense. An organization founded in response to the Russian military threat is now pursuing one of the only policies guaranteed to accelerate the reemergence of a Russian military threat, one that is no less dangerous for its radically different nature and context.

NATO’s adoption of missile defense may come as a surprise to those who remember the allies’ anger over the non-NATO European system proposed by the Bush administration in 2005. For decades, missile defense was the lonely obsession of a right-wing faction in Washington. Clinton did his best to ignore GOP calls for abrogating the ABM Treaty and committing the country to national missile defense. He was clearly hoping to run out the clock until it was Al Gore’s problem, but a 1998 “Team B” study on the missile threat chaired by Donald Rumsfeld shifted the debate, and during his last year in office Clinton reluctantly signed the Missile Defense Act. With the arrival of George W. Bush in the White House, the Act became an executive priority. September 11 next provided an unlikely opportunity for the most unctuous missile defense boosters to prey on the nation’s sense of vulnerability. I remember Frank Gaffney, director of the defense-industry sponsored American Center for Security Policy, going on television while ground zero was still on fire and making the case that the box-cutter attack proved missile defense was more urgent than ever.

In 2005, Bush proposed the system be extended to Europe to better address the still-theoretical threat from Iran. Most NATO allies wanted nothing to do with what they regarded as a destabilizing boondoggle but the Bush administration found eager partners in the “New Europe” capitals of Prague and Warsaw, which agreed to host a radar and missile battery. The Russians were outraged. In the early ’90s, NATO promised Russia it would not expand toward Russia’s eastern border; then it did and promised it wouldn’t put missile batteries on new members’ territory. Now the U.S. was doing just that. Major NATO allies were also unhappy, both about not being consulted and the growing diplomatic row with Moscow over a plan to protect the continental United States. Soon even the Czechs turned against the plan. Only Warsaw, Washington’s reliable saliva-dripping puppy, was angry when the plan began to fall apart.

Obama arrived in office and quickly scrapped Bush’s system. Republicans on the Hill laughably attacked the decision as a betrayal of Europe, even though the system was designed to protect the U.S. and the decision to kill it was fully backed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The Republicans would have [Obama] pursue every single missile defense program that is theoretically possible, even if the new system is faster and more flexible and has a better test record,” says Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association in D.C.

Obama replaced the Bush system with the “Adaptive Approach” system being celebrated this weekend in Chicago. Intended to address the technological and geopolitical shortcomings of what came before, it has done neither. Despite the word “European” in the name and the NATO seal of approval, Obama’s system is essentially an extension of U.S. missile defense, paid for by American taxpayers. “The U.S. never really asked NATO permission, but told them what they were doing and said they could contribute if they wanted,” says Pavel Podvig, the Geneva-based analyst. “Europe joined, but for them it’s more about managing relationships among Russia, the U.S., Old and New Europe. Nobody in Europe really cares about missile defense. They just don’t want to make it confrontational or destabilizing.”

It sure is a nice thing to want. But unfortunately for the 900 million people represented by NATO countries, European missile defense without meaningful Russian participation is inherently confrontational and destabilizing. It’s also a very costly antonym for “Smart Defence.” A good number of the allied presidents and ministers arriving today at O’Hare know this. Their willingness to say so during tomorrow’s meetings and working dinners may determine much.

So too with the America’s drone industry. The Israeli influence is not visible but it is real, documented and extremely relevant to the future of drones in America. If you want to know how drones may change American airspace in coming years, just look to Israel, where the unmanned aerial vehicle market is thriving and drones are considered a reliable instrument of “homeland security.”

“There are three explanations for Israel’s success in becoming a world leader in development and production of UAVs,” a top Israeli official explained to the Jerusalem Post last year. “We have unbelievable people and innovation, combat experience that helps us understand what we need and immediate operational use since we are always in a conflict which allows us to perfect our systems.”

Israel’s drone expertise goes back to at least 1970, according to the UAV page of the Israeli Air Force. Mark Daly, an expert on unmanned aircraft at Jane’s Defense in London, notes the Israelis were the first to make widespread use of drones in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when the aircraft were used to monitor troop movements.

Now, as the Arab media and Western reporters such as Scott Wilson of the Washington Post have reported, the Israeli Defense Force uses fleets of constantly hovering drones to intimidate and control the Arab population in the Gaza Strip.  (The residents call these drones “zenana,” which both sounds like the aircraft’s distinctive buzz and is Arabic slang for a nagging wife.) The IDF regularly uses drones for targeted assassinations of suspected militants, saying the drones enable them to use “precision strikes” to avoid hurting civilians. Yet as Human Rights Watch has documented, the drone strikes during the Gaza War killed scores of children who were nowhere near armed combatants.

Israel markets its expertise in defense to the rest of the world. Israeli academic Neve Gordon cites a glossy government brochure on drones titled “Israel Homeland Security: Opportunities for Industrial Cooperation,” which boasts, “no other advanced technology country has such a large proportion of citizens with real time experience in the army, security and police forces.” The chapter called “Learning from Israel’s Experience” notes that “many of these professionals continue to work as international consultants and experts after leaving the Israel Defense Forces, police or other defense and security organizations.”

The work has paid off when it comes to drones: The Jewish state is the single largest exporter of drones in the world, responsible for 41 percent of all UAVs exported between 2001 and 2011, according to a database compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Israeli companies export drone technology to at least 24 countries, including the United States.

In addition to exports, Israeli companies also create subsidiaries in consumer countries. “To increase sales outside Israel, Israel’s defense companies have to set up subsidiaries in target markets, rather than expand local manufacturing,” Haaretz reported  in 2009. The Israelis “set up Stark in 2006 to drum up business in America,” according to Haaretz, because the U.S. prefers “to buy armaments and other defense gear from local companies.” In 2007, Stark  “inaugurated its first production outfit, which makes Hunter unmanned vehicles that it sells through Northrop Grumman. In fact, the U.S. armed forces have been using [Israeli-made] Hunter drones since the early 1990s.”

As for domestic drone uses, the Israeli example is perhaps most instructive at the U.S. border. The 5 million Palestinian Arabs living in and around Israel, like the 11 undocumented resident aliens in the United States, are ineligible for citizenship in the land they call home. Both groups are subject to monitoring, barriers to entry and rapid expulsion. Not surprisingly one of the first uses of drones by the Department of Homeland Security was to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border, where it now flies Israeli-made Hermes 450 drones.

And the Israeli example is instructive not just at the border, but also south of it, where the Mexican government has allowed the U.S. to fly drone missions as part of the drug war. Mexico has, apparently, learned a thing or two from its northern neighbor about the best country for buying drones. In March, when it allegedly purchased two new drones of its own, it knew where to go: Israel.

Some Democratic pundits are giddy at their party’s turnaround on national security. “There’s no doubt Obama’s had a better first term in the White House on foreign policy than any Democrat going back to Truman, and frankly better than most Republicans’ first terms as well,” crowed Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. Michael Tomasky has argued that Obama is on his way to being “not just a good but a great foreign-policy president.”  Michael Cohen made a good case in Foreign Policy for the Democrats being “the new national security party.” In other words, Obama has reversed decades of public perception about Democratic weakness, and it is time to uncork the champagne.

Not so fast. While it is welcome news to those of us who prefer the Democratic Party on domestic issues that it has finally neutralized Republicans on the crucial issue of national security, two problems persist. First, Obama’s popularity on foreign policy has come at great cost. Second, if the Dems exploit their national security advantage in the 2012 campaigns, they may be committing themselves to a permanent “Republican lite” agenda on the issue. American foreign policy still contains strong elements of militarism, interventionism and special-interest influence. Only if and when President Obama cures those underlying diseases can he be considered a great foreign-policy president.

Start with Obama’s national security track record. Obviously, it is far better than President George W. Bush’s, a low bar. Of all the post-Truman Democratic presidents, Obama’s tenure is equaled only perhaps by JFK’s. Successes have included the killing of Osama bin Laden, the downsizing of the American presence in Iraq, presiding over the relatively orderly exit of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and backing the removal of Gadhafi in Libya without sending U.S. troops. Obama and the Democrats deserve credit for laying the groundwork for a withdrawal from Afghanistan, and in showing the American people that diplomacy and multilateralism are not curse words but common sense. Most recently, the administration has begun paying more attention to Asia, where America’s attention should really be focused.

But these victories have been accompanied by significant failures. Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan was a predictable fiasco. His inability to turn the U.S. into an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians is probably the proverbial final nail in the coffin of the so-called peace process. Obama never made clear how intervention in Libya was a vital strategic U.S. interest, and his engagement with Iran was halfhearted. Most disturbingly, from Guantanamo Bay to military commissions, the administration has continued many of the worst civil-liberties policies of its predecessor. And it is has even added some of its own in the form of stepped-up drone attacks, which not only kill scores of civilians but are vital in turning Pakistanis in crucial areas against the United States.

More broadly, Obama has been unable to fundamentally reorient U.S. foreign policy away from intervening in every region across the globe. The administration has not persuaded Americans that restraint would be both a wiser and more just approach to international affairs. It has not made the case that American exceptionalism is just a nationalist myth common to most nations. Instead, Obama has largely been successful in convincing the public that America can better dominate the world with something of a lighter touch.

If Obama and the Democrats rely on this approach in hopes of keeping the presidency and gaining seats in the House and Senate, they may only be extending America’s chronic foreign policy problems. If the administration does not even try, let alone succeed, in telling the American people that their defense budget is bloated, that the country must be much more selective in engagement across the world, and that civil liberties should be more than just an afterthought when conducting international affairs, all triumphs will be partial at best. Yes, Obama has proven terrific in regaining the national security edge the Democratic Party has relinquished for so long. And yes, that pays great dividends in both implementing the Democrats’ domestic policies and in turning Americans against the hyper-nationalist and -militaristic positions that defined the George W. Bush administration.

But we have seen the movie before. Lyndon Johnson’s administration was so obsessed with appearing soft on national security that this fear played no small part in embroiling the country in the disastrous war in Vietnam. More recently, many Democrats voted in support of the Iraq war for fear of seeming soft on the war on terrorism. Though Obama seems far too shrewd to engage in any quagmires of that scale, obsessing about electoral advantage has undeniable costs.

“Since at least the 1990s, the Democrats have embraced the premises of the GOP in national security,” says Julian Zelizer, author of “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security — From World War II to the War on Terrorism.” “It’s about being tougher and more aggressive, not about international cooperation or dialogue with other countries.” Branding themselves as the “tough” party on national security is tempting, but if it prevents the Democrats from offering a genuine alternative to the current Republican Party, it may be too great a cost.

And therein lies the difficulty for Democrats, of course. Human nature presents challenges for any leader hoping to illustrate the counterintuitive reality that military power and obstinacy are actually only of limited use in the conduct of foreign policy. “When people are insecure, they’d rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who’s weak and right,” President Clinton famously said after the 2002 midterm elections. Though cynical, Clinton was correct in his assessment. “It’s hard to tell people that you’re against being strong — the rhetoric sounds too good, even when the results aren’t,” says Zelizer, a professor at Princeton.

Obama has admirably succeeded in regaining the national security electoral edge from Republicans, who are still committed to pursuing hawkish policies even though they’ve been shown repeatedly to be wrongheaded. But success comes with its costs. When, and only when, the Democrats wean America off its addiction to global dominance can it truly claim to be a great party on national security.

The consequence: An FBI agent showed up at the family’s home, asking if they knew anyone who might want to hurt the United States.

Mall of America officials say their security unit stops and questions on average up to 1,200 people each year. With 4.2 million square feet under one roof, the two-decade-old mall is a monument to suburban shopping and entertainment. Nearly 100,000 people from around the world pass through on a given day.

The interviews at the mall are part of a counterterrorism initiative that acts as the private eyes and ears of law enforcement authorities but has often ensnared innocent people, according to an investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting and NPR.

In many cases, the written reports were filed without the knowledge of those interviewed by security. Several people named in the reports learned from journalists that their birth dates, race, names of employers and other personal information were compiled along with surveillance images.

In some cases, the questioning appears to have the hallmarks of profiling — something that officials at the mall deny. In nearly two-thirds of the cases reviewed, subjects are described as African-American, people of Asian and Arabic descent, and other minorities, according to an analysis of the documents.

Mall spokesman Dan Jasper said the private security guards would not conduct interviews based on racial or ethnic characteristics because “we may miss someone who truly does have harmful intent.”

Much of the questioning at the mall has been done in public while shoppers mill around, records show. Two people, a shopper and a mall employee, also described being taken to a basement area for questioning. Officials at the mall would not address individual cases.

“The government is not going to protect us free of charge, so we have to do that ourselves,” said Maureen Bausch, executive vice president of business development at the mall. “We’re lucky enough to be in the city of Bloomington where they actually have a police substation here [in the mall] … They’re great. But we are responsible for this building.”

Reporters at the Center for Investigative Reporting and NPR obtained 125 suspicious activity reports totaling over 1,000 pages dating back to Christmas Eve, 2005. The documents, provided by law enforcement officials in Minnesota, give a glimpse inside the national campaign by authorities to collect and share intelligence about possible threats.

The initiative exemplifies one of the enduring legacies of the terrorist attacks 10 years ago: Organizations and individuals are now encouraged by U.S. leaders to watch one another and report any signs of threats to homeland security authorities.

There is no way for the public to know exactly how many suspicious activity reports from the Mall of America have ended up with local, state and federal authorities. CIR and NPR asked 29 law enforcement agencies under open government laws for reports on suspicious activities. Only the Bloomington Police Department and Minnesota’s state fusion center have turned over at least a portion of the paperwork.

In 2008, the mall’s security director, Douglas Reynolds, told Congress that the mall was the “number-one source of actionable intelligence” provided to the state’s fusion center, an intelligence hub created after 9/11 to pull together reports from an array of law enforcement sources.

Information from the suspicious activity reports generated at the mall has been shared with Bloomington police, the FBI and, in at least four cases, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

The push to encourage Americans to report suspicious activity began in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, when government officials and citizens found out there had been hints about the attackers that intelligence analysts had missed.

In the decade since, the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security have launched programs urging citizens to report suspicious activity. The private sector, including the utility industry and other businesses concerned with protecting “critical infrastructure,” have their own surveillance and reporting systems. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has made such reporting a priority.

Last year the Department of Homeland Security launched a promotional campaign, “If you see something, say something,” encouraging Americans to report anything perceived as threatening.

Among those formally enlisted were parking attendants, Jewish groups, stadium operators, landlords, security guards, fans of professional golf and auto racing and retailers such as the Mall of America. Visitors “may be subject to a security interview,” the mall’s website says.

The suspicious activity reports from the mall are rich with detail. They contain personal information, sometimes including Social Security numbers and the names of family members and friends. Some of the reports include shoppers’ travel plans.

Commander Jim Ryan of the Bloomington Police Department said shoppers are not under arrest when stopped for questioning by private security. He said even he would walk away if the questioning seemed excessive.

“I don’t think that I would subject myself to that, personally,” he said. Ryan, however, defends security procedures at the mall.

Ryan said such reports are crucial to the nation’s safety in the post-9/11 era. He said the suspicious activity reports could be held by his agency for two decades or longer. He acknowledged that the mall’s methods, and reports the security guards file, may “infringe on some freedoms, unfortunately.”

“We’re charged with trying to keep people safe. We’re trying to do it the best way we can,” he said. “You may be questioned at the Mall of America about suspicious activity. It’s something that may happen. It’s part of today’s society.”

Some national security and constitutional law specialists question the propriety and effectiveness of such reports.

Dale Watson, a former top counterterrorism official with the FBI, said the mall’s reports suggest that anyone could be targeted for intrusive questioning and surveillance.

“If that had been one of my brothers that was stopped in a mall, I’d be furious about it — if I thought the police department had a file on him, an information file about his activities in the mall without any reasonable suspicion to investigate,” said Watson, who played key roles in the investigations of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and a 1998 attack on U.S. embassies in East Africa.

Shoppers, who for the most part had no idea that a visit to the mall led to their personal information being shared with law enforcement, reacted with anger and dismay when shown their reports.

“For all the 30 years that I have lived in the United States, I’ve never been a suspect,” said Emil Khalil. The California man was confronted at the mall in June 2009 for taking pictures, and he said an FBI agent later questioned him at the airport. “And I’ve never done anything wrong.”

Monica Lam, Center for Investigative Reporting

Brad Kleinerman, at home with his youngest son, was stopped after Mall of America security guards said he looked at them in a suspicious manner.

Mike Rozin, chief of a special security unit at the mall since 2005, acknowledged that the vast majority of people who come into contact with his unit “have done nothing wrong, have no malicious intent.”

“They just act in a suspicious manner that obligated me to investigate further,” Rozin said. “We talked to them for an average of five minutes, and they’re able to continue their shopping.”

Francis Van Asten’s experience with mall security lasted much longer.

On Nov. 9, 2008, the Bloomington resident videotaped a short road trip from his home to the Mall of America. Van Asten, now 66, planned to send it to his fiancée’s family in Vietnam so they could see life in the United States.

As he headed down an escalator, camera in hand, mall guards caught sight of him.

“Right away, I noticed he had a video camera and was recording the rotunda area,” a security guard wrote in a suspicious activity report.

Van Asten, a one-time missile system repairman for the Army, was questioned for approximately two hours, records show. He was asked about traveling to Vietnam and how he came to know people there. The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force was alerted. He was given a pat-down search, and the FBI demanded that his memory card be confiscated “for further analysis.”

Authorities were concerned about his footage of an airplane landing at Minnesota’s nearby international airport. They also worried Van Asten was conducting surveillance of mall property.

Exhausted and rattled, Van Asten had trouble finding his car after the ordeal was over.

“I sat down in my car and I cried, and I was shaking like a leaf,” Van Asten said in an interview at his home. “That kind of sensation doesn’t leave you real quickly when you’ve had an experience like that.”

Bobbie Allen, a musician who lives in downtown Minneapolis, was stopped for writing in a notebook. As he waited for a lunch date on June 25, 2007, Allen jotted down some words, which caught the attention of security guard.

One guard wrote in Allen’s suspicious activity report: “Before the male would write in his notebook, it appeared as though he would look at his watch. Periodically, the male would briefly look up from his notebook, look around, and then continue writing.”

Guards asked for his name and for whom he was waiting. Allen, who is black, felt singled out for his race, according to the report. The guard responded that he was “randomly selected” for an interview.

The guards called Bloomington police, after deciding Allen was uncooperative and his note-taking “suspicious.” Allen was cleared, but a suspicious activity report was compiled, complete with surveillance photo, age, height, address and more. Much of that information ended up in a Bloomington police report.

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, said such actions trample on traditional civil liberties protections and shift unaccountable power into private hands.

Rosen said the risk of abuses is high, particularly if there turns out to be a lack of proven results. “If all they’re getting for amassing suspicious activity reports on innocent people in government databases is the arrest of a few low-level turnstile jumpers and shoplifters, that doesn’t seem very sensible,” Rosen said.

In Allen’s case, he responded in a way few others have: He complained to the Minnesota Department of Human Rights and filed a lawsuit. Department investigators concluded that there was probable cause to support Allen’s claim of racial discrimination.

Allen declined an interview, citing a settlement agreement reached with the mall.

Not everyone had a negative reaction to being written up. After a report naming him was forwarded to the FBI, Sameer Khalil of Orange County, Calif., said he believed that police and private security have an important job they must do.

“I think [the mall's program] makes America safer,” he said.

Businessman Najam Qureshi discovered how the suspicions at the mall can linger.

The FBI arrived on his doorstep shortly after a run-in with mall security. His family moved from Pakistan to the United States when Qureshi was 8. Police once pulled over their car for a minor traffic violation, and Qureshi remembers his father saying, “You don’t have to fear the police here. They are here to help.”

Qureshi opened a small kiosk at the mall so his aging father, a former aeronautical engineer named Saleem, could keep busy. One day in early 2007, Saleem Qureshi left his cellphone in a mall food court. When he returned for it, security personnel had established a “perimeter” around the phone, along with other unattended items nearby that did not belong to Saleem — a stroller and two coolers.

The “suspicious” objects eventually were cleared by security, documents show. But mall guards pursued Saleem Qureshi with questions.

“Qureshi moved around a lot when answering questions,” security guard Ashly Foster wrote in a report. “At one point, he moved to his kiosk and proceeded to take items off of two shelves just to switch them around. … He seemed to get agitated at points when I would ask more detailed questions.”

Four years after his father ended up in a suspicious activity report, his son was shown the report for the first time.

“Everybody that lives in this country,” said Najam Qureshi, “is a person of interest as far as these reports are concerned.”

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The Center for Investigative Reporting, the nation’s oldest independent, nonprofit investigative news center, reported this story along with National Public Radio. You can contact the reporters at gwschulz-at-cironline.org, zwerdling-at-npr.org and abecke-at-cironline.org.

Read the extended version on the Center for Investigative Reporting’s project site, americaswarwithin.org.

Margot Williams of NPR contributed to this report.