Firefighters are seen as particularly useful in the US government’s fight against terror as, unlike police, they do not need warrants to enter a private property.
The Department of Homeland Security scheme, which has already been trialed in New York City, involves training fire crews to spot people that show discontent with the USA or who have stockpiles of weapons or blueprints.
Critics say the idea is another blow to civil liberties in post-9/11 America and one that could damage the now iconic image of the firefighter.
Already the government monitors telephone calls and e-mails and bags are subjected to much more thorough searches when Americans fly. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sees using fire crews as the eyes of the intelligence service as another step in that direction.
“If in the conduct of doing their jobs they come across evidence of a crime, of course they should report that to the police. But you don’t want them being intelligence agents,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent and an ACLU security policy advisor.
But Jack Tomarchio, a senior official in the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence division, welcomed the move.
“They’re really doing technical inspections, and if perchance they find something like, you know, a bunch of RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] rounds in somebody’s basement, I think it’s a no-brainer,” he told the Associated Press.
“The police ought to know about that, the fire service ought to know about that, and potentially maybe somebody in the intelligence community should know about that.”
If the New York trial proves successful, Homeland Security officials hope to expand it to other cities across the USA.