LIVERMORE, Calif. - Retirees sometimes take up golf or move to Florida for a change of pace. Here they hunt for terrorists from 1,200 feet in the sky.
"We're looking for suspicious activity," said Ron L. Darcey, peering through binoculars from a single-engine Cessna one day last month. "If we see a vessel docked at port with a ladder down on the seaward side, with no personnel nearby, we would call that in immediately. That's where a terrorist could go by and jump aboard."
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Ron L. Darcey patrols the California coast as a civilian volunteer with the United States Coast Guard Auxiliary.
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Mr. Darcey, 66, wore a trim-fitting flight suit purchased on eBay. His salt-and-pepper hair was pressed beneath a headset connected to a two-way radio, and he had a clipboard and a pencil at the ready. For two hours, he and two other retirees - Eugene Wheeler, 66, and Dennis A. Caponigro, 63 - patrolled the waterways of Northern California from above in Mr. Wheeler's 29-year-old six-seater.
The men are civilian volunteers with the Coast Guard Auxiliary, among the tens of thousands of Americans who - from private airplanes, boats, trucks and front porches - donate their time to battle terrorist threats.
Although the surge in volunteerism after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has long since trailed off, a dedicated core remains, including many older people whose children are grown, whose job obligations have winnowed and who are looking to have a little fun in unpaid service to their country.
"It really pumps people up just to be able to be in the airplane," said Mr. Darcey, who was off to paste photographs in the squadron's yearbook after finishing the patrol, which yielded a marooned sailboat but no terrorists. "People can't get enough."
Three years ago, lawmakers in Washington rejected the Justice Department's proposed Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, which would have enlisted mail carriers, utility workers and other citizens in an organized corps of informants. Since then, a patchwork of local and national volunteer programs, including the Bush administration's Citizens Corps, have been filling some of the domestic surveillance gap.
Unlike the so-called Minutemen volunteers who conduct immigration patrols along the border with Mexico, the antiterrorism volunteers are unarmed and unsung. Their mission is to spot and report possible wrongdoing, leaving enforcement to the authorities. With state and local budgets stretched most everywhere, the watchful eyes are rarely turned away; money to train the volunteers often comes from domestic security and other federal grants.
"Law enforcement has other priorities besides terrorism now," said Michael Licata, a retired Air Force colonel and president of the Community Antiterrorism Training Institute, a New Jersey-based company that provides training for businesses and local governments. "A trained citizenry is like a force multiplier."
The loose network of volunteers has passed largely under the radar of civil liberties groups, which raised objections to TIPS because of concerns that it might turn neighbor against neighbor and promote vigilantism.
Barry Steinhardt, director of the program on technology and liberty at the American Civil Liberties Union, said worries about wayward or overzealous volunteers had taken a back seat to more pressing fears, most notably those surrounding the protection of databases of personal information.
"Big brother has gone high tech," Mr. Steinhardt said. "The reality is, compared to the data that is being circulated by private enterprise to law enforcement, the citizen watch groups are not a significant issue. I am not diminishing the significance of terrorism, but given how few terrorists there actually are, it's a little like looking for a needle in a haystack."
Many volunteer organizations acknowledge the long odds, and most are hard pressed to cite anything close to a thwarted terrorist plot. But that has not deterred them from trying.
At Wichita State University in Kansas, workshops on spotting and reporting terrorism suspects attracted more than 400 people in February. David L. Carter, a professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University who spoke at the sessions, said he was stunned at the turnout and planned to do more.
"It was only a pilot in Kansas," Dr. Carter said, "but we figure if in the heart of America there is this kind of interest, there will be interest elsewhere."
In Pennsylvania, about 250,000 people in neighborhood watch groups have been enlisted in a state-sponsored program that teaches how to look out for terrorists while being mindful of racial profiling. More than 200 businesses, cities and public agencies in 39 states have requested the program materials.
"We want to teach our citizens to be involved in stopping the planes from hitting the buildings, not reacting afterward," said Donald Numer, a training supervisor for the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, which developed the program.
The police in Austin, Tex., have created a civil defense battalion, in which uniformed volunteers are equipped with radios and sent on daily patrols of potential targets, like gas pipelines, water facilities and the airport.
About 250 residents have been trained for the domestic terrorism duty, said Sonia Carrion, a volunteer coordinator for the department, who described the effort "as a lot of fun" for the residents and a cost saver for the city. The volunteers, who are unpaid, make the rounds in cars that have been painted candy apple red.
"The meaning of homeland security in the United States is shifting to something much more local," Ms. Carrion said.
Considered vulnerable targets themselves, nearly 75,000 truck and bus drivers are enrolled in a nationwide watch program sponsored by a number of organizations, including the American Trucking Associations.
About a dozen truck drivers at ITL Inc., a wholesale fuel and transport company in suburban Los Angeles, participate in the program. Over pizza and soda in the company's warehouse-sized garage, an instructor, Richard Leimbach, showed photographs of Osama bin Laden and the inferno at the World Trade Center and schematic drawings of the explosives used by Timothy J. McVeigh in Oklahoma City.
"Our responsibility is to make sure they never commandeer a truck and use it as a missile to kill Americans," said Mr. Leimbach, who reminded the drivers that they are "on the battle line every day." He said the hot line for the highway watch in California gets 30 to 40 calls a month from the enrolled drivers, including reports of stranded motorists and suspicious activities like people making drawings of dams and bridges.
Jeff Irvin, the president of ITL, said that the training had not made his truckers "experts at catching Al Qaeda," but that he believed it had honed their observation skills.
Many volunteers with recreational boats and small planes have been drawn to the Coast Guard Auxiliary, which in addition to antiterrorism duties assists the active Coast Guard in search and rescue operations and safety patrols.
The organization has 36,000 volunteers nationwide, with 5,000 private boats and 300 private planes at its disposal. The craft are plastered with Coast Guard decals and blue and orange stripes.
Gene M. Seibert, the national commodore of the auxiliary, said the goal "isn't to make everybody a spook, but to educate people that it's better to be safe than sorry."
"You can do as little or as much as you want," he said. "Just enjoy what you're doing and train hard."
Like all auxiliary members, the volunteers who fly patrols from the airport here in Livermore, about 45 miles southeast of San Francisco, have gone through security checks and months of training, including swimming 50 yards in their clothes. The Coast Guard pays a stipend for fuel and maintenance, but the citizen pilots say it covers only a fraction of their expenses. Last month, the purse strings here were tightened further when the budget for the volunteers was cut and some air and water patrols were eliminated.
The money woes have sapped morale a bit. Mr. Darcey, Mr. Wheeler and Mr. Caponigro touched down at the airport in Lodi for lunch, where they lamented the situation over tuna melts and teriyaki chicken at a runway-side cafe. But back in the air, they said they would keep patrolling even if they had to collect money from volunteers to buy the gas.
"A lot of people in this country enjoy the privileges and freedoms but don't want to work for them," said Mr. Caponigro, a former Marine. "If you feel good at the end of the day that you've contributed something, that's what this is all about."
