State government, MCLU, FBI represented on homeland security panel

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap is one of three panelists who will discuss terrorism, homeland security and civil liberties in a Bates College presentation at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 19, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Part of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships’ Civic Forum series Maine in a Transnational World, the event is open to the public at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-6400.

The other panelists are Shenna Bellows, executive director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, and Warren Bamford, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston field office.

Dunlap became Maine’s secretary of state in 2005. He has been a vigorous promoter of technological improvements in the delivery of government services. As Maine’s chief motor vehicle official, he was nominated to a national committee, created under the Intelligence Reform Act, to set standards for state driver’s licenses and identification cards. With passage of the Real ID Act, Dunlap has been an active participant in the national discussion of identity security.

Dunlap’s career in public service began with his election to the Maine House of Representatives in 1996. During eight years in the Legislature, he served three terms as House Chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

Dunlap’s’ notable legislative activities included securing passage of the Great Ponds Act, protections for permanently disabled workers under the State Retirement System, creation and development of the Lifetime Hunting and Fishing License and the creation of the Office of Program Evaluation and Governmental Accountability.

Bellows has served as the executive director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union since March 2005. She returned home to Maine, where she grew up, after spending two years as a national field organizer at the ACLU Legislative Office in Washington, D.C. In Washington, Shenna was a leader in post-9/11 issues, developing a field program around the Patriot Act, as well as working to defeat several constitutional amendments that would have undermined the criminal justice system, freedom of speech and the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people.

She is active in the Maine Immigrants Rights Coalition, the Women’s Leadership Action Coalition and the Maine Choice Coalition.

A 22-year veteran of the FBI, Bamford took charge of the Boston field office in 2007. He previously headed the counterterrorism division of the bureau’s Los Angeles office.

After six years as a Marine Corps officer, he joined the FBI in 1986 and has worked in Washington, New Haven and Baltimore. He was a sniper on the bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, leader of a SWAT unit in New Haven and was second in command of the FBI’s national Critical Incident Response Group.

While working on the Hostage Rescue Team, Bamford was deployed to three high-profile operations: the Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho in 1992, the Branch Davidian siege in Texas in 1993 and the Talladega prison riot in Alabama in 1995.