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Issue #100March 13, 2007
FUSION CENTERS
 by
 Jim Harper 
The Senate debated the "Improving America's Security by Implementing Unfinished Recommendationsof the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007" last week. Asimilarly titled measure was the top priority of House Speaker Pelosi, who pushed it through as part of the House's vaunted "First100 Hours" agenda. Nowwould be a good time to consider carefully the proposed plans for the Department of Homeland Securityto fund so-called "fusion centers."Since the 9/11 attack, state and local governments have established 46 centers to "fuse" informationfrom criminal investigations, media reports, and other sources to search for possible terrorist threats. Asa federal reportputs it, "States and localities have created and invested in fusion centers and chargedthose centers with collecting, analyzing, and sharing terrorism information." Having several state andlocal centers — rather than a single centralized bureaucracy – collecting, analyzing, and acting upon"threat data" may help to overcome what Friedrich Hayek identified as the "knowledge problem" wherespecialized, localized knowledge is lost the further up the chain of command decisions are made."Fusion centers" have to date largely been the result of a bottom-up effort by state and localgovernments. But an implementation planfor a federal "Information Sharing Environment" (ISE) issued  by the President last November envisions an integrated network of fusion centers working under Homeland Security and the Directorate of National Intelligence..The 9/11 Commission helda hearingin 2004 to consider the question of whether the United Statesshould create a domestic intelligence agency like Britain's MI-5. Both the CIA and FBI directorsdenounced the creation of such a new agency. Robert Mueller called it a "grave mistake." But afederally-funded system of fusion centers would be a large step in that dangerous direction.
 
Title VII of the House 9/11 bill sets up a
"Fusion and Law Enforcement Education and Teaming
(FLEET)
Grant Program
" to fund fusion centers. The proposed FLEET program would centralize thesedistributed security offices, making the regional centers subservient to federal priorities rather thandriven by local concerns. FLEET would throw more federal money at, and detail more federal officersto, these operations — but that help would also come with strings attached.As established in the House bill,the FLEET grants would be conditional upon a number of requirements set by the Homeland Security Secretary such as eligibility requirements for law enforcement personneldetailed to the centers and hiring of personnel "representative of a broad cross-section of local and triballaw enforcement agencies and departments." The Homeland Security Secretary would have "generalregulatory authority" to script, implement, and interpret the FLEET program and could revoke or suspend funding to a local fusion center at any time upon a determination that the fusion center "is not insubstantial compliance."The Senate bill would create a more broad-based grant program which would give state governmentsmoney to fund fusion centers (as well as other activities). The director of the Federal EmergencyManagement Agency would have the ability to pull funds for failure to "substantially comply." As in theHouse bill, these provisions would make the fusion centers dependent on the priorities of theDepartment of Homeland Security rather than the priorities of state and local law enforcement.Placing fusion centers under the de facto direction of the Homeland Security Department would portendthe creation of a new domestic intelligence agency along the lines of MI-5. The Senate bill wouldexplicitly blend elements of criminal and terrorism intelligence, raising the prospect of state and localundercover agents working under the direction of DHS fusion-center liaisons. These operations would be outside the scope of traditional Justice Department guidelines on infiltrating domestic groups, leadingexperts such ACLU's Tim Sparapani to worry, "we're setting up essentially a domestic intelligence
 The value of this is uncertain. "Information-sharing" has been the post-9/11 mantra — butsharing information without concentrating on which data is truly important will not makeAmericans safer. Focusis moreimportant than "sharing." And at some point massinformation collection and data "fusion" becomes a domestic intelligence operation
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