Description

Since the 9/11 attack, state and local governments have established 46 centers to "fuse" information from criminal investigations, media reports, and other sources to search for possible terrorist threats. As a federal report puts it, "States and localities have created and invested in fusion centers and charged those centers with collecting, analyzing, and sharing terrorism information." Having several state and local 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" where specialized, localized knowledge is lost the further up the chain of command decisions are made.