A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White
Mike German is not surprised you haven't heard of fusion centers.
German was an FBI agent until 2004 and is currently a national security policy advisor for the American Civil Liberties Union, yet he "had never heard of a fusion center" until 2007. He said the reason that he started investigating these intelligence centers for the ACLU was because he saw hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars going to support law enforcement activities that he couldn't define.
German said part of the problem is that "no two fusion centers are alike," making it hard to even talk about them. Even determining "whether something is a fusion center or not is iffy."
So what are they?
A fusion center is part of a network linking at least 800,000 federal, state, municipal and private security and law enforcement professionals who gather information about Americans in order to combat terrorism. Maybe one such person will stop and ask you why you're taking a picture of those power lines, or show up
incognito to your religious meeting or anti-war demonstration. They might look at your credit report or your phone records. There are at least 58 centers, though some estimate there are as many as 70. They could be in a back room at your local police department, housed within a National Guard office or in a nondescript building down the street.
Do I sound paranoid?
Well, though German told me these centers "developed really quietly" in the years following 9/11, they are not a secret. The
Department of Homeland Security has a brief and vague description of the centers on their Web site, notably putting the emphasis on "state and local." The department also recently issued a report detailing privacy threats posed by the centers. And all the examples of the instances related above have been documented in the media or by the ACLU.
German worked on an
ACLU report about fusion centers published in December 2007. In the months that followed, news reports about the abuses the ACLU report anticipated started popping up around the country, so German compiled an
update to the report in July 2008. With this week's news of the
report leaked from a Virginia fusion center that warned of traditionally black colleges and peaceful religious and social change groups being potential hotbeds of terrorist activity, German said they're thinking about compiling another report.
The original idea of a fusion center network came out of the turf war over intelligence sharing after 9/11. Local law enforcement officials weren't getting security information from the Feds, so states set up these centers to gather and share information. In turn, the Department of Homeland Security was more than happy to have extra hands on the counterterrorism case.
There's no mission statement or clear set of guidelines for these centers, but in many cases they were envisioned as a repository for suspicious activity reports. If you've ever heeded those signs in public places to "say something" "if you see something," the information you gave out probably went to a fusion center.
Then came the "mission creep." Each center existed in a local area, each with its own individual problems. Some centers began to focus on border patrol; others
volunteered themselves for the drug war. And then there's the inherent flexibility in the term "suspicious activity."
If these were merely call centers for concerned citizens to report to, German said he would have no problem with that. In fact, it's not the fusion centers themselves that are the real issue, but rather the sometimes
illegal and
unconstitutional activities that occur in clear violation of
federal privacy statutes within and around the centers.
Supporters of third party presidential candidates such as Bob Barr and Ron Paul have been targeted for surveillance by these centers for no other reason than their political ideology. Mainstream ecological groups such as the Sierra Club and the Humane Society are being watched as eco-terrorists. One North Central Texas center alleged a terrorist conspiracy between a disparate group of hip-hop musicians, Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbyists, anti-war demonstrators, the U.S. Treasury Department and former Congresswoman and presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney.
(The above would be laughable, if it weren't so scary. Seriously; my
mom volunteers for the Humane Society. On second thought, if there are any fusion center employees reading this, leave my poor mother alone! I swear she's not a radical!)
Amen. It's more than scary, it is terrorizing, and I thought that's what we are trying to avoid. If one finds oneself terrorized, does it matter, really, whether the threat is coming from our own government or from without.
The ACLU is
calling for lawmakers at all levels to institute guidelines and oversight for these centers. They are also
calling on the Department of Homeland Security to investigate the abuses that have been documented.
While there have been a handful of congressional hearings on fusion centers as well as local efforts to ensure the centers comply with Freedom of Information Act requests, specific instances of abuse have been largely glossed over by the government and ignored by the media.
"Where there are instances of abuse, there has been very little investigation," German said, specifically noting a
case in Los Angeles where a few fusion center officials were court-martialed for stealing classified information, but the local law enforcement officers who were involved in the theft were never charged.
"We are working with the executive branch to draw guidelines, and there is some progress there," German said. He emphasized a "multifaceted" approach with state and local legislation plugging the time gap before federal action is taken.
This comprehensive approach mirrors the networking of many levels of jurisdiction at fusion centers themselves. German said the fact that these centers are considered neither national nor local allows them to "water down all the protections to the least common denominator." In states with strong privacy laws, fusion centers abide by less restrictive federal laws; in states with lax protections, the centers use local regulations.
Public-private collusion also allows fusion centers to skirt privacy laws. Law enforcement doesn't have the legal right to collect and store certain personal information because of its ties to government. Instead, fusion centers pay private companies, which own extensive stores of information about Americans' consumer and intellectual habits, to create and maintain searchable databases for the center's benefit.
"They have created this symbiotic relationship," German said. "If you combine [federal information gathering with private efforts], it is very dangerous to the individual." German said the privatization problem at fusion centers is not acknowledged as an issue by officials.
"This is one area that is being ignored by the federal government," German said.
It would be one thing if these fusion centers worked, but from all the intelligence reports German has seen, he's concluded that they haven't done anything to contribute to the country's security. On the contrary, German says they're becoming an obstacle to safety due to the public uproar over privacy violations.
"Law enforcement authorities are having to respond to the criticism rather than focus on security," German said.
Besides the distraction and lack of results, the basic math behind fusion centers may be flawed. The primary weapon at these centers is a method of sifting through information received from all these different sources that is called "data mining." The practice is very common among direct mail marketers and other small-scale commercial operations, but the ACLU report cites several independent studies showing that data mining is not at all a useful technique for the counterterrorism community. Instead, the ACLU found that data mining would only drain resources and implicate innocent citizens in imaginary plots.
OK, let's recap: We have local centers in almost every state in the country that engage in illegal and unconstitutional activities, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and that do not actually work to combat terrorism. The impetus for these centers may have been understandable at the time, but why are they still around?
German said the federal intelligence agencies are more than happy to have these local nodes to gather security information for them, saying it's like having 800,000 extra agents working for them. But Congress may have its own reasons for resisting a call to shut these places down.
"Fear is still driving a lot of our security policies," German said. He noted political pressure against reducing funds or projects combating terrorism is strong. Many expected the Democratic Congress to limit programs such as warrantless wiretapping, but instead "they've been expanded."
"To narrow any program [related to national security] is extremely difficult," German said.
Meanwhile the right wing of the blogosphere, already itchy from myths about
"Obama's enemies list" and the
expansion of Americorps into liberal "re-education camps," has broken out in a rash of
paranoia over these fusion centers.
Where was all their concern when Bush and Cheney were calling the shots? I remember right-wingers calling the guy, who blew the old whistle on the illegal domestic spying, as well as the NYT, traitors. Some even suggested the death penalty. Now, they are concerned. Did they learn nothing from what happened in Germany? When you fail to come to the aid of others, no one will be around to come to your aid when it comes to civil/human rights.
German said the ACLU is working with the executive branch to rein these centers in. But after years of operating in secrecy under the Bush Administration, I hardly think a set of guidelines is going to make the renegades at some of the more troubling centers behave. The best move President Obama could make -- from a security, civil rights, budgetary and public relations standpoint -- is to close these homegrown spy centers immediately.
So, let me get this straight? This system of fusion centers are mostly spying for every reason on earth rather than terrorism, without which there would be no fusion centers....at least I hope not? Do I understand correctly that these centers are being manned by volunteers, many of whom may or may not know shit from shinola about what might be important or not, let alone how to connect dots? I mean, my god, look who they find worthy of being a target; maybe they are eco-terrorist....or Al Qaeda sympathizers. How does anyone come to the conclusion that peace activists are pro-Al Qaeda.? Not real ones. We are not any more in favor of one kind of terrorism than another. War is terror. too
Anyone having any role in the events of 9/11 or the anthrax attacks should burn in the deepest recesses of hell, as far as I am concerned.
Does anyone, think that shock and awe was any less terrifying for the people of Iraq than 9/11 was to the people of NYC and America? Even more so the anthrax attacks; anthrax was killing and attacking randomly, with the exception of the highly weaponized anthrax attacks on the Congress. Both targets were Democrats.
It wasn't neccesary. It was a war of aggression which is against just about every international treaty unto which we have signed.
Bob Barr? I'm not crazy about the guy, but is he a threat to national security? I can't buy that one no matter how high the paranoia level gets. Ron Paul? Oh, puleeze.
I'm not paying for this totally bizzare network of goofball "security" paranoids? So, there's another reason for tax resistance to a terror run state, which, in few ways, resembles the America in which I was taught to believe, before they stopped teaching civics in school.
Me thinks this came out of Adm.. Poindexter's Total Awareness Program, before it was supposedly scrapped. Did anyone really believe the unconstitutional program had really been scrapped? Of course not, it just morphed into the NSA domestic spying thingy (also data mining of all kinds of information belonging to the people of the USA) and, now, we hear about these fusion centers, encouraging anyone who sees something "suspicious," ( the meaning of which in no way clearly defined in national or state guidelenes, neither of which serves any real practical purpose as a counterterrorism tool, at least not as it is being done.
My advice, for what it's worth to our readers; don't back down. Continue to speak the truth as you understand it, on you web site or blog and on others you visit. Do not be intimidated.
Wasn't it Ben Franklin who said that the pen is more powerful than the sword? Could be wrong about who said it, but I'm sure it was one of our founder guys.
Time to take a stand...."and we won't back down."....
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