The new Democratic Congress continues moving forward on a 9/11 commission bill, part of Speaker Pelosi’s so-called 100-hour drive, with the Senate passing its version on Tuesday. Part of that bill includes increased funding for state and local intelligence centers, often referred to in sexy anti-terrorism parlance as ‘fusion centers.’ States have long complained that they don’t get the real lowdown from the feds and that information sharinghas been a one-way flow from the locals to the feds. The pending legislationproposes to increase funding to the centers, though the money may actually federalize the centers — leading some to charge that the centers are just a way to funnel state and local police info to the feds and to create a domestic intelligence agency like the surveillance happy Brits across the pond.
This afternoon at 3:30 EST, a House Homeland Security subcommittee will be holding hearings on the centers, but unfortunately they won’t be hearing from Jim Harper, a policy analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute, who just released an analysis of fusion centers’ promises and perils.
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 personnel detailed to the centers and hiring of personnel “representative of a broad cross-section of local and tribal law enforcement agencies and departments.”TheHomeland Security Secretary would have “general regulatory 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 in substantial compliance.”
The Senate bill would create a more broad-based grant program which would give state governments money to fund fusion centers (as well as other activities). The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency would have the ability to pull funds for failure to “substantially comply.” As in the House bill, these provisions would make the fusion centers dependent on the priorities of the Department 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 portend the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency along the lines of MI-5. The Senate bill would explicitly blend elements of criminal and terrorism intelligence, raising the prospect of state and local undercover 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, leadingexpertssuch ACLU’s Tim Sparapani to worry, “we’re setting up essentially a domestic intelligence agency.” Without a guarantee that such written guidelines could be enforced, the slippery slope to spying on political dissidents — as the FBI’s COINTELPRO did before such guidelines — is inevitable.
The fusion center program also would seem to require massive amounts of one-way “data-sharing” from the state and local law-enforcement agencies to Homeland Security and the DNI, and not in the other direction. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) reported at a recent Congressional hearing that fusion centers in California were having big trouble getting intelligence from the feds: “DHS has resisted allowing the state and local[sic]to get top security clearances for what the state believes are territorial reasons… Intelligence that the [fusion center] director knows exists doesn’t get sent to him. He’s spent a good deal of time trying to get someone to pass him intel instead of having it pushed away. DHS is generally overly protective and resistant to working cooperatively from what the director believes is a fear of becoming irrelevant.”
The full text isn’t currently available, but it’s issue 100 of Tech Knowledge. More fusion later, but I’d love to hear from any current fusers.
via Fusion Center Cash Infusion | Threat Level | Wired.com.
