On May 14th, Kathy and I, as members of Operation Defuse were allowed to tour the Washington State Fusion Center and ask them questions regarding their privacy policy. We already uploaded the power point the staff gave us. We weren’t allowed to film or audio record, so we are trying to keep our analysis as concise as possible from our notes.

The Washington state intelligence sharing community has 4 levels. The information originates from the local and is filtered up to the Regional Intelligence Governances (RIGs). There are 9 RIGs in Washington, and after the information is decided to be of importance, it is filtered up again to the Washington State Fusion Center (WSFC). The WSFC brings in representatives from different agencies all around the state to analyze information and decipher potential crimes or threats to public safety. If something is seen to be of critical importance, the WSFC pushes the information up to the federal agency that would deal with that type of information, which is most often the FBI or Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF).

The WSFC is housed in a building in downtown Seattle with the FBI and the JTTF. The WAJAC fusion center used to be in the building, but a year ago, the fusion center was judged against baseline capabilities, and deemed to be a failure. Washington fired every employee of the WAJAC and created the WSFC in the same building. The new WSFC is one of 3 test fusion centers that are trying to hold themselves to the “best practices” standard. (The other two are in Miami and Boston.) We will have more on “best practices” later.

Now, for some specifics.

The WSFC takes an all-crimes approach to investigation. They claim that they don’t delve into the all-hazards arena, but their focus is on emergency management. The WSFC has 23 employees. 12 paid by Department of Homeland Security grants. The rest are paid by the agencies that they work for (i.e. Washington State Police). The fusion center claims that it has no databases. It does, however have geo-spatial mapping programs to analyze events. The WSFC says that they don’t investigate events such as rallies unless there is significant evidence that there will be a threat to public safety due to this rally. This does not include things such as stopping traffic, or small crimes that don’t have significant impact on society. The fusion center has access to Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), but only those that seem that they may present a significant public threat. They are part of the Nationwide SAR Initiative (NSI). To find out more about the NSI go to:

http://nsi.ncirc.gov/Resources.aspx

Operation Defuse will be posting the WSFC’s charter soon, and we will have an analysis of our meeting and tour of the WSFC this weekend, so stay tuned.