Reporter Ken Dilanian has a fascinating story in the Los Angeles Times this week about intelligence-gathering fusion centers in the United States that are designed to combat terrorism, showing how they gather huge amounts of data – and yet a considerable portion of the data is irrelevant to the people in this country who are actually fighting homegrown terrorists. Dilanian reports that the 72 U.S.-based fusion centers have, over the past six years, received $426 million in federal funds.
The system is almost dizzying in scale, and the people who work there spend an inordinate amount of time not on terrorism but on issues such as street crime. In addition, much of the work is handled by private contractors, which means that the government money is even harder to track.
A fusion center. (SOURCE: Dept. of Homeland Security)
Dilanian’s article about fusion centers echoes some of the criticisms of the homeland security system that appeared in The Washington Post’s “Top Secret America” series. The three-article, 13,000-word Washington Post series shed light on “a bureaucratic behemoth, substantially privatized but awash in public money,” as Hendrick Hertzberg wrote in a Talk of the Town piece in The New Yorker.
Indeed, the federal homeland-security money has gone to some strange projects: Several years ago, I was writing a piece about the Amish in Wisconsin for Nerve magazine, and one of the local officials told me that they had used some of the funds to set up an outreach program for the Amish who lived in the area.
The Washington Post series, and the article about fusion centers by Los Angeles Times’ Ken Dilanian, show that there is waste and abuse of federal funds in the world of homeland security.
The articles also show that some of the best stories are hidden in plain sight. Luckily, journalists spend time looking for them.
