The Department of Homeland Security’s $1.4 billion network of 77 fusion centers has “not yielded significant useful information to support federal counterterrorism intelligence efforts,” and in the process has “too often wasted money and stepped on Americans’ civil liberties,” a congressional committee has declared.
“Pools of ineptitude,” is the phrase turned in a Washington Post headline this week in regard to the investigative findings by from the U. S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
“But after nine years — and regular praise from officials at the Department of Homeland Security — the 77 fusion centers have become pools of ineptitude, waste and civil liberties intrusions, according to a scathing 141-page report… .”
Said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma: “It’s troubling that the very ‘fusion’ centers that were designed to share information in a post-9/11 world have become part of the problem.”
Intelligence from the centers is of “uneven quality – oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism,” the report states.
According to the Post, the Department of Homeland Security “condemned the report and defended the fusion centers, saying the Senate investigators relied on out-of-date data.”
Steve Aftergood of Secrecy News lauded the way the report and investigation were accomplished, call it “a rare example of congressional oversight in the classical mode. It was performed by professional investigators over a two-year period. It encountered and overcame agency resistance and non-cooperation. And it uncovered — and published — significant new information that demands an executive branch response. That’s the way the system is supposed to work.”
Is there a fusion center near your market? PublicIntelligence.net has locations and a map.
