US "Fusion Centers" For Intelligence Sharing

Wired has an article on the national fusion centers in the US, which were created to aid intelligence-sharing in the fight against terrorism but are increasingly being used to look at other sorts of crimes. The keynote of these centers is "all hazards, all threats" — the LA police chief is quoted: "Information that might seem innocuous may have some connection to terrorism." The ACLU has up an interactive US map to help you become acquainted with your local fusion center.

The UK just announced these as well

[LiquidCoooled]

Though over here I believe they are regional Counter Terrorism Units.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/19/gordon_brown_jack_bauer_ctu_counter_terror_plan/ [theregister.co.uk]

No link to wired article?

[grassy_knoll]

Ok, so it's standard practice not to read TFA, so not including a link to the wired article in the summary would seem to save time.

However, if you'd like to read the article, I think this is it:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/feds-tout-new-d.html [wired.com]

Scope Creep

[iknownuttin]

FTFA [wired.com]:Jane Harman (D-California), a powerful force in intelligence matters and funding, pooh-poohed the ACLU's concerns, and said she supported both fusion centers, and civil liberties.

"I was frustrated when I met with the [ACLU] report authors and they could not point to a single instance of a fusion center violating someone's civil rights or liberties," Harman said. "In fact, state and local laws and protections in place at many fusion centers are more rigorous than their federal counterparts."

Ahem: California's Anti-Terrorism Information Center admitted to spying on anti-war groups in 2003. And Denver's police department built their own secret spy files on Quakers and 200 other organizations.

It looks like there's already some scope creep. Does anyone else hear a voice in their head saying, "Slippery slope! What's happening to America!"

Mental note: Jane Harman D-CA. Must tell CA relatives about this when her seat is up for reelection.

Re:Read: data mining

[jo42]

Under previous regimes and in precedent times such organizations where named "Stasi [wikipedia.org]" and "KGB [wikipedia.org]".

Oh, Amerika, you are becoming what you fought so hard against...

Re:Read: data mining

[Travoltus]

No unreasonable search or seizure without due process. Guess which amendment that is.

This is hardly reasonable.

Re:Nothing wrong with data mining pizza delivery

[AHumbleOpinion]

"You may rightfully question the legality of acquisition methods and raise privacy concerns, but mocking the technique only demonstrates an ignorance of the topic."

Torture is also great way to find criminals.

Wrong. Torture generates a lot of bad leads, interrogators are told what they want to hear.

The point being is that using these techniques used in a certain way can make criminals out of otherwise innocent people through circumstance or confessions.

Wrong, data mining generates connections, possible suspects. No criminality is determined by data mining. It is statistically generating a list of people to check out. It is not that different from using statistics when one finds the body of a young woman, go talk to the husband or boyfriend first.

Wrong impression

[glitch23]

Despite what the article states about the focus of these fusion centers on anti-terrorism, they do a lot of things which focus on domestic crimes. This can be anything from serial killers, drug trafficking, to serial robberies. This data is being aggregated at the fusion centers and the OneDOJ [washingtonpost.com] (among others) program is going to aggregate it again to make better sense of it so that inter-state crimes can be better investigated and solved by sharing the information. These fusion centers receive a lot of flak when viewed strictly from the perspective of anti-terrorism because they are collecting data that isn't necessarily connected to terrorist acts. That data is for other criminal activity. The data is collected based on pre-existing police reports, investigations, etc. so the gov't isn't doing anything extraordinary here besides tearing down walls between federal, state, local, and tribal agencies in order to better solve past crimes and maybe, hopefully, prevent further ones by performing statistical analysis on the criminal data.

For example, by seeing that a new business opening up is located in the same part of a city as a string of new criminal activity the local police department can have more patrols out to make sure the criminals realize they are being watched. Obviously that is at the local level but this type of data mining on *existing data* helps the feds too.

Stasi Police

[EEPROMS]

The East Germans had the exact same thing called the Stasi Secret Police [wikipedia.org]. Your friends and neighbours even your relatives would pass on details about you to your local representative in the name of crime and social harmony. It worked great until those dam Americans stuffed it all up.........eh wait a minute.

Re:Nothing wrong with data mining pizza delivery

[AHumbleOpinion]

"Wrong. Torture generates a lot of bad leads, interrogators are told what they want to hear."

If a court determines who is a criminal and who is not, then by default a confession of a crime makes the person a criminal regardless of if its true.

That is a red herring, coerced confessions are not admissible in court.

But isn't there a bias towards the investigators that these persons are indeed criminals? ...

Not "indeed", *possibly*, that's what a suspect inherently is. Data mining is automation of what used to be done by observation and by hand. Investigators are used to dealing with the coincidences of life, you know the victim, or you were in the area, or your car matches a description, etc.

... If an investigator believes this person is the most likley candidate according to their dataset, regardless of it really was that person who committed the crime, would they not naturally treat the person as the criminal until they find some other information that said otherwise.

They would treat the person as a suspect, as they would the boyfriend of a girl who is found murdered. The "boyfriend" relationship is a piece of data that by itself justifies nothing beyond an interview. Same for the pizza deliveries.

They are part of Total Information Awareness.

[Mactrope]

The original term for this "Homeland Defense" monstrosity was "Total Information Awareness" and it was well underway before 9/11. It's so repulsive and unAmerican that the US Congress overwhelmingly ordered it shut down. Bush moved it to the NSA instead [stallman.org], so it is doing just fine.

Be advised that the terrorists who run this program think they have the right to detain and torture people without charge. When they are finished beating you they dump you in a foreign country where you might be murdered or starve before you can get back home.

Re:Terror and it's definition

[BountyX]

In the eyes of the government it seems that Terrorism is anything that is against government interest.