Fusion Centers: Expensive, Practically Useless, and Bad for Your Liberty

Fusion Centers: Expensive, Practically Useless, and Bad for Your Liberty - Hit & Run : Reason.com
The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has just released a report [pdf] on the "fusion centers" that pepper the law-enforcement landscape -- shadowy intelligence-sharing shops run on the state and local level but heavily funded by the federal Department of Homeland Security. 
It is a devastating document.
 When a report's recommendations include a plea for the DHS to "track how much money it gives to each fusion center," you know you're dealing with a system that has some very basic problems.

After reviewing 13 months' worth of the fusion centers' output, Senate investigators concluded that the centers' reports were "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." 
One report offered the vital intelligence that "a certain model of automobile had folding rear seats that provided access to the trunk without leaving the car," a feature deemed notable because it "could be useful to human traffickers." 
Others highlighted illegal activities by people in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) database, which sounds useful until you hear just what those people did that attracted the centers' attention. 
One man was caught speeding. 
Another shoplifted some shoes. TIDE itself, according to the Senate report, is filled not just with suspected terrorists but with their "associates," a term broad enough to rope in a two-year-old boy. 
Nearly a third of the reports were not even circulated after they were written, sometimes because they contained no useful information, sometimes because they "overstepped legal boundaries" in disturbing ways: 

• "Reporting on First Amendment-protected activities lacking a nexus to violence or criminality; 
• reporting on or improperly characterizing political, religious or ideological speech that is not explicitly violent or criminal; 
• and attributing to an entire group the violent or criminal acts of one or a limited number of the group's members." 

(One analyst, for example, felt the need to note that a Muslim community group's list of recommended readings included four items whose authors were in the TIDE database.) 
Interestingly, while the DHS usually refused to publish these problematic reports, the department also retained them for an "apparantly indefinite" period..."