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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
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Results for fusion centers
7 results foundAuthor: Bjelopera, Jerome P. Title: Terrorism Information Sharing and the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Report Initiative: Background and Issues for Congress Summary: The 2004 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission) cited breakdowns in information sharing and the failure to fuse pertinent intelligence (i.e., “connecting the dots”) as key factors in the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Two of the efforts undertaken since 2001 to tackle these issues included • Congress mandating the creation of an information-sharing environment (commonly known as the “ISE”) that would provide and facilitate the means of sharing terrorism information among all appropriate federal, state, local, and tribal entities and the private sector through the use of policy guidelines and technologies. • States and major urban areas establishing intelligence fusion centers to coordinate the gathering, analysis, and dissemination of law enforcement, homeland security, public safety, and terrorism intelligence and analysis. The imperative for the exchange of terrorism-related intelligence information among law enforcement and security officials at all levels of government is founded on three propositions. The first is that any terrorist attack in the homeland will necessarily occur in a community within a state or tribal area, and the initial response to it will be by state, local, and tribal emergency responders and law enforcement officials. Second, the plotting and preparation for a terrorist attack within the United States (such as surveillance of a target, acquisition and transport of weapons or explosives, and even the recruitment of participants) will also occur within local communities. Third, “[i]nformation acquired for one purpose, or under one set of authorities, might provide unique insights when combined, in accordance with applicable law, with seemingly unrelated information from other sources.” Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) contain information about criminal activity that may also reveal terrorist pre-operational planning. Many believe that the sharing of SARs among all levels of government and the fusing of these reports with other intelligence information will help uncover terrorist plots within the United States. The Nationwide SAR Initiative (NSI) is an effort to have most federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement organizations participate in a standardized, integrated approach to gathering, documenting, processing, and analyzing terrorism-related SARs. The NSI is designed to respond to the mandate of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (P.L. 108-458), for a “decentralized, distributed, and coordinated [information sharing] environment ... with ‘applicable legal standards relating to privacy and civil liberties.’” This report describes the NSI, the rationale for the sharing of terrorism-related SARs, and how the NSI seeks to achieve this objective. It examines the privacy and civil liberties concerns raised by the initiative and identifies other oversight issues for Congress. Details: Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2011. 25p. Source: Internet Resource: R40901: Accessed January 12, 2012 at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/R40901.pdf Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/R40901.pdf Shelf Number: 123560 Keywords: Criminal IntelligenceFusion CentersInformation SharingTerrorism |
Author: The Constitution Project Title: Recommendations for Fusion Centers: Preserving Privacy & Civil Liberties while Protecting Against Crime & Terrorism Summary: In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal and state governments embarked on a far-ranging effort to detect and defend against potential terrorist threats. One of the central components of this effort has been the creation of a network of state and regionally-based fusion centers that share information among law enforcement and some intelligence agencies. Today at least 77 fusion centers are active in the United States. While these state entities have received substantial support from Congress and the Executive Branch, their roles and missions vary widely and are still being developed. Run properly, fusion centers could play an important role in addressing terrorist and other criminal threats. Yet fusion centers can also pose serious risks to civil liberties, including rights of free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion, racial and religious equality, privacy, and the right to be free from unnecessary government intrusion. Several fusion centers have issued bulletins that characterize a wide variety of religious and political groups as threats to national security. In some instances, state law enforcement agencies that funnel information to fusion centers have improperly monitored and infiltrated anti-war and environmental organizations. Moreover, the manner in which fusion centers amass and distribute personal information raises the concern that they are keeping files—perhaps containing information that is sensitive or concerns constitutionally protected activities—on people in the United States without proper justification. For these reasons, we, the members of The Constitution Project’s Liberty and Security Committee endorsing this report, have undertaken this examination of fusion centers, and offer a set of recommendations to assist policymakers to ensure that fusion centers operate effectively while respecting civil liberties and constitutional values. Part II of this report provides an overview of the structure of fusion centers and the institutional framework within which they operate. Parts III, IV and V identify specific concerns raised by fusion center data collection, data storage and use, and accountability and governance mechanisms. Part VI outlines our specific recommendations for reforms that address civil liberties concerns. We hope that these recommendations will facilitate the development of sound rules and best practices to ensure respect for constitutional rights and values. Indeed, fusion centers themselves seek concrete guidance on the practical application of constitutional principles to daily threat assessment. We also hope that they will encourage further consideration of the proper role and mission of fusion centers within the nation’s law enforcement and anti-terrorism framework. Details: Washington, DC: The Constitution Project, 2012. 38p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed September 23, 2012 at http://www.constitutionproject.org/pdf/fusioncenterreport.pdf Year: 2012 Country: United States URL: http://www.constitutionproject.org/pdf/fusioncenterreport.pdf Shelf Number: 126403 Keywords: Civil LibertiesCriminal IntelligenceFusion CentersInformation SharingPrivacyTerrorism |
Author: U.S. Senate. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Title: Federal Support for and Involvement in State and Local Fusion Centers Summary: Sharing terrorism-related information between state, local and Federal officials is crucial to protecting the United States from another terrorist attack. Achieving this objective was the motivation for Congress and the White House to invest hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars over the last nine years in support of dozens of state and local fusion centers across the United States. The Subcommittee investigation found that DHS-assigned detailees to the fusion centers forwarded “intelligence” 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. Congress directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to lead this initiative. A bipartisan investigation by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has found, however, that DHS’s work with those state and local fusion centers has not produced useful intelligence to support Federal counterterrorism efforts. The Subcommittee investigation also found that DHS officials’ public claims about fusion centers were not always accurate. For instance, DHS officials asserted that some fusion centers existed when they did not. At times, DHS officials overstated fusion centers’ “success stories.” At other times, DHS officials failed to disclose or acknowledge non-public evaluations highlighting a host of problems at fusion centers and in DHS’s own operations. Since 2003, over 70 state and local fusion centers, supported in part with Federal funds, have been created or expanded in part to strengthen U.S. intelligence capabilities, particularly to detect, disrupt, and respond to domestic terrorist activities. DHS’s support for and involvement with these state and local fusion centers has, from the beginning, centered on their professed ability to strengthen Federal counterterrorism efforts. Under the leadership of Senator Coburn, Ranking Subcommittee Member, the Subcommittee has spent two years examining Federal support of fusion centers and evaluating the resulting counterterrorism intelligence. The Subcommittee’s investigative efforts included interviewing dozens of current and former Federal, state and local officials, reviewing more than a year’s worth of intelligence reporting from centers, conducting a nationwide survey of fusion centers, and examining thousands of pages of financial records and grant documentation. The investigation identified problems with nearly every significant aspect of DHS’s involvement with fusion centers. The Subcommittee investigation also determined that senior DHS officials were aware of the problems hampering effective counterterrorism work by the fusion centers, but did not always inform Congress of the issues, nor ensure the problems were fixed in a timely manner. Regarding the centers themselves, the Subcommittee investigation learned that a 2010 assessment of state and local fusion centers conducted at the request of DHS found widespread deficiencies in the centers’ basic counterterrorism information-sharing capabilities. DHS did not share that report with Congress or discuss its findings publicly. When the Subcommittee requested the assessment as part of its investigation, DHS at first denied it existed, then disputed whether it could be shared with Congress, before ultimately providing a copy. In 2011, DHS conducted its own, less rigorous assessment of fusion centers. While its resulting findings were more positive, they too indicated ongoing weaknesses at the fusion centers. The findings of both the 2010 and 2011 assessments contradict public statements by DHS officials who have described fusion centers as “one of the centerpieces of our counterterrorism strategy,”2 and “a major force multiplier in the counterterrorism enterprise.”3 Despite reviewing 13 months’ worth of reporting originating from fusion centers from April 1, 2009 to April 30, 2010, the Subcommittee investigation could identify no reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution such fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot. Instead, the investigation found: The Subcommittee investigation found that the fusion centers often produced irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence reporting to DHS, and many produced no intelligence reporting whatsoever. • Nearly a third of all reports – 188 out of 610 – were never published for use within DHS and by other members of the intelligence community, often because they lacked any useful information, or potentially violated Department guidelines meant to protect Americans’ civil liberties or Privacy Act protections. • In 2009, DHS instituted a lengthy privacy and civil liberties review process which kept most of the troubling reports from being released outside of DHS; however, it also slowed reporting down by months, and DHS continued to store troubling intelligence reports from fusion centers on U.S. persons, possibly in violation of the Privacy Act. • During the period reviewed, DHS intelligence reporting suffered from a significant backlog. At some points, hundreds of draft intelligence reports sat for months before DHS officials made a decision about whether to release them to the intelligence community. DHS published many reports so late – typically months late, but sometimes nearly a year after they were filed – that many were considered “obsolete” by the time they were released. • Most reporting was not about terrorists or possible terrorist plots, but about criminal activity, largely arrest reports pertaining to drug, cash or human smuggling. • Some terrorism-related “intelligence” reporting was based on older news releases or media accounts. • Some terrorism-related reporting also appeared to be a slower-moving duplicate of information shared with the National Counter Terrorism Center through a much quicker process run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Terrorist Screening Center. In interviews, current and former DHS officials involved in the fusion center reporting process stated they were aware that “a lot of [the reporting] was predominantly useless information,” as one DHS official put it.4 A former reporting branch chief said that while he was sometimes proud of the intelligence his unit produced, “There were times when it was, ‘what a bunch of crap is coming through.’”5 The Subcommittee investigation also examined DHS’s management of the fusion center counterterrorism intelligence reporting process. The investigation discovered: • DHS required only a week of training for intelligence officials before sending them to state and local fusion centers to report sensitive domestic intelligence, largely concerning U.S. persons. • Officials who routinely authored useless or potentially illegal fusion center intelligence reports faced no sanction or reprimand. The Subcommittee investigation also reviewed how the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a component of DHS, distributed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to support state and local fusion centers. DHS revealed that it was unable to provide an accurate tally of how much it had granted to states and cities to support fusion centers efforts, instead producing broad estimates of the total amount of Federal dollars spent on fusion center activities from 2003 to 2011, estimates which ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion. The Subcommittee investigation also found that DHS failed to adequately police how states and municipalities used the money intended for fusion centers. The investigation found that DHS did not know with any accuracy how much grant money it has spent on specific fusion centers, nor could it say how most of those grant funds were spent, nor has it examined the effectiveness of those grant dollars. The Subcommittee conducted a more detailed case study review of expenditures of DHS grant funds at five fusion centers, all of which lacked basic, “must-have” intelligence capabilities, according to assessments conducted by and for DHS. The Subcommittee investigation found that the state and local agencies used some of the Federal grant money to purchase: • dozens of flat-screen TVs; • Sport Utility Vehicles they then gave away to other local agencies; and • hidden “shirt button” cameras, cell phone tracking devices, and other surveillance equipment unrelated to the analytical mission of a fusion center. All of those expenditures were allowed under FEMA’s rules and guidance, DHS officials told the Subcommittee. Yet none of them appeared to have addressed the deficiencies in the centers’ basic information analysis and sharing capabilities, so they could better contribute to Federal counterterrorism efforts. Every day, tens of thousands of DHS employees go to work dedicated to keeping America safe from terrorism; Federal funding of fusion centers was intended to advance that Federal objective. Fusion centers may provide valuable services in fields other than terrorism, such as contributions to traditional criminal investigations, public safety, or disaster response and recovery efforts. In this investigation, the Subcommittee confined its work to examining the Federal return on its extensive support of state and local fusion centers, using the counterterrorism objectives established by law, Executive strategy, and DHS policy statements and assessments. The investigation found that top DHS officials consistently made positive public comments about the value and importance of fusion centers’ contributions to Federal counterterrorism efforts, even as internal reviews and non-public assessments highlighted problems at the centers and dysfunction in DHS’s own operations. But DHS and the centers do not shoulder sole responsibility for the fusion centers’ counterterrorism intelligence failures. Congress has played a role, as well. Since Congress created DHS in 2003, dozens of committees and subcommittees in both Houses have claimed jurisdiction over various aspects of the Department. DHS officials annually participate in hundreds of hearings, briefings, and site visits for Members of Congress and their staffs. At Congress’ request, the Department annually produces thousands of pages of updates, assessments and other reports. Yet amid all the Congressional oversight, some of the worst problems plaguing the Department’s fusion center efforts have gone largely undisclosed and unexamined. At its conclusion, this Report offers several recommendations to clarify DHS’s role with respect to state and local fusion centers. The Report recommends that Congress and DHS revisit the statutory basis for DHS support of fusion centers, in light of the investigation’s findings. It also recommends that DHS improve its oversight of Federal grant funds supporting fusion centers; conduct promised assessments of fusion center information-sharing; and strengthen its protection of civil liberties in fusion center intelligence reporting. Details: Washington, DC: U.S. Senate, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 2012. 141p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 5, 2012 at: www.hsgac.senate.gov Year: 2012 Country: United States URL: Shelf Number: 126564 Keywords: Counter-TerrorismFusion CentersHomeland Security (U.S.)Intelligence GatheringTerrorism |
Author: U.S. Government Accountability Office Title: Information Sharing: Additional Actions Could Help Ensure That Efforts to Share Terrorism-Related Suspicious Activity Reports Are Effective Summary: In 2007, DOJ and its federal partners developed the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative to establish a capability to gather and share terrorism-related suspicious activity reports. GAO was asked to examine the initiative's progress and performance. This report addresses the extent to which (1) federal agencies have made progress in implementing the initiative, and what challenges, if any, remain; (2) the technical means used to collect and share reports overlap or duplicate each other; (3) training has met objectives and been completed; and (4) federal agencies are assessing the initiative's performance and results. GAO analyzed relevant documents and interviewed federal officials responsible for implementing the initiative and stakeholders from seven states (chosen based on their geographic location and other factors). The interviews are not generalizable but provided insight on progress and challenges. What GAO Recommends GAO recommends that DOJ implement formalized mechanisms to provide stakeholders feedback on the suspicious activity reports they submit, mitigate risks from supporting two systems to collect and share reports that may result in the FBI not receiving needed information, more fully assess if training for line officers meets their needs, and establish plans and time frames for implementing measures that assess the homeland security results the initiative has achieved. DOJ agreed with these recommendations and identified actions taken or planned to implement them. Details: Washington, DC: GAO, 2013. 63p. Source: Internet Resource: GAO-13-233: Accessed May 1, 2013 at: Year: 2013 Country: United States URL: Shelf Number: 128579 Keywords: Fusion CentersInformation SharingTerrorism (U.S.)Terrorists |
Author: U.S. Department of Justice. Office of the Inspector General. Evaluation and Inspections Division Title: Review of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces Fusion Center Summary: This review examined the operations of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) Fusion Center (OFC) and assessed its process for sharing its analytical products. The OFC is a multi-agency intelligence center that produces intelligence products in response to requests from federal investigators (requesters). The Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) Special Operations Division (SOD) supports the OFC in developing these products. Details: Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2014. 69p. Source: Internet Resource: I-2014-002: Accessed April 28, 2014 at: http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/2014/e1402.pdf Year: 2014 Country: United States URL: http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/2014/e1402.pdf Shelf Number: 132194 Keywords: Criminal IntelligenceDrug EnforcementFusion CentersInformation SharingOrganized Crime |
Author: Bjelopera, Jerome P. Title: Domestic Federal Law Enforcement Coordination: Through the Lens of the Southwest Border Summary: Federally led law enforcement task forces and intelligence information sharing centers are ubiquitous in domestic policing. They are launched at the local, state, and national levels and respond to a variety of challenges such as violent crime, criminal gangs, terrorism, white-collar crime, public corruption, even intelligence sharing. This report focuses on those task forces and information sharing efforts that respond to federal counterdrug and counterterrorism priorities in the Southwest border region. More generally, the report also offers context for examining law enforcement coordination. It delineates how this coordination is vital to 21st century federal policing and traces some of the roots of recent cooperative police endeavors. Policy makers interested in federal law enforcement task force operations may confront a number of fundamental issues. Many of these can be captured under three simple questions: 1. When should task forces be born? 2. When should they die? 3. What overarching metrics should be used to evaluate their lives? Task forces are born out of a number of realities that foster a need for increased coordination between federal law enforcement agencies and their state and local counterparts. These realities are particularly evident at the Southwest border. Namely, official boundaries often enhance criminal schemes but can constrain law enforcement efforts. Criminals use geography to their advantage, profiting from the movement of black market goods across state and national boundaries. At the same time, police have to stop at their own jurisdictional boundaries. Globalization may aggravate such geographical influences. In response, task forces ideally leverage expertise and resources-including money and manpower to confront such challenges. Identifying instances where geography, globalization, and criminal threat come together to merit the creation of task forces is arguably a process best left to informed experts. Thus, police and policy makers can be involved in highlighting important law enforcement issues warranting the creation of task forces. Task forces, fusion centers, and other collaborative policing efforts can be initiated legislatively, administratively, or through a combination of the two, and they can die through these same channels. While some clarity exists regarding the circumstances governing the creation of task forces, it is less clear when they should die and how their performance should be measured. Two basic difficulties muddy any evaluation of the life cycles of law enforcement task forces. First, and in the simplest of terms, at the federal level no one officially and publicly tallies task force numbers. The lack of an interagency "task force census" creates a cascading set of conceptual problems. - Without such information, it is challenging, if not impossible, to measure how much cooperation is occurring, let alone how much cooperation on a particular threat is necessary. - Concurrently, it may be difficult to establish when specific task forces should be disbanded or when funding for a particular class of task forces (e.g., violent crime, drug trafficking, counterterrorism) should be scaled back. - Additionally, how can policy makers ascertain whether task force programs run by different agencies duplicate each other's work, especially if they target the same class or category of criminals (such as drug traffickers or violent gangs)? For example, do the violent crime task forces led by one agency complement, compete with, or duplicate the work of another's? To give a very broad sense of federal task force activity in one geographic area, CRS compiled a list of task forces and fusion centers operating along the Southwest border, which are geographically depicted in this report. To be included in the list, a task force had to exhibit the possibility of either directly or indirectly combatting drug trafficking or terrorism. Thus, task forces devoted to fighting gangs, violent crime, public corruption, capturing fugitives, and money laundering may be included. Second, there is no general framework to understand the life trajectory of any given task force or class of task forces. What key milestones mark the development and decline of task forces? (Can such a set of milestones even be produced?) How many task forces outlive their supposed value because no thresholds regarding their productivity are established? Though federal law enforcement has embraced the task force concept, it has not agreed on the breadth or duration of such cooperation. Such lack of accord extends to measuring the work of task forces. This report suggests a way of conceptualizing these matters by framing task force efforts and federal strategies tied to them in terms of input, output, and outcome-core ideas that can be used to study all sorts of organizations and programs, including those in law enforcement. An official task force census coupled with a conceptual framework for understanding and potentially measuring their operations across agencies could greatly assist policy making tied to federal policing throughout the country, and particularly along the Southwest border. Details: Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2014. 40p. Source: Internet Resource: R43583: Accessed June 26, 2014 at: http://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R43583.pdf Year: 2014 Country: United States URL: http://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R43583.pdf Shelf Number: 132554 Keywords: Border SecurityDrug TraffickingFusion CentersIntelligence GatheringOrganized CrimePartnershipsTerrorism |
Author: Strom, Kevin Title: Building on Clues: Methods to Help State and Local Law Enforcement Detect and Characterize Terrorist Activitiy. Final Report Summary: For the past decade, members of the law enforcement and intelligence communities have been working to develop methods and processes to identify and thwart terrorist plots. As part of these efforts, state and local law enforcement agencies have been increasingly recognized as the "first-line preventers" of terrorism (Kelling & Bratton, 2006). The network of over 17,000 law enforcement agencies, including regional and state fusion centers, represents a resource that exponentially increases the United States' ability to identify, report, and analyze information that is potentially terrorist-related. However, these agencies also face ongoing challenges in this counterterrorism role. Perhaps the most pressing issue has been the lack of coordination and standardization of counterterrorism practices at the state and local levels. For example, in the absence of federal guidance, local jurisdictions have often developed different procedures for collecting and prioritizing suspicious activity reports (SARs) - reports of activities and behaviors potentially related to terrorism collected from incident reports, field interviews, 911 calls, and tips from the public. The lack of standardization has impeded the sharing and analysis of such information (Suspicious Activity Report Support and Implementation Project, 2008). Federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Department of Defense (DOD), among others, have made it part of their mission to standardize this process. One of the first steps was the introduction of the Nationwide SAR Initiative (NSI), which created "a unified process for reporting, tracking, and accessing of SARs" (National Strategy for Information Sharing [NSIS], 2007, p. A1-7). This project, funded by the Institute for Homeland Security Solutions (IHSS), considered the collection and use of SARs at the state and local level. We assess how tips and clues generated from state and local sources have been used to prevent terrorist plots, assess the strengths and weaknesses of data sources from which SARs are often derived, and make recommendations for improving the collection, processing, and evaluation of tips and clues reported at the local level. The project was conducted in three phases. Phase I included an analysis of publicly-reported terrorist plots against U.S. targets from 1999 to 2009, including both foiled and executed plots, to determine what types of suspicious behaviors and means of reporting most frequently led to (or could have led to) their discovery and ultimate prevention (Strom et al., 2010). The report published from Phase I examined open-source material on 86 foiled and executed terrorist plots against U.S. targets. In Phase II, we conducted interviews with members of the law enforcement, fusion center, and intelligence communities to gain an improved understanding for how these agencies collect, process, and analyze SARs. In addition, we sought to gain more perspective on how these agencies could better use the information gathered and what challenges they face with respect to SARs. Phase III of the study assessed the primary data sources for SARs, the processes used to collect and analyze SARs, and approaches used to prioritize SARs. We also developed a set of recommendations that can be used by law enforcement and fusion center personnel to improve their practices of collecting, managing and prioritizing SARs. The work conducted across these phases resulted in a set of recommendations and conclusions, which we believe can improve the SAR process. Details: Research Triangle Park, NC: Institute for Homeland Security Solutions, 2011. 71p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed July 18, 2014 at: http://sites.duke.edu/ihss/files/2011/12/IHSS_Building_on_Clue_Final_Report_FINAL_April-2011.pdf Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://sites.duke.edu/ihss/files/2011/12/IHSS_Building_on_Clue_Final_Report_FINAL_April-2011.pdf Shelf Number: 125754 Keywords: Counter-terrorism Criminal Investigations Fusion CentersHomeland Security Intelligence Gathering Terrorism Terrorists |