Hopefully there will be some time to fully digest this latest CRS report on fusion centers, but for now, this extract from the summary will have to suffice:
Fusion centers are state-created entities largely financed and staffed by the states, and there is no one “model” for how a center should be structured. State and local law enforcement and criminal intelligence seem to be at the core of many of the centers. Although many of the centers initially had purely counterterrorism goals, for numerous reasons, they have increasingly gravitated toward an all-crimes and even broader all-hazards approach.
While many of the centers have prevention of attacks as a high priority, little “true fusion,” or analysis of disparate data sources, identification of intelligence gaps, and pro-active collection of intelligence against those gaps which could contribute to prevention is occurring. Some centers are collocated with local offices of federal entities, yet in the absence of a functioning intelligence cycle process, collocation alone does not constitute fusion.
My own limited exposure to such centers leaves me with this take-away: unimpressive. Not that people there are not earnest or lack skills, but establishing an intelligence capability is not a shake-and-bake endeavor. Repackaging the news is not intelligence and if your primary function is collation, well, they make copiers that can do that. Personal attempts to inject some serious reform in this area is moving like a glacier. No biggie except that I’d prefer that my over-taxed self get a little more ROI.
Update:
The more I read into this report the more disappointed I am, not just from taxpayer point of view, but as an intelligence wonk.
Left to their own devices and absent more strenuous, centralized control, it is clear that fusion centers are going to focus on what is most important to the local area. Occasionally that will be terrorism but the more pressing concern at that level is general purpose crime. Of course some types of crime feed and clothe terrorists so there is a certain amount of justification in following that path, but by and large it looks like the locals are taking advantage of federal largess and building their CTU ops centers to focus on their priorities, not necessarily Washington’s.
It doesn’t help that DC provides little in the way of manpower, training or methodology. Core intelligence skills are somewhat universal, but a crime analyst isn’t a terrorism analyst isn’t a WMD analyst. The workload doesn’t get lighter over time either, so piling more missions on top of the already over-worked isn’t going to cut it.
That we still have not gotten past the issue of clearances is another debacle. “Write for release,” and “obliged to share” have still not taken hold, and there are no indications that anyone is giving serious consideration to anonymization as an alternative to clearing a thousands of cops and deputy sheriffs.
The primary attempt to exert some control seems to be emphasizing the use of HSIN, but as has been noted previously, HSIN is hot steaming pile DHS has left in the middle of the floor that no one wants to clean up, so they just walk around it and hold their noses.
Sadly this is just another example of Uncle Sam trying to get by on the cheap. Throwing money over a wall isn’t a serious way to improve intelligence dissemination, analysis and fusion at the sub-national level. If you are not prepared to move bodies, deliver hardware and software, and invest in training you’re just making things worse.
A better and cheaper approach would be to establish standards (here is our XML feed) and practices (this is how you do fusion) and leave the implementation to the locals. This needs to be a federation, not a single hierarchy. If they fall down or chose to focus on other priorities that’s on them - unless you want to move to a do-it-our-way-or-no-money model.
There also needs to be an incentive to share and a motivation to pursue excellence. Adopting the Wiki-and-blog model allows you to build in an easy rating/ranking system that can highlight points of expertise and excellence, and serve as a way to recognize high performance come budget time.
To me this is just more support for the idea that we should be spreading the bulk of our analytic talent to the hinterlands. Regional IC centers would put a wide variety of expertise much closer to those who need it on the domestic front. It significantly reduces manpower requirements at the state and local level and it does the job “right” in the sense that people who know fusion do fusion, instead of pretenders making believe.
