The Unspoken Danger of Fusion Centres
In April of 2020, the US Customs and Border Patrol issued a memo claiming that ‘multiple international social media posts related to anarchist ideology are promoting acts of sabotage in what they are calling an “International Sabotage Day”’. Their source was a TikTok video. In June of the same year, a massive government document leak revealed that Minnesota state law enforcement vastly exaggerated security threats caused by Black Lives Matter events, removing all language that suggested scepticism of the claims that the protestors were a terrorist threat before sending the report to thousands. In July, police officers in Austin, Texas, were reported to have stalked Juneteenth events throughout the city, including private social media accounts of attendees and shared the obtained personal information with the FBI, CIA, and U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE). Over the course of just four months, thousands of Americans were spied on and had their fundamental freedoms of speech, assembly, and privacy compromised.
All of these incidents have one thing in common: fusion centres. Created as an internal arm of the ‘War on Terror’ following the 9/11 attacks in the United States, fusion centres are nexuses for intelligence sharing. Police officers and state troopers work alongside representatives from the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and even private entities like transportation networks, concert venues, and sports arenas. Theoretically, these actors work together to preemptively identify and neutralise security threats, investigate terrorism and other mass violence, and streamline the flow of communication between vertically separated tiers of law enforcement. In reality, fusion centres are perfectly organised to amass thousands of data points on innocent and unsuspecting citizens while remaining disorganised enough to fail at any intended mission of crime-stopping.
The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution outlaws ‘warrantless searches’ by the police. Fusion centres skirt around this regulation through quasi-legal means of data collection. These centres can establish reasonable suspicion, for example, through Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed by other officers and even lay citizens. Although the SARs are often riddled with errors and contain clear political biases, fusion center employees promulgate them. Additionally, dozens of information sharing databases are used in these centres, and, as the Brennan Center for Justice reports, the proximity of fusion center employees means that classified information that may exist in these databases cannot possibly be protected. These databases often contain data bought from and sold to private security entities, which allows law enforcement to obtain massive amounts of data through sources ranging from private CCTV and Ring doorbell footage to dashboard cameras and GPS information. While some fusion centres collect this information on an individual basis, or only when it coincides with an ongoing criminal investigation, many more take in footage, GPS coordinates, and hundreds of other data points in a constant stream, regardless of its usefulness in solving or preventing criminal activity.
Each individual point of data collected by a fusion center may seem incidental, but when they are compiled and analysed in such large numbers and stored indefinitely, they represent a material risk to key rights and liberties. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor prophetically pointed out over a decade ago, the threat of constant surveillance, especially when it is so comprehensive in scale, is enough to chill one’s freedoms of expression and protest. It’s hard to argue with Sotomayor, too, after seeing how fusion centres have ramped up surveillance activities and have specifically targeted social justice and pro-choice protestors throughout the United States. In Virginia, following the Dobbs v. Jackson opinion leak that rescinded national abortion rights, fusion centres amplified the internal biases of their employees through internal reports that cautioned pro-choice rallies ‘may become violent’ without clarifying that pro-life extremists have committed the vast majority of abortion-related violence in the state. Increased security at these rallies, protests, and marches was directly linked to information from fusion centres.
There is no quick fix to fusion centres, but the current status quo cannot continue if Americans want to keep their title as the ‘Land of the Free’. Some states have taken steps to rein in fusion center activities in their states. In Maine, lawmakers severely handicapped their fusion center, introducing new transparency measures and regulating types of data collection. Meanwhile, the Senate reintroduced a bill that would ‘put protections against government agencies purchasing their data into black-letter law’, according to co-author Ron Wyden. These steps are crucial in securing the promises Americans so often take for granted.
Image courtesy of Dan Aasland via Wikimedia, ©2020. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
