Retired NSA Analyst Exposes "Fusion Centers", "Radio Waves Used Against American Public"

Attacks Put Spotlight on Boston Counterterrorism Center

April 16, 2013, 5:50 PM ET




Joel Schectman
Reporter

Boston’s Regional Intelligence Center is poised to aid investigators as they search for suspects in yesterday’s bombing.

The center is one of America’s 77 intelligence-sharing facilities, known as fusion centers, that allow investigators to pool data from local, state and federal sources. The state-run centers were funded by the Department of Homeland Security in the years after 9/11 to address the lack of information sharing among agencies, an issue cited as a factor in the government’s failure to prevent the 2001 attacks.

As investigators attempt to connect the dots in yesterday’s attack, Boston’s fusion center will allow authorities to tap thousands of law enforcement data sources, along with public data like information from credit agencies, said Mike Sena, president of the National Fusion Center Association, and a state commander of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. “This is what fusion centers were built for,” Mr. Sena said.

Boston’s fusion center can help investigators scour for connections among potential suspects, by mining hundreds of law enforcement sources around the region, ranging from traffic violations, to jail records and criminal histories, along with public data like property records, Mr. Sena said. As the investigation widens, and investigators identify suspects, the system can help lead authorities to co-conspirators. For example, the system could flag a possible associate of the suspect by finding a past traffic ticket issued to someone driving the perpetrator’s car.

The system also allows local investigators to access the federal Homeland Secure Data Network, giving screened personnel access to classified reports from federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Sena said.

The fusion center system has its shortcomings, however. Despite their strengths, fusion centers are hampered by the kinds of data silo issues that are familiar to any CIO of a large company, according to Mr. Sena.

For example, while authorities can access an array of data sources from their own state, data collected in fusion centers in other states cannot be automatically accessed–that information needs to be requested and manually uploaded. And interoperability issues that stem from a multiplicity of proprietary search tools—as well as police record systems built by different vendors–means even information from within California’s 70 data systems, often has to be reformatted before it can be pooled and analyzed, slowing investigations, Mr. Sena said. And for security reasons, classified reports from federal agencies cannot be accessed on the same machines, Mr. Sena said. “Not being able to pull that data together is a huge problem,” Mr. Sena said. “When you are dealing with having to pull in information from 70 systems you can never be that speedy and time is of the essence with real time crime support and investigation.”

Last year, the Senate subcommittee on investigations released a report questioning the effectiveness of the centers in fighting terrorism and protecting privacy.

Still, without the fusion centers, investigators would need to physically pull paper records from dozens of sources, and would need to obtain federal reports through a lengthy request process, Mr. Sena said. “It gives investigators access to an array of data they would not even know about otherwise — it would be stovepiped away.”

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Senate Report Says National Intelligence Fusion Centers Have Been Useless

Huge sums spent to watch flat-screen televisions and report on suspicious bass fishing in Mexico.

BY R. JEFFREY SMITH AT THE CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY | OCTOBER 3, 2012


An alarming report published by the Department of Homeland Security in March 2010 called attention to the theft of dozens of pounds of dangerous explosives from an airport storage bunker in Washington state.

Like many such warnings, it drew on information gathered by one of the department's so-called "fusion centers" created to exchange data among state, local and federal officials, all at a cost to the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars.

There was just one problem with that report, and many others like it: the theft had occurred seven months earlier, and it had been highlighted within five days in a press release by the Justice Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which was seeking citizen assistance in tracking down the culprits.

The DHS report's tardiness and its duplication of work by others has been a commonplace failing of work performed by fusion centers nationwide, according to a new investigation of the DHS-funded centers by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The centers were created with great fanfare over the past decade by Washington with the aim of redressing gaps in intelligence-sharing among local, state, and federal officials -- gaps documented by probes of the period before the Sept. 2001 attacks, when some of the attackers were stopped by police for traffic violations or other reasons, and then released.

In July 2009, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano called the fusion centers "a critical part of our nation's homeland security capabilities." About 70 of the centers now exist, located in major cities and nearly all states.

But in its blistering, bipartisan staff report released late Tuesday evening, the panel asserts that the centers -- which were financed by federal taxpayers with the express aim of helping the counter-terror effort -- frequently produced "shoddy, rarely timely" reports that in some cases violated civil liberties or privacy and often had little to do with terrorism.

"Most [relevant reports] were published months after they were received" from fusion centers in Washington, the subcommittee's 107-page account said. And only a fraction of all the reports dealt with terrorism, because no one in Washington forced the centers to stay focused on that topic. The fusion center in southern Nevada -- formally called a Counterterrorism Center -- mostly tracks school violence, according to the report.

"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," the document states. "DHS's involvement with fusion centers appeared not to have yielded timely, useful, terrorism-related intelligence for the federal intelligence community."

Matthew Chandler, a DHS spokesman, condemned the subcommittee's report in a prepared statement, calling it "out of date, inaccurate, and misleading." He also accused the investigators of refusing to review "relevant data," in an apparent reference to their decision not to read fusion centers' reports in classified form.

Chandler further asserted that the subcommittee, which closely scrutinized work produced by the centers in 2009 and 2010 and examined Bush and Obama administration policies through August of this year, had failed to understand that a key role for the centers is to "receive" intelligence information provided by the federal government, not just to produce it. Another Obama administration official, who declined to be identified, said the report "fails to reflect the totality of work done by fusion centers that directly supports our counter-terrorism efforts."

But their comments did not address the report's detailed findings, including its claim that the department cannot estimate how much money it has spent on the centers, and that it has never established any benchmarks for their success or measures of merit for those DHS employees assigned to write, edit, or disseminate their reports.

The subcommittee report, released by chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and ranking member Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), said the department's estimates of its expenditures on fusion centers ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion. It also said that DHS has never tried to track or seriously audit how its funds were spent, with the result that tens of thousands of dollars were spent by state or local officials on vehicles, televisions, laptops, and other electronic gear that have yet to be used in counter-terror work.

In San Diego, for example, law enforcement officials used nearly $75,000 to buy 55 flat-screen televisions for "open-source monitoring," a term they said essentially meant watching the news. In Arizona, officials spent $64,000 on televisions and monitors for a "surveillance monitoring room," even though that task was not part of their federal writ and they had no system for analyzing the data they might collect.

Specially-made, rugged laptops purchased by Ohio officials with federal funds wound up in a county medical examiner's office. Millions of dollars in grants were given to a fusion center that DHS publicly claimed to have established in Philadelphia but which the subcommittee discovered did not -- as of August this year -- actually exist.

By operating what is essentially an open-ended grants program, with few rules and no oversight, DHS "is unable to identify what value, if any, it has received from its outlays," the subcommittee report said.

Officials are, for example, supposed to file reports on "suspicious activity" that appears to be related to potential "terrorism or other criminal activity." But the warnings sent to Washington included such humdingers as a notation that a car's fold-down rear seats could be used to hide human trafficking; a claim that two men acted suspiciously in a bass fishing boat near the U.S.-Mexican border; and details of a day-long motivational talk and "lecture on positive parenting" provided by a Muslim organization.

A false report in November 2011 by the fusion center in Illinois could have sparked an international incident, the subcommittee staff wrote. It said the computer system of a municipal water system had been hacked from Russia and that a pump had been deliberately disabled. "Apparently aware of how important such an event could have been had it been real, DHS intelligence officials included the false allegations -- stated as fact -- in a daily intelligence briefing that went to Congress and the intelligence community."

But the reality was almost comically different: local officials had misread an internet contact with the system made five months earlier by a local repair technician on vacation in Russia, according to a subsequent FBI investigation. "The only fact that they got right was that a water pump in a small Illinois water district had burned out." But DHS' intelligence office never corrected its initial alert.

Those who wrote the reports were poorly trained, according to the subcommittee, and reviews were frequently conducted by contract employees that supervisors described in interviews as substandard. Partly as a result, thirty percent of the fusion center reports produced in the 13-month period scrutinized by the subcommittee were killed inside the department because they had violated legal guidelines or they lacked useful information, the investigators determined after multiple interviews with current and former DHS officials.

The information contained in the banished drafts was kept by DHS, however, even when it appeared to violate guidelines, the subcommittee said.

On the relatively few occasions that officials shared information directly relevant to counter-terror efforts, such as reports of contacts between local law enforcement officials and persons named on a federal terrorist list, DHS passed the information to the National Counter Terrorism Center in Washington "several weeks or months" later, according to the subcommittee. The NCTC meanwhile would typically have gotten the same information on the same day as the contact through a competing FBI channel, the report said.

The investigators said many of their criticisms appeared in two internal reports that DHS officials were reluctant to share. One completed in 2010 said that a third of the established centers had no set procedures for sharing information and that most had no stated ambition to prevent a terrorist attack. Another less ambitious review completed in 2011 also found many shortcomings.

"Unfortunately, DHS has resisted oversight of these centers. The Department opted not to inform Congress or the public of serious problems plaguing its fusion center and broader intelligence efforts. When this Subcommittee requested documents that would help it identify these issues, the Department initially resisted turning them over, arguing that they were protected by privilege, too sensitive to share, were protected by confidentiality agreements, or did not exist at all. The American people deserve better. I hope this report will help generate the reforms that will help keep our country safe," Sen. Coburn said.



TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images

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Fusion Centers and Intelligence Sharing

• National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan (NCISP)


• Fusion Center Guidelines: Law Enforcement Intelligence, Public Safety, and the Private Sector Executive Summary


• Fusion Center Guidelines: Law Enforcement Intelligence, Public Safety, and the Private Sector Full Text PDF


• Fusion Center Guidelines: Law Enforcement Intelligence, Public Safety, and the Private Sector Complete Resource CD (High bandwidth required)


• Baseline Capabilities for State and Major Urban Area Fusion Centers


• New! - Fire Service Integration for Fusion Centers

As part of the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative's (Global) efforts to develop fusion center guidelines, the Criminal Intelligence Coordinating Council (CICC), in support of the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), Office of Justice Programs (OJP), recommended the creation of the Fusion Center Focus Group. This focus group was tasked with recommending guidelines to aid in the development and operation of fusion centers.
Concurrently, the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) Intelligence and Information Sharing Working Group focused on developing guidelines for local and state agencies in relation to the collection, analysis, and dissemination of terrorism-related intelligence in the context of fusion centers. The recommendations resulting from the HSAC's efforts assisted in the development of the fusion center guidelines.

"In developing our country's response to the threat of terrorism, public safety leaders from all disciplines have recognized the need to improve the sharing of information and intelligence across agency borders. Every law enforcement, public safety, and private sector official involved in information and intelligence sharing has a stake in this initiative. Leaders must move forward with a new paradigm on the exchange of information and intelligence."

Excerpt fromThe Role of Leadership,Fusion Center Guidelines

The development of guidelines for fusion centers was separated into three phases-law enforcement intelligence, public safety, and the private sector. The Fusion Center Guidelines: Law Enforcement Intelligence, Public Safety, and the Private Sector, covering all three phases, is now complete and available. These guidelines may be used for homeland security efforts, as well as all crimes. By integrating these guidelines, agencies can resolve and overcome many common obstacles. In addition, guidelines can help guide administrators in developing policies, managing resources, and evaluating services.

What Is a Fusion Center?A fusion center is an effective and efficient mechanism to exchange information and intelligence, maximize resources, streamline operations, and improve the ability to fight crime and terrorism by merging data from a variety of sources. In addition, fusion centers are a conduit for implementing portions of the National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan(NCISP).

Excerpt fromFusion Center Guidelines: Executive Summary Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan

The ultimate goal of a fusion center is to provide a mechanism where law enforcement, public safety, and private partners can come together with a common purpose and improve the ability to safeguard our homeland and prevent criminal activity. A police officer, fireman, or building inspector should not have to search for bits of information. They should know to call one particular place-the jurisdiction's fusion center.

The Fusion Center Focus Group, whose mission was to further many of the tenets outlined in the National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan (NCISP), included experts and practitioners from local, state, and federal law enforcement and public safety agencies, as well as representatives from DOJ, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In addition, members from national law enforcement and public safety organizations, the private sector, and currently operating fusion centers participated in the focus group's efforts.The focus group members recommended that the guidelines include all crime types and that centers provide an array of intelligence services. In addition, the group recommended that centers be scalable based on the needs of the city, state, or region and should conduct tactical, operational, and strategic intelligence functions in support of criminal investigations.


As a result of the focus group's work, 18 guidelines were developed:

1. The NCISP and the Intelligence and Fusion Processes


2. Mission Statement and Goals


3. Governance


4. Collaboration


5. Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)


6. Database Resources


7. Interconnectivity


8. Privacy and Civil Liberties


9. Security


10. Facility, Location, and Physical Infrastructure


11. Human Resources


12. Training of Center Personnel


13. Multidisciplinary Awareness and Education


14. Intelligence Services and Products


15. Policies and Procedures


16. Center Performance Measurement and Evaluation


17. Funding


18. Communications Plan

Also included in this report are additional resources, model policies, and tools for implementation to assist agencies in integrating the guidelines.

Source: http://www.it.ojp.gov/default.aspx?area=nationalInitiatives&page=1181

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