The Truth About Fusion Centers

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Imagine that somewhere close to your local community there exists a secret computer center. Equipped with powerful mainframe computers and the database integrating powers of XML, this government-funded facility gathers data from thousands of sources including local, state and federal law enforcement, social welfare agencies, hospitals, banks, telephone companies, ISPs, computer search engines, private security companies, schools--essentially an endless list. With its massive computing power, this secret outpost is able to search and sift this data using vaguely defined criteria like "suspicious activity" in order to identify individuals for even closer scrutiny. Finally, this computer center dispenses the results of its analyses to local, state and federal law enforcement and to the military so that they can take action against the citizens tagged as threats.

fusion centers suffered a setback when Congress de-funded TIA back in 2003 because of privacy and civil liberties concerns. But an idea that grabs so much government power at the expense of its citizens' privacy always has a phoenix-like ability to resurrect itself, and so the fusion center initiative has been reborn under the Department of Homeland Security's "Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative" and been provided with $380 million in funding for 40 installations throughout the country.

Say that you're planning to have a neighborhood get together. You head to the local supermarket and pick up a few of those big pork and beans cans and plenty of bottled water and soft drinks. Of course, you give the clerk your shopper card to save a few bucks. The record of your purchase heads to the supermarket's central database which they have patriotically agreed to share with the local fusion center. The out-of-the-ordinary purchase is flagged because the government is on the lookout for survivalist types who are stocking up for Doomsday and thus violating anti-hoading laws. Your bottled water purchase is cross-checked against other records.

All i have to say is wow!To think that this is going on on a daily basis, 24/7. all that tracking being done is just too much to absorb.
Why would the government want to concern themselves with survivalist types???

Is this old news? I apologize if it is, but i just ran across this and i am overwhelmed!
So they have the skinny on stuff you stock at home. Whats the next step, raid the home??

So, its old news, huh?

I knew about the phone companies tracking us, the Internet, etc, but i did not know they had actually allocated money for this specific project.

Its getting to the point where an extinction event would be welcome, as far as i'm concerned.

reply to post by dgtempe


Fusion centers do NOT track your every bottled water purchase. I work in the IT industry and am personally familiar with fusion centers. Yes they do track lots of information, but the shear amount of data precludes them tracking everybody’s daily lives. The computers are designed to shift though data and look for out of the ordinary items, then it cross checks these with other items of note and finally it would pass the info on to a person for further study. This is similar to the phone tracking system that has been in place for years.

In order for you to be “pegged” by the computer you would have to pass a number of hurtles and/or already be listed as a “person of interest” in the system. In the case of the “bottled water” idea, you would have to buy a large amount of water over a long period of time. Say you where buying 20 cases every week for months, then this might put a “flag” on you name. Then if you did two or three other things to put flags on your name maybe it would pop your name out for a real person to look over the info.

The issue is that if you’re not doing anything illegal you don’t have anything to worry about. In fact 90% of this data is never seen by another person and is purged from the system and more data comes in.

Fusion Centers to a good thing, they are a means of local authorities being able to get federal information faster. Also as a information shareing network. Much easier than each individual dept trying to coordinate between the thousands of others. Each Fusion Center allows faster awareness of new threats and watch lists or suspect activity, and BOLO lists.

Now your city cop who needs to know if the guy he has pulled over is just another green card immigrant or a jihadist infiltrator. Or evenon a more local level, FCs can share child and rapist predator info. FBI have taken child predation very seriously, and any one on the list who in moble can be tracked and location with the help of shared fusion centers.

It is not a civil police state tool, not yet any ways. It is still in it's infancy and may become more popular in the next decade. But so far not very many exist, in many cases some states dont even have one yet.

To add to the existing thread:

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