Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan quoted in the text, argued that fusion centers conceive the business of gathering and sharing intelligence as “synonymous with monitoring and disparaging political dissent and association protected by the First Amendment.” He noted “You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest.
You can almost argue that a protest against [the war] is a terrorist act.”
Network Accountability for the Domestic Intelligence Apparatus
by Danielle Keats
Citron and Frank Pasquale
(http://www.hastingslawjournal.org/...)
From the Introduction:
A new domestic intelligence network has made vast amounts of data available to federal and state agencies and law enforcement officials. The network is anchored by “fusion centers,” novel sites of intergovernmental collaboration that generate and share intelligence and information. Several fusion centers have generated controversy for engaging in extraordinary measures that place citizens on watch lists, invade citizens’ privacy, and chill free expression. In addition to eroding civil liberties, fusion center overreach has resulted in wasted resources without concomitant gains in security.
While many scholars have assumed that this network represents a trade-off between security and civil liberties, our study of fusion centers suggests these goals are, in fact, mutually reinforcing. Too often, fusion centers’ structure has been based on clever legal strategies for avoiding extant strictures on information sharing, rather than on objective analysis of terror threats. The “information sharing environment” created by fusion centers has short-circuited traditional modes of agency accountability.
Our twentieth century model of agency accountability cannot meaningfully address twenty-first-century agency coordination. [emphasis added]
Also see Systemic Impunity under the Department of Homeland Security