Pacifying the Homeland. Brendan McQuade
family members, and fellow shoppers, travelers, and sports fans.”53
The ROIC and the NYSIC also run more focused programs with the same goal to recruit intelligence collectors. The ROIC runs a Fusion Liaison Officer Initiative, which, in the words of the trooper managing it, aims to “recruit folks from law enforcement, public safety and the private sector to attend the training. They would see an overview of about four hours of what fusion center is, what we do, how we process information, privacy and civil liberties, and the parameters we operate under.”54 The NYSIC makes a similar effort with the Field Intelligence Officer program to “provide basic training on intelligence and counterterrorism and familiarize officers with the NYSIC’s products and services and also national programs like the National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative.”55 Both fusion centers also train private sector security personnel and produce a version of their daily reporting for the private sector.
The NYSIC takes their training even further. Through Operation Red Cell, they covertly assess the effectiveness of their outreach to the private sector. An analyst
will go out to a specific area and inquire about information that should trigger that business to make a call or otherwise reach out to us. So, it is a way to see if we’ve been successful or if we need to do more outreach. It tells us what kind of information we’ve gotten out there and what need to improve upon. It’s a test.56
The NYSIC also organizes a yearly State-Wide Intelligence Summit to train police executives. It is a “higher-level overview” on terrorism, crime trends, and intelligence tradecraft.57 An administrator described the goal of the meeting as “getting new people in the fold, making them aware of terrorism, and get them exposed to the other professionals at that level, and then the upper echelon of communication is opened up.”58 In 2012, two hundred police chiefs and sheriffs attended the meeting.59 For the NYISC, the conference is an opportunity to build their network of intelligence collectors. “We will have people who are unaware of our services. We have a booth set up at the conference and we market the NYSIC. . . . We’ll see new departments reaching out to us after the summit.”60
These counterterrorism products and programs are more than examples of the discourse of terrorism that constructs a terror threat. They are also political acts that assert the professional authority to define “threats” and make collective claims about the appropriate distribution of resources and the direction of state strategy. The massive public investment in the name of counterterrorism is a class project in at least two senses. There is a “law-and-order lobby”—a segment of the capitalist class with allies in government, academia, and popular culture—that has a vested interested in “security.” Homeland security has been a boon for this constituency. For police officers and other security professionals, an assignment at a fusion center can create opportunities for higher-prestige work in and outside of government. For example, the NYSIC catapulted New York State Police Colonel Bart Johnson, its first director, to principal deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at DHS. “He saw an opportunity and made the most of it,” one interviewee told me.61 From here, Johnson moved to the private sector, becoming the executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), the influential professional association. After IACP, Johnson moved back to government. Today, he is the Transportation Security Administration’s federal security director for fifteen upstate New York airports.
Counterterrorism is also a class project in that it is a systemic reorganization of the state, one that recalibrates and intensifies the ability to pacify disturbances in an era of increasingly sharp social polarization. Drawing on Poulantzas, Christos Boukalas contends that DHS and the related rise of counterterrorism policies signals “the pre-emptive shielding of capitalist rule from anticipated popular struggles against political exclusion and economic dispossession.” Boukalas locates this authoritarian hardening in the reforms of the George W. Bush administration and the related rise of particular capitalist-class fragments—armaments and oil. This important work presents a formal logic of a particular structure of power. He writes:
In line with the discursive construction of the Enemy as being potentially anyone/anywhere, the scope of surveillance seeks to encompass all: all social interaction, by all individuals. The totality of social activity is the ultimate target of surveillance. Thus, the unified police mechanism, operating in a uniform space, is set to police an homogenised target: all of us.62
This provocative argument serves better as a hypothesis, which subsequent chapters explore at length. While a universal, total intelligence state could be activated, this process would be mediated through the previous history of political struggle, which shapes the specific character of the state. In other words, DHS exists to pacify those coded by the prose of pacification as a “threat.” As such, it seems more likely that surveillance and police power would operate along historical lines of power. Not only are more vulnerable groups more likely to feel the ill effects of security expansion, dominant groups are more likely to embody the prose of pacification and invest their energy and emotion into “security.” In this way, this study builds on Boukalas’s contribution to consider some questions: How has the massive investment in intelligence changed the practice of policing? How do these changes affect the criminal legal system and the larger state apparatus? How do they shape politics? These are not the questions taken up by the scholarship on intelligence fusion and ILP.
SEEING PAST THE DISCOURSE
OF ORGANIZATIONAL FAILURE
A discourse of organizational failure also surrounds fusion centers and clouds a full accounting of their effects. Virtually all writing on intelligence fusion and ILP is fixated upon shortcomings and recommendations for reform. No doubt, there are real technical problems entailed in the institutionalization of intelligence fusion and the implementation of ILP that could be redressed through study and analysis. This debate, however, is not simply applied study for public administration. Neither should it be understood as straightforward evidence of the failure of fusion centers. What Foucault said of the prison expresses a tendency implicit in every reform effort: “Prison ‘reform’ is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were, its programme.”63 Similarly, this discourse of failure is not a critical check on the development of fusion centers. Instead, these expert performances are always and unavoidably productive investments in the institution. They are expert interventions in “the problem of fusion centers,” which, in producing both the “expert” and “the problem,” are incapable of solving the latter (just as criminology will never stop crime or deviance). Instead, these individual enactments of expertise expand the list of problems associated with intelligence and ILP. To the extent that this work contributes to conventional reforms, they get caught up in the play of the prose of pacification.
Here, both criminologists and law enforcement practitioners, on one hand, and surveillance scholars and civil libertarians, on the other, reproduce the same logic of argument, even if their content is very different. For both, the abiding concern, whether consciously articulated or implicit, is administrative: how to refine the operation of fusion centers? The de-politicized and objective tone of criminologists and law enforcement on fusion centers masks a professional project to legitimize, institutionalize, and refine intelligence fusion. Hence, scholars and practitioners identify best practices, such as outreach efforts that have measurably increased intelligence sharing or the best use of specific technologies like geospatial mapping.64 Others have identified problems—police officers’ passive posture toward fusion centers, low-quality intelligence, poor coordination—that impede intelligence fusion and ILP.65
This conversation is not disinterested. It happens in forums connected to large political associations of security professionals like Police Chief, the IACP’s magazine, or the Journal of Intelligence Analysis, a peer-reviewed publication of the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts. These organizations are the political arm of security professionals. They lobby to direct resources to security agencies, promote professional standards, and manage public perceptions of the institution. They are also increasingly involved in policy formation. In the mid-2000s, the young National Fusion Center Association (NFCA)—among older associations like