Pacifying the Homeland. Brendan McQuade
of fusion centers throughout the next decade.66 For its part, the NFCA also organizes yearly conventions, which, starting in 2013, were independent of DHS or DOJ.67 Instead, security and technology firms “cosponsor” the annual gathering: older titans like IBM and Thomson Reuters, which both sell data analysis platforms, established firms like Esri, the geographic information system (GIS) mapping juggernaut, and relative upstarts like Dataminr and Geofeedia, the early leaders in social media monitoring. Instead of a discourse of failure, this block of professional and corporate interests is producing the prose of pacification, creating the knowledge and practices that animate and organize intelligence fusion and ILP.
In a more oblique way, even ostensibly “critical” voices like surveillance scholars and civil libertarians get caught up in the prose of pacification. While surveillance scholars provide empirical insights on fusion centers, they have not asked how their findings relate to larger power structures. A case in point is Torin Monahan and Priscilla Regan’s survey of thirty-six DHS-recognized fusion centers. They present the bulk of their findings in the same narrow, objective style that characterizes criminology. Hence, they identify the reason the mission of fusion centers has crept from counterterrorism to “all hazards.” They similarly note the administrative and interagency factors that result in weak accountability at fusion centers. They also examine fusion centers’ role in the expansion of suspicious activity reporting.68 Their most ambitious argument conceptualizes fusion centers as “centers of concatenation” or clearinghouses where “disparate data are drawn together as needed, invested with meaning, communicated to others, and then discarded such that no records exist of such surveillance activities.”69 This theorization, however, does not explore the ends of fusion center surveillance. Why is this monitoring happening? Who is surveilled and with what effects? In short, it does not explore systemic connections with the concrete specificities of “power.” Since surveillance is—by definition—an exercise of power, ignoring these questions leaves the study unfinished.
Most importantly, the tentative nature of these studies coupled with their objective tone leads surveillance scholars to some fraught conclusions. In an article written with Krista Carven, Monahan and Regan consider what is arguably the most egregious example of political policing connected to fusion centers: the policing of Occupy Wall Street and, particularly, Occupy Phoenix (an incident discussed in chapter 5). They use this example “to better understand” the tension between the claims of security officials that “the public should trust police and intelligence communities not to violate their rights” and the dynamic where “the very act of engaging in secretive surveillance operations erodes public trust in government.” While they find that fusion centers are generally “well aware of these dangers and are generally wary of scrutiny by the media or others,” they contend that increased public accountability would formalize this tendency. In other words, ostensibly “critical” scholars of surveillance conclude that enhanced regulation may lead to more public legitimacy for law enforcement intelligence centers, which, they note in the first sentence of the article, operate “in direct tension with ideals of democratic governance and accountability.”70
In this way, the work of surveillance scholars underscores the dilemma of traditional reformist politics. Efforts to ameliorate the excesses of state power often entrench and perpetuate those same abuses. Consider the stance of the premier civil liberties organization, the ACLU, toward fusion centers. In 2008, they identified a series of problems with fusion centers—ambiguous lines of authority, private sector and military participation, and wholesale data mining and excessive secrecy. They recommended that the US Congress and state legislatures work to increase oversight of fusion centers, regulate the flow of information between fusion centers and the private sector, clarify “how and when” military personnel can collect intelligence for law enforcement purposes, and strengthen open records laws.71 The ACLU did not demand an end to these problematic practices. Instead, they sought to regulate and, thus, codify them. Challenging intelligence fusion on these terms will, at best, produce limited public oversight (an ACLU representative on the fusion center’s executive board) and some modest restrictions on intelligence gathering (three-month retention periods for certain kinds of data), which would only be contravened in exceptional circumstances (an emergency warrant or administrative subpoena).
In this way, the analyses of surveillance scholars and the reformist efforts of civil libertarians reify state power. Consider the politics of privacy. Surveillance scholars often focus narrowly on the implementation of privacy policies and their inadequacy.72 Civil libertarians view privacy as a universal right that can be asserted against the encroachment of outside parties. They position “the right to privacy” or “the state” as independent entities that stand apart from the social relations and political processes that, historically, created them and still imbue them with meaning. This way of thinking transforms historically specific social relations and the ideas that animate them into abstract “things.” The “private” is not natural condition that is always and already in opposition to the state and capital. Instead, “privacy” is a particular claim articulated within a particular context: sixteenth-century liberal theory, a concession that the consolidating administrative state made to “the public.” Privacy has no essential essence. It is a shifting boundary with demarcations set and reset by the state. The meaningful foil to the “private” is not the state—the “public”—but the “criminal,” or the other activities outside the state but disallowed by the sovereign. Rather than a basis of resistance, privacy is a tool of regulation: privacy as pacification. In a social world already governed by the commodity form and wage relation, privacy
entrenches the very separations between people presupposed by capitalist social relations that security is used to enforce and maintain. Privacy, then, promises a life apart, a mode of existence separate from others and to this end is presupposed by our appearance as individuals who are autonomous from another and can, therefore, “choose” to be further detached and apart.73
The notion of privacy further alienates social relations and fetishizes the processes that define our lives as mystified things.
For this reason, the work of surveillance scholars and civil libertarians often amounts to a moral critique: an appeal to law and a demand, sometimes only implicit, for further state regulation. This moral critique is simultaneously performance of and productive investment in a particular conception of the social world. Insofar as it remains uncritically wedded to privacy, the efforts of surveillance scholars and civil libertarian represent the liberal counterpoint to the law-and-order advocacy of criminologists and law enforcement practitioners. While the former highlights accountability and the latter emphasizes effectiveness, both offer “better” surveillance and policing. In contrast, this study asks how such intensive surveillance and aggressive policing became a common practice in the first place. To meaningfully consider this question, it is necessary to resist conventional understandings of “reform,” a subject the conclusion revisits. Instead of trying to fix fusion centers, Pacifying the Homeland travels inside the secret world of intelligence fusion to unearth and analyze the intended consequences of an apparent organizational failure.
INSIDE THE WORLD OF INTELLIGENCE FUSION
The world of intelligence fusion is muddled and complex. It entails more than just one type of institution, fusion centers. It encompasses an entire network of actors: the police agencies that manage fusion centers; the intelligence analysts from state homeland security offices; and the representatives from a variety of local, state, and federal agencies that work at fusion centers. There are also more arms-length relationships, such as the government and private sector “partners” that may call the fusion center for support or receive their products. Some of these relationships are more administrative, like those with federal officials involved in the funding and evaluation of fusion centers. Of course, there are also the contractors, both the companies that sell and service information technology systems and subcontractors that work at fusion centers.
The confusion is not just a matter of secrecy. It is also a product of a specific set of institutions, a particular state-form. Indeed, when the Senate hammered fusion centers for their ineffectiveness at counterterrorism, the House of Representatives responded that such standardization was never the point. “The strength