What are your thoughts on the Commonwealth Fusion Centers?
What role and costs do these centers assume and consume and how do they actually make the average citizen safer?
Do you have any thoughts or suggestions about increasing transparency and general information to the public about the centers (Maynard, Boston) and why they should have oversight or not?
Is it the AG’s role to spy on the spies (surveillance and security information specialists) in order to ensure that accountability and civil rights are being protected? If you believe the AG’s office or other offices/departments are needed to perform those watchdog services, how do you propose to do it?
Thank you – I look forward hearing from you. HD
Please share widely!
What are Commonwealth Fusion Centers?
First is what the government says they are. Next is what privacy advocates have to say.
And what role all of our electeds (Gov, Lt Gov, Sec of State, Treasurer, Auditor and the Legislature should be doing about them? In plain English s please. And yes address any privacy concerns.
As a reasonably informed person……
…..
everyone knows that Judith.
I went for the smart ass reply before I read the post. What the hell is a fusion center? Doesn’t sound kosher to me.
And the ACLU doesn’t like them so neither do I . https://www.aclu.org/fusion-centers-force-multiplier-spying-local-communities
well if the local police say the need it I’m sure it’s necessary. At any cost.
Done in “free federal money” for the purpose of creating jobs out of thin air.
The US Senate found, “the fusion centers often produced irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence reporting to DHS, and many produced no intelligence reporting whatsoever.” They are staffed by law enforcement people from different agencies. Wanna bet an agency doesn’t give up its best and brightest personnel to send to a dumping ground?
“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.” ―Simone Weil
I’m glad that others besides me are asking these questions.
I’m particularly glad to see this promoted to the front page.
Here is a link to an emergency management consultant’s webpage that identifies multiple areas of consideration for setting up a Fusion Center (there are two in MA (Boston has it’s own and Maynard acts as the state’s Fusion Center.)
http://www.allhandsconsulting.com/go/services/fusion-center-design
This link does not discuss the issues of surveillance and oversight or budget/funding for these government entities.
I am asking these questions because there are clearly more questions than answers and the answers including who are the directors, chain of command, staff, scope of work are not transparent. Fusion Centers should be under the auspices of EOPSS but it is not clear if it is a federal entity operating within the commonwealth or a state agency. Here’s what mass.gov has to say: http://www.mass.gov/eopss/home-sec-emerg-resp/fusion-center/
… that is of an entirely different nature.
‘Fusion centers’, it seems to me, are a second order ‘solution’ to problem that is, entirely, of our own making. One imagines that, in a sane world, the local police department would interface seamlessly with the state troopers and the state troopers, in turn, would interface (again, seamlessly) with fire departments and emergency managers of all stripes and kind. Lather, rinse, repeat. One imagines that public safety would be a thoroughly comprehensive and, well, entirely public endeavor.
To the extent that ‘fusion centers’ are necessary for communication and co-operation across departmental lines, one is compelled to ask how and why impediments to co-operation and communication exist at all. Administrative burdens can’t explain it… unless you want to say each and every administrative entity involved is flat out incompetent.
To the extent, however, that we’ve created these ‘fiefdoms’ (why, to take a recent example, do we have an entirely separate and distinct ‘probation department”… at all?) we’ve created this very problem. Then, under the guise of ‘public safety’ we’ve created an artifice to address the artifice of distinction in and among public safety workers… An entirely new fiefdom to bring the other fiefdoms to heel.
To the extent that these ‘fusion centers’ are ripe for abuse, they are so because of the underlying problem of compartmentalization, stovepiping and the silo’ing of information and purpose given to each individual, distinct and separate fief. Combatting this, very real, problem is the solution…. Codifying the problem in some uber-entity, the sole purpose of which is to make the individual fiefs do what they ought to do as a matter of their public purpose, isn’t the answer.
Each candidate has made posts here. Each candidate has found at least staff time to present their candidate’s views here and even respond to some comments.
The silence from both candidates reinforces my perception that neither candidate wants to engage these issues that are important to at least some of us — even if they aren’t on the talking-point list of either campaign.
We’ve been working on the fusion center issue for a while.
http://warrantless.org/2014/04/cfc-violations/
How about these questions for AG candidates?
1. As AG, would you commit to not attempting to loosen Massachusetts’ wiretapping statute to permit more electronic surveillance by state or local authorities?
2. As AG, will you refrain from using the resources of your office to pro-actively monitor social media and arrest people, such as Travis Corcoran and Cameron d’Ambrosio, for First Amendment-protected speech on social media that does not violate any threat statute?
3. Will you withdraw the support of the AG’s office from the fusion centers and their practice of systematizing vast arrays of data on Massachusetts citizens not suspected of any criminal activity, and retaining it for up to five years even if the information is found to be false?
4. Should state or local law enforcement accept DHS grants to buy surveillance cameras, drones, Stingrays, armored vehicles or other military equipment?
5. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Riley, will you commit to end the AG’s office’s misuse of administrative subpoenas, by requesting a warrant if you want access to our phone records?