It seems that Big Brother is everywhere these days. Last week, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU, we learned that the Justice Department’s warrantless surveillance had increased 600% in the last decade, including a doubling in the last two years. This week we learned that the Obama administration will argue that it should be able to access any American’s cell phone tracking records without a warrant, as if it’s impossible for that kind of information to be abused when there is zero oversight. It’s easy to imagine that our government is increasingly monitoring our every move.
But that government is made of people just like us, and it’s also becoming clear that a lot of those people don’t really know what they’re doing.
A new congressional report reveals that the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers have “failed to provide virtually any useful intelligence.” Originally intended to streamline the government’s intelligence gathering operations in a post-9/11 world, these fusion centers have simply become “a black hole for taxpayer money” that mostly produces “a bunch of crap.” You really have to read the entire NYT article to appreciate just how fully incompetent these fusion centers have been. A few highlights:
The report found that the centers “forwarded intelligence of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”
…Hundreds of draft reports sat for months, awaiting review by homeland security officials, making much of their information obsolete. And some of the reports appeared to be based on previously published information or facts that had long since been reported through the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
…federal officials cannot account for as much as $1.4 billion in taxpayer money earmarked for fusion centers and that some of the centers listed on paper by the Homeland Security Department do not even exist…
…easy for state and local officials to divert the federal money earmarked for the centers to other things, including sport utility vehicles and dozens of flat-screen televisions…
Furthermore, the Wired article notes that the fusion centers failed to uncover “a single terrorist threat” during a time period that included the Fort Hood shooting and several failed attempts. (One report was praised for information that had been reported in the Los Angeles Times four days earlier.)
The complete dysfunctionalism of this organization would almost be encouraging to those concerned about the government’s invasion of privacy, notwithstanding the wasted billions of dollars. But bumbling bureaucrats do more than simply waste money while failing to live up to their stated goals; they make mistakes and contribute to the “oops cost.” As the NYT reports:
In the wake of the January 2011 shootings in Tucson that killed six and wounded others, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona center issued a report filled with inaccurate information about the gunman’s alleged connections to an anti-Semitic and antigovernment group…
It would be scary enough if a perfectly accurate government wanted to increasingly track our every move, even for our own safety; that much information and power would tempt many officials to corruption, abusing the information for personal and political gain. But it might be even scarier to realize that the government can’t even accurately track you, because having the wrong information about you could potentially be worse than having no information at all.