The first fusion center I visited was the New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC, pronounced “rock”). The center is located at the sprawling New Jersey State Police (NJSP) Headquarters compound in East Ewing Township, an affluent suburb in a state that ranks as one of the wealthiest and most unequal in the Union.2 Though the building is accessible to the public (the headquarters is also home to the New Jersey State Police Museum and Learning Center), a state trooper greets visitors, inspects their identification, and records their names. The newest addition to the headquarters, the ROIC is in the back of the compound. The building is impressive: a $26.7 million, 65,500-square-foot, two-story structure that can withstand winds of 125 miles per hour and earthquakes measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale. With on-site generators and photovoltaic cells, it can operate off the grid.3 Inside, a security guard sits in an enclosed booth to take the names and identifications of visitors. After I checked in for the first time, the state trooper tasked with coordinating my visit led me to a main room where the intelligence analysts worked, swiping his key card to access the elevator and open doors. When we arrived, the fusion center—the secretive intelligence facility I spent months trying to access—looked like any other office: men (and a few women) dressed business casual, a maze of cubicles on the right, a few breakout areas with conference tables on the left.
As the result of a grant-driven federal initiative that stipulates “baseline capabilities” but no binding standards, no two fusion centers are alike. The variation from fusion center to fusion center can be dramatic. The phrase—“If you’ve seen one fusion center, you’ve seen one fusion center”—has become clichéd within the fusion center community.4 Official secrecy obscures fusion centers, so the little public information available on a particular fusion center rarely details its unique profile. For these reasons, I arrived at the ROIC with a series of basic questions that could not be answered from the outside. What data are available and how are they used? Fusion centers do not store most of the data available to them. Instead, they negotiate agreements that allow remote access to existing databases. These partnerships are not limited to law enforcement agencies; fusion centers also make agreements with other agencies, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles or private operators of “critical infrastructure,” for example, an electric utility or freight rail operators. They will work around privacy protections and buy access to the private databases of firms like Accurnit or Choicepoint, which provide a plethora of information on individuals with no criminal record. Analysts crunch this data with specialized software that produces individual “pattern-of-life analyses” or tries to divine the future by finding “predictive” correlations among these massive datasets.
Who works at fusion centers and how are they managed? Who receives their intelligence products? While fusion centers are managed by state or municipal police, they are staffed by personnel from many agencies. Some fusion center analysts focus on criminal intelligence and produce regular analyses of crime trends, while also providing case support, which can include extended involvement in an investigation. Others concentrate on “counterterrorism” and produce regular threat reports as well as more focused briefings on particular security issues such as threat assessments for large public gatherings. Task specialization is not the only factor influencing the focus of fusion center staff. Agency representatives assigned to fusion centers work for two superiors, the police officers managing the fusion center and their home agency supervisor. This arrangement can exacerbate jurisdictional rivalries and cause confusion. The public mission is information sharing, but, underneath, there is often a bureaucratic battle to control the resources accessible through the fusion center and the work that it does. On the outside, a diverse group of “stakeholders”—including many in the private sector—receive fusion center intelligence. The interests of all the parties do not necessarily converge. These competing demands complicate the work of fusion centers and muddle lines of authority.5
The difficulty of research alone does not explain why these questions remain largely unanswered. Most discussions of fusion centers do not include detailed assessments of any given fusion center. Instead, the abiding concern is the effectiveness of counterterrorism policy and its consequences for civil liberties. With so much attention on how fusion centers ought to work, few have examined their concrete effects or systemic connections to other institutions (such as the wider criminal legal system) and other domains of the social world (such as politics or economics). Consider the expert conversation in trade publications, academic journals, and policy reports. Police officers, professionals in homeland security and intelligence, criminologists, and others discuss the finer points of intelligence fusion, often as part of larger conversations on counterterrorism and intelligence-led policing. Some journalists, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and other policy advocates make “critical” interventions in this expert conversation, but their impact is much the same: to stake a position in an elite debate about how to set up, regulate, or otherwise refine the work of intelligence fusion. While there are some scholarly studies on fusion centers, the majority of this work remains oriented toward administrative concerns of policy implementation.
Starting with these basic questions concerning the concrete characteristics of a particular fusion center provides the perspective to ask more important, foundational questions that are often ignored in favor of seemingly more pragmatic concerns: What is the work of actually existing fusion centers? How does the institutionalization of intelligence fusion change police agencies, the criminal legal system, and the wider institutional apparatus of the United States? How does it influence political life and the practices of government? How has the rise of fusion centers been shaped by other developments such as the Great Recession? How do fusion centers inform related shifts in policy such as the declaration of the “War on Terror” or the recent efforts to reduce America’s prison population? These questions expand the scope of analysis beyond the confines of policy refinement and civil liberties protection. They highlight concerns erased by the security discourses that pervade discussions of fusion centers. Rather than accepting the assumptions that the world is dangerous, terrorism is an existential threat to world order, and new security measures—including intelligence programs like fusion centers—are required to combat this exceptional danger, this study examines how fusion centers emerged and with what effects. Rather than asking how fusion centers can be more effective or more sensitive to the limits of law, this study examines what “threats” fusion centers monitor and whose “security” they preserve.
This approach reveals that many claims about fusion centers are correct but incomplete. Professionals and practitioners can point to real improvements in interagency intelligence sharing and operational collaboration. At the same time, government auditors have good reason to call fusion centers ineffective and a wasted public investment. The fears of civil libertarians are not unfounded. Fusion centers are involved in civil liberties violations, including political policing, although not in the ways often imagined. All these claims offer glimpses into the operation of fusion centers, but they miss the main target of intelligence fusion: dispossessed and criminalized surplus populations. Now numbering in the billions globally, surplus populations are the economically redundant mass of humanity that is no longer needed as either workers or consumers and, as such, no longer protected as citizens.6 The growth of surplus populations is the product of global restructuring since the 1970s: the deindustrialization of the old capitalist core and the collapse of its welfare states in the face of a truly global and ruthlessly competitive world-economy. During this period, the United States built the largest prison system on the planet to warehouse surplus populations and otherwise manage the violent, wrenching social transformations caused by dramatic social change.7 While much attention has rightly focused on mass incarceration, a complementary set of arrangements, sometimes called mass supervision, also developed to manage “problem populations”—the poor; racial, religious, and sexual minorities; and formerly incarcerated and otherwise criminalized people—outside of the prison.8 In the more recent period bookended by the dotcom crash of 2001 and the Great Recession of 2008, intelligence fusion has gone from an unacknowledged feature of these punitive shifts in criminal justice to the central component of an increasingly visible system of mass supervision.
Placed in this context, fusion centers provide missing