Russia Did It Flashback

October 2, 2012

[Congressional investigators] looked at problems in regional intelligence-gathering offices known as “fusion centers” that are financed by the Department of Homeland Security and created jointly with state and local law enforcement agencies.

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.

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The investigators also discovered that 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.

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In a 2009 e-mail discovered by the Senate investigators, one department official warned that the fusion centers were collecting information on Americans “without proper vetting,” and were “improperly reporting this information through homeland information reporting channels.”

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Homeland Security has not carved out a clear counterterror mission that does not overlap with those of other agencies.

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Top officials of the Homeland Security Department have known about the problems for years, but hid an internal department report on the program’s flaws from Congress while continuing to tell lawmakers and the public that the fusion centers were highly valuable and that they formed the centerpiece of Homeland Security’s counter-terrorism efforts.

[...]

The fusion centers quickly became a black hole for taxpayer money, the Senate investigators found. The fusion centers were run by state and local officials, but were funded through grants to states from the Federal Emergency Management Agency with little oversight. That made it 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 for use by state and local agencies.

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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.

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Last November, for example, an Illinois center reported that Russian hackers had broken into the computer system of a local water district in Springfield and sent computer commands that triggered a water pump to burn out. But it turned out that a repair technician had remotely accessed the water district’s computer system while he was on vacation in Russia.

  NYT

Sometimes I wonder how we are not all blown up in a nuclear holocaust already.  Or are we, and this is Hell?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.