Secretary
Janet Napolitano’s speech today to the International Association of Chiefs of
Police (IACP) in Orlando, Fla., is a good opportunity to update the American
public on the important role that state and major urban area fusion centers are
playing in keeping our country safe.
Fusion
centers grew out of a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, which found that
the federal government had no systematic way for sharing information and
intelligence with state and local governments.
Today,
we have a national network of 72 recognized fusion centers – one in every state
and 22 in major urban areas – and, with Department of Homeland Security
support, they are being woven into the national and homeland security fabric of
the United States.
What
does that mean for the American people? It means you now have a dedicated and
well-trained group of men and women in your own communities, working with DHS,
FBI, and other federal partners, to keep your police officers, firefighters,
public health and safety officials, and other first responders informed about
terrorist, criminal, and other homeland security threats.
The
DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, where I serve, takes information and
intelligence from across DHS and the national Intelligence Community, processes
and analyzes it, and then shares it with the fusion centers, often in joint
products with the FBI. The fusion centers then disseminate it to the some
18,000 state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement organizations, and
to thousands more first responders throughout the country. They also support
the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces in their terrorism investigations.
Conversely,
fusion centers provide the federal government with critical information and
subject?matter expertise from the state and
local level, enabling the effective communication of locally-generated
information about terrorism back to Washington.
Fusion
centers have already proven their value in countering terrorist attacks. For
example, they played important roles in the case of the attempted Times Square
bombing by Faisal Shahzad and the plot to bomb New York subways by Najibullah
Zazi.
DHS
is working with each center to improve its baseline level of operational
capability. Through the use of grant funding, each center is expected to
achieve and maintain the capacity to receive and share threat-related
information generated by the federal government, as well as the capacity to
gather, assess, analyze, and share suspicious activity reports generated by
local law enforcement and the private sector. These same baseline capabilities
also ensure that fusion centers establish and maintain privacy and civil
liberty protections.
In
addition, the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and the DHS
Privacy Office, provide privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties training to
all DHS intelligence officers before they deploy to the fusion centers, and
support the training of all fusion center personnel nationwide.
Fusion
Center Info