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1. Connecting the Dots beyond Counterterrorism and Seeing Past Organizational Failure

The Critique of Security and the Prose of Pacification

On September 9, 2001, a Maryland state trooper stopped Ziad Jarrah for a traffic violation. Having no reason to do otherwise, the trooper sent Jarrah on his way. Two days later, he was the hijacker-pilot of Flight 93, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Citing incidents like this stop, the 9/11 Commission found that the intelligence community had failed to “connect the dots.”¹ In response, the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) promised to link the entirety of domestic intelligence—from municipal police departments to the federal intelligence community—with a new National Network of Fusion Centers. At the same time, the spread of intelligence-led policing (ILP) complemented the rise of these networked intelligence hubs with a “smarter” approach that uses intelligence to preempt threats.

The resultant process of intelligence fusion starts with information: massive databases decades in the making; open-source data gleaned from the web and social media; and streams of information created by new surveillance systems like automated license plate readers. To “fuse” data into useful information, analysts often use powerful computers and specialized software to “connect the dots” and, in theory, draw out the signal from the noise of data. Different tools offer different insights. With specialized software, analysts can turn unintelligible and interminably long lists of phone calls into a pattern of use, and, from there, a social network analysis. They can map unwieldy agglomerations of information—such as geospatial data drawn from police files, the census, and other public records—to create “predictive” heat maps to anticipate where the next shooting is likely to occur. Intelligence fusion also “connects the dots” in simpler ways. Often, fusion centers operate as data brokers, providing investigative support to law enforcement partners. Data brokerage can also mean doing even less: in so-called “pass-throughs,” fusion centers simply disseminate another agency’s intelligence reports.

For the most ardent proponents, the intelligence fusion never really ends. Traditionally, there is an iterative tendency built into intelligence: a cycle in which decision-makers demand information, officers collect information, and analysts process the data into intelligence. The feedback executives provide helps orient the next turn of the intelligence cycle. Intelligence-led policing tries to transcend this reactive model with a proactive approach. It collapses intelligence collection and analysis into a conjoined and continuous activity. Intelligence producers strive to maintain the situational awareness necessary to preempt and disrupt behaviors deemed criminal and disorderly.² Hence, their ever-creeping reach: first, government records and private data brokers; next, the integration of old surveillance systems like closed-circuit TV cameras and new ones like automated license plate readers; and, most recently, wholesale data-mining of social media and other forms of open-source intelligence.

Intelligence-led policing is also an administrative philosophy. The goal is efficiency. About three decades ago, police executives started using crime mapping to manage police departments. With crime hot spots identified, they knew where to direct patrols and investigators and which middle manager to hold accountable. Today, ILP strives for proactive crime control with increasingly individual targeting, a shift from “hot spots” to “hot people.” Under this pressure, officers target “chronic offenders.” Detectives try to refine leads out of data. Analysts work to stay ahead of events and otherwise divine the future. They collaborate with police on long-term investigations, providing a variety of services from simple database searches, to routine crime analysis and mapping, to in-depth criminal profiles and social network analyses.³ In theory, intelligence fusion and ILP will produce more proficient policing.

One decade and upwards of a billion dollars later, the results are unimpressive. In October 2012, the US Senate excoriated fusion centers. After two years of investigation, they could not identify any “reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat . . . [or any] contribution such fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot.”⁴ The report brought uncomfortable national attention to fusion centers. “DHS ‘fusion centers’ portrayed as pools of ineptitude and civil liberties intrusions” read the Washington Post’s headline.⁵ The New York Times had a more subdued title but opened with an equally damaging assessment: “One of the nation’s biggest domestic counterterrorism programs has failed to provide virtually any useful intelligence.”⁶ “It’s brutal,” one federal official involved in funding and management of fusion centers later told me. “It’s one-sided. Definitely. But it’s not totally wrong. We have some problems to work out.”⁷ Seven months later, the Senate’s findings were confirmed in spectacular fashion by the Boston Marathon bombing. In the preceding two years, the FBI and CIA had neglected to share information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother implicated in the attack, with the Boston Regional Intelligence Center. Even if they had, Boston’s fusion center was preoccupied with other matters: spying on Occupy Boston.⁸

The wider conversation on fusion centers reflects the major themes of the Senate report: dysfunction, mission failure, and abuse. From the very start in 2004, when DHS began encouraging state and local governments to create fusion centers, journalists criticized the new program for its ineffectiveness, the potential for mission creep, and civil liberties violations.⁹ By 2008, government researchers and auditors identified the factors contributing to these problems: an ill-defined, vague mission, poor coordination, over-classification, and incompatible information systems.¹⁰ Policy advocates repeated many of these concerns and recommended reform. Liberal organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Brennan Center for Justice focused on protecting civil liberties and recommended greater oversight, while conservative groups like the American Enterprise Institute argued that centralization could reduce costs and increase information sharing.¹¹ Only practitioners in law enforcement and a later report from the House of Representatives found that fusion centers were an effective and worthwhile addition to law enforcement.¹² Some journalists, activists and civil liberties groups inverted this stance, charging that fusion centers are effective, not at counterterrorism, but at suppressing dissent.¹³

Despite all the criticism and bad press, neither politicians nor the public have subjected fusion centers to meaningful oversight or sustained scrutiny. Not only did all of the DHS-recognized fusion centers survive the public sector austerity that followed the Great Recession, the network expanded, increasing from seventy-two centers in 2009 to seventy-nine in 2018. The funds continue to flow: state governments increased their investment in intelligence fusion, and federal support, although reduced, has not stopped.¹⁴ Surely, there is more to the story than organizational failure? Even the sharply critical Senate report acknowledged that “[f]usion centers may provide valuable services in fields other than terrorism, such as contributions to traditional criminal investigations, public safety, or disaster response and recovery efforts.”¹⁵ Perhaps fusion centers are effective, just not at counterterrorism? Even if fusion centers have failed, it begs the question: what are the unintended consequences of this apparent institutional failure?

A wider view brings more urgency to these questions. The DHS-recognized National Network of Fusion Centers is only part of the story. In 2013, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified five kinds of “field-based information-sharing entities” totaling up to 268 interagency intelligence taskforces in the United States, including the then seventy-two fusion centers recognized by DHS and predecessor intelligence centers like the thirty-two investigative support centers set up under the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Program as well as the six multistate Regional Intelligence Sharing Centers administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This count only includes federally funded initiatives, which leaves out, for example, at least thirteen county intelligence centers in New York State alone. The history of fusion centers, then, extends beyond DHS and the “War on Terror.” The first intelligence-sharing operation that could be labeled a “fusion center,” the Drug Enforcement Administration’s El Paso Intelligence Center, was founded in 1974. Furthermore, counterterrorism is not the mission of all these interagency intelligence centers.¹⁶ The mission of most DHS-recognized fusion centers quickly crept from a narrow focus on counterterrorism to a broader “all crimes, all threats, all hazards” mission.¹⁷ Altogether, the institutionalization of intelligence fusion cannot be explained by 9/11 and the increased emphasis on counterterrorism. The scathing Senate report should not be the final word on the subject.

Fusion centers and the related rise of ILP, I contend, provide a window into larger changes, the scope and consequences of which are obscured by the fear of terrorism, the immediate focus on policy implementation, and the apparent failure of fusion centers. To appreciate the full significance of fusion centers, it is essential to connect the dots beyond counterterrorism and see past the discourse of organizational failure. The hyperbolic concerns with terrorism and the perpetual efforts to reform fusion centers are examples of the prose of pacification—that is, the productive play of discourse that organizes and animates the state apparatus. While immediate policy questions are usually determined within these domains, these administrative discourses do not adequately explain how intelligence fusion and ILP are changing the criminal legal system and reshaping the social world. The prose of pacification obscures the materiality of power—the concrete social relations that tie the haves and have-nots together in historically enduring systems of domination and exploitation.

Quieting all this sound and fury requires some theoretical reflection on the power of language to shape social reality. To this end, this chapter first considers the meaning of the term terrorism in order to elaborate the concept of the prose of pacification, which was introduced in the prologue. From here, I demonstrate how concerns about counterterrorism, organizational dysfunction, and privacy miss the broader consequences of the long-term institutionalization of intelligence fusion. Instead, these administrative concerns are productive investments in fusion centers that shape the practice of intelligence fusion as much as they explain it. In this way, this chapter situates the larger study within the relevant literature on fusion centers while also advancing a materialist methodology that recuperates the poststructural approach of discourse analysis and explains the overarching comparative logic of this study. This approach incorporates the comparison within its constitutive historical moment. The goal is to construct a larger whole—in this case, the processes remaking the United States—not deduce causal relations (the factors that enhance information sharing at fusion centers, for example). Traditional comparative approaches define the systemic totality out of existence. It becomes a mess of complicating details to be “abstracted” away. “Incorporating” the comparison means that institutionalization of intelligence fusion in New York and New Jersey are not distinct “cases” that can be abstracted out of their time and space. Instead, they are interrelated “instances” that form and are also formed within a greater whole: our contemporary historical moment and, more specifically, the US state apparatus. This approach is less likely to lead to fraught entanglements with the prose of pacification because it focuses analysis on the larger questions other approaches tend to avoid.

THE MEANING OF TERRORISM AND THE PROSE OF PACIFICATION

The language used to define reality also shapes it. Consider the term terrorism. Critical terrorism scholars like Richard Jackson and Lee Jarvis show that labeling political opponents “terrorists” places them beyond politics and beyond understanding, creating a dichotomy between irrational, barbarous “terrorists” and virtuous, civilized states. Incidents labeled “terrorism” are also defined as exceptional acts outside the normal confines of war and beyond any historical or social context. Hence, the “War on Terror” became a timeless struggle between good and evil.¹⁸ This kind of rhetoric is not just limited to public proclamations of politicians. Lisa Stampnitzky finds that the expert conversation is “continually hybridized by the moral discourse of the public sphere, in which terrorism is conceived as a problem of evil and pathology.” Instead of a “rational” and “scientific” debate, “the language of evil creates ‘a black box’ around terrorism, which creates its own explanation: terrorists commit terrorism because they are evil.”¹⁹

This understanding shapes the response to terrorism. Evil cannot be reconciled. It must be defeated. After 9/11, George W. Bush proclaimed, “No nation can negotiate with terrorists.” A decade and a half earlier Ronald Reagan insisted, “America will never make concessions to terrorism.” In 2009, Susan Rice, the then national security advisor for the Obama administration, repeated the mantra, “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”²⁰ With diplomacy off the table, the United States has engaged in a boundless, borderless, ceaseless “War on Terror.” After nearly two decades, an untold number of military operations in at least seventy-six countries, and some $7.6 trillion spent on a global pacification project, a grim accounting of the costs shows an immense human toll: nearly a million dead from fighting and the related predations of war and over ten million more displaced in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, to say nothing of other affected regions.²¹ Importantly, this immense violence has not ended terrorism. Instead, foreign interventions have devastated Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, creating the conditions for intensified conflict and more terrorism. For the United States, this massive investment in security has led to loose monetary policy, and increased indebtedness. It has diverted resources from pressing social problems like health care and infrastructure, helping to create the conditions for the Great Recession. As economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes explain, “With more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe.”²² This situation created the political opportunity to direct economic anxieties toward refugees. The resulting dynamics are destabilizing both the United States and Europe, where the far-right, including its paramilitary fringe, is ascendant. Despite the failure of the “War on Terror,” security remains the solution to the problem of terrorism. Why?

Critical terrorism scholars would say it is because the discourse of the “War on Terror” supports “power.” Hence, the aforementioned studies by Jackson and Jarvis analyzed the contemporary political rhetoric to reveal how the language of the “War on Terror” is, in Jackson’s words, “a carefully constructed discourse . . . designed to achieve a number of key political goals.” By “denaturalizing” the discourse of the “War on Terror,” these scholars make a vital contribution. They show that the “War on Terror” is not “an objective or neutral reflection of reality.” However, these studies cannot explain why the “War on Terror” advances such “key political goals” like “normalis[ing] and legitimis[ing] the current counter-terrorism approach” or “disciplin[ing] domestic society by marginalising dissent or protest.” In short, they can show that the discourse of the “War on Terror” is “an exercise of power” but they cannot define what is specific about that “power.”²³

Getting at the particularities of “power” requires a different approach. Much of “critical terrorism studies” takes the work of Michel Foucault as its methodological and theoretical point of departure.²⁴ Foucault famously upended the study of “power,” which he reconceptualized not as a thing that could be wielded by individuals or institutions but as a diffuse effect of social relations. In this conception, power is a productive force that resides in discourses, practices, and forms of knowledge. Hence, in his influential work on the prison, asylum, and hospital, Foucault analyzed the discursive construction of criminality, madness, and disease.²⁵ He argued these power apparatuses developed in tandem with systems of knowledge, creating “heterogeneous ensemble[s] consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions.” These dispositifs are unique assemblages of heterogonous elements. They cannot be reduced to or derived from material relationships.²⁶

In his efforts to decenter the analysis of power, however, Foucault failed to give due weight to the historically produced differences in power among institutions and peoples. Nicos Poulantzas, the first Marxist to take Foucault seriously, noted that his “metaphysical and mystical” conception of power “dilutes and scatters power among innumerable microsituations.” Hence, Poulantzas concluded that, “for Foucault, the power relation never has any other basis than itself: it becomes a pure ‘situation’ in which power is always immanent.”²⁷ As a theoretical intervention, the critique of security continues Poulantzas’s work and completes a Marxist recuperation of the poststructural theory of “power.” Hence, Neocleous, while working his way from Poulantzas to the critique of security, noted that Foucault’s great contribution—the focus “on the networks of administrative power mechanisms that operate in the ordering of capitalist society”—is lost to fuzzy theorization, where “the state is dissolved into power, in turn dissolved into the social.” As a result, Foucault—and, particularly, his poststructural followers who have canonized his work in an ever-proliferating number of academic subfields—are unable to see “the significant differences between different forms, modalities, institutions and exercises of power, most obviously the difference between the power of the state in relation to civil society and the relative power of individuals and groups within civil society.” This ill-defined, ahistorical theorization of “power” is evident in a “spurious materialism” that replaces legal subjects with “bodies,” reduces law and sovereignty to mere repression, and denies the “wider constitutive, regulative, and policing functions” of the state. Indeed, “not all legal subjects are human beings and therefore cannot be treated as ‘bodies.’”²⁸ The approach often fails to acknowledge, let alone analyze, the stark power differentials between individual workers and the massive multinational corporations with which they sign employment contracts or—more germane to this study—the “drug pusher” and the police.

Returning to Poulantzas’s critique of Foucault centers analysis squarely on the materiality of power relations, as expressed in the historically specific relationships among capital, state, and class struggle. Here, it is important to note that Poulantzas’s work was more than “a first shot at a materialist appropriation of Foucault.”²⁹ In many ways, Poulantzas anticipated Foucault on the relational and productive nature of power, and the relation between power and knowledge, among other points.³⁰ However, where Foucault developed a suggestive but ultimately ambiguous theory of micropowers that lacked any clear connection to actually existing social relations, Poulantzas tried to reinvigorate historical materialism. He developed his own conception of the productive and relational nature of power, reconceptualizing state institutions as “organically present in the generation of class powers.” The state plays a productive role in the reproduction of a social formation through the maintenance of production relations and the management of class conflict by varied means (repression, material concessions, institutional incorporation of subordinate classes and class fragments, and ideological and cultural production). At the same time, the state is neither an autonomous actor nor the subject of a greater locus of (economic) power. Instead, it is the “specific material condensation of a given relationship of forces.”³¹ The state does not wield power. Instead, it is the structural effect of the cacophony of competing class powers, defined as the capacity to realize historically specific material interests. In this way, Poulantzas conceptualized a relational “field of class practices,” where class interests could not be deduced from an “objective” position within the relations of production. Instead, class interests are historically specific outcomes formed through the subjective experience of individual and collective class relations.³²

The critique of security extends and elaborates Poulantzas’s state theory. The notion of pacification and the broader conception of policing derived from the critical read of police science add further specificity by identifying the key class strategies that have organized and animated state administration. In contrast to Foucaultian categories like discipline and biopower, which de-emphasize the state as “nothing more than the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities,” the idea of pacification brings together a variety of social regulatory mechanisms—the coercive power of police and military agencies, the light touch of surveillance, and social policy more broadly—into a holistic and integrative account of the productive power of capitalist states to shape the societies they govern.³³

The critique of security also continues Poulantzas’s polemics toward Foucault and extends it to contemporary debates. In this way, the critique of security represents an alternative research agenda to largely Foucaultian subfields like critical terrorism studies, surveillance studies, or securitization theory. Consonant with Poulantzas’s remarks on Foucault, these fields also advance a self-referential theorization of “power”: the discourse and practices of counterterrorism, surveillance, and security are freestanding processes grounded in themselves. In contrast, the critique of security considers these discourses and practices in relation to social relations expressed in given moments of the world-economy and specific instances of state-formation.³⁴ As a project of critique, it begins with deep engagement with the histories and constitutive ideas that produced—and are produced within—the capitalist world-economy and the modern administrative state.

To advance this project, I read the relevant literature and my primary research as examples of the prose of pacification, or the discourses and performances that provide practical logic and functional coherence to the state apparatus. Pacification is both an administrative strategy to manage class struggle and a prose, a loosely connected but still coherent body of ideas, practices, and performances that animate and organize the provisioning of “security.” In contrast to the now well-known notion of discourse, my effort to highlight the discursive aspect of pacification is a deliberate attempt to avoid poststructuralism’s drift toward idealism. Rather than a free-floating idea of discourse, which can often be seen as the productive nexus of social relations, as in Foucault’s ambiguous and self-referential conception of power, the prose of pacification centers the discursive aspects of administration in the historically specific and changing relations among capital, the state, and class struggle. In this way, the prose of pacification is a reformulation of what Poultanzas called “a state discourse.” “[B]roken into segments and fragments according to lines intersecting the strategy of power,” these “discourses of organization” are “elements of state knowledge to be used for the purposes of political strategy.”³⁵ The prose of pacification, while productive of social relations, is also produced by historically enduring relations that cannot be reduced, in a circular fashion, to the effects of discourse. The relationship is dialectic and nonlinear. Hence, “the state is not aware of its own strategy in advance and cannot formulate it at the level of discourse.” Rather, what I term the prose of pacification “constitutes the state as a strategic field by giving expression to class interests in a selective manner consistent with the social relations of forces.”³⁶

In the following two sections, I consider the counterterrorism intelligence produced at fusion centers and the related concerns about dysfunction and civil liberties voiced by criminologists, civil libertarians, and surveillance scholars. As examples of the prose of pacification, these expert debates provide voice and consistency to different classes and class fragments vying to control the state apparatus and dictate its dominant strategies. In the case of counterterrorism, police officers, intelligence analysts, and other security professionals speak the language of counterterrorism to claim authority over the definition of “threats” and, in so doing, assert control over distribution of resources within the state apparatus. Criminologists, surveillance scholars, and civil libertarians engage in similar struggle but at a distance from the state. They position themselves as experts capable of remedying the dysfunction and redressing the civil liberties violations associated with fusion centers. Insofar as criminologists form an essential part of what might be thought of as the law-and-order lobby, surveillance scholars and civil libertarians get caught up in traditional reformist politics; both of these expert conversations are constructive contributions to the institutionalization of intelligence fusion that do more to refine and perpetuate fusion centers than explain or analyze them.

CONNECTING THE DOTS BEYOND COUNTERTERRORISM

Concerns about their poor performance fail to acknowledge the actual work done at fusion centers. The politically inconvenient reality is that the threat from political violence is insufficient to warrant the amount of resources invested in counterterrorism. Since 9/11, there have been few fatalities from terrorism in the United States. According to the Global Terrorism Database, a comprehensive collection of open-source data on all attacks deemed “terrorism,” these incidents of political violence have killed 197 people in the United States from 9/11 to the end of 2016.³⁷ In other words, the threat of terrorism is exceedingly remote. The chance of dying from terrorism in the United States is one in twenty million. These odds pale in comparison to other, more mundane threats like heart disease and cancer (one in seven); the flu, pneumonia, and emphysema (one in twenty-eight); suicide (one in a hundred); motor vehicle accidents (1 in 112); falling (1 in 144); assault by firearms (1 in 358); and even a host of exceedingly remote causes of death such as accidental suffocation during sleep (1 in 5,721), bee stings (1 in 55,764), or lightning strikes (1 in 164,968).³⁸

While the threat of terrorism is statistically unlikely, mounting fears cannot be simply discounted. However, terrorism must be placed in a wider political context, beyond the hyperbolic rhetoric of security professionals, politicians, and terrorism experts. Acts labeled “terrorism” are forms of political violence that most often emerge from the breakdown of social order: civil war, revolution, and state failure or collapse. As such, most terrorism takes place in destabilized regions beset by armed conflict. In 2016, for example, most incidents of terrorism occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria.³⁹ The weakening of these states and surrounding regions, moreover, cannot be fully explained without considering military interventions and covert operations of Western states and, particularly, the United States. The current crisis is a day of reckoning that has been long in the making. It extends beyond the aggressive attempt to remake the Greater Middle East during the “War on Terror” to the long history of Western support for dictatorial regimes that constrained politics in much of the formerly colonized world during the Cold War. Such sober public policy data and broader historical context notwithstanding, the federal government has poured at least a trillion dollars into DHS, including, by some counts, over a billion dollars into fusion centers.⁴⁰

There is also little evidence to show that these counterterrorism programs actually prevent terrorism. Many of the highest-profile attempted terrorist attacks since 9/11—the “shoe bomber” in 2001, the “underwear bomber” in 2009, and the “subway bomber” in 2010—were not foiled by counterterrorism programs. Instead, bystanders observed alarming behavior and responded accordingly.⁴¹ These incidents fit within a general trend. In 2012, the US Senate concluded that “fusion center success stories” related to counterterrorism were fraudulent. They were “unable to confirm that the fusion centers’ contributions were as significant as DHS portrayed them; were unique to the intelligence and analytical work expected of fusion centers; or would not have occurred absent a fusion center.”⁴² Most of the terrorism convictions in the last decade, moreover, are either manufactured farces, a product of FBI entrapment operations, or legal artifices—smaller convictions enhanced to appear as counterterrorism coups. As of late August 2018, 864 people have been charged for terrorism in the United States, 569 defendants pleaded guilty, courts found 186 guilty, three have been acquitted and three have seen their charges dropped or dismissed, 365 are in custody with fifty-eight awaiting trial, 314 have been caught in FBI stings, and thirty-four have been cooperating informants who have served little to no prison time. Over half of those charged—453 people—have since been released, often without supervision, suggesting the courts do not view them as threats. As Trevor Aaronson, the journalist who assembled and analyzed these data explained, “I could count on one hand the number of actual terrorists, such as failed New York City subway bomber Najibullah Zazi, who posed a direct and immediate threat to the United States.”⁴³

If terrorism is statistically an insignificant threat and intelligence produced at fusion centers cannot be linked to any foiled plots, then, is it correct to repeat the mantra about the misaligned mission and ineffectiveness of fusion centers? The content of the intelligence reports that the US Senate dismissed as “problematic and useless” provides some necessary perspective.⁴⁴ Given the insignificant threat of terrorism to the United States, fusion centers cannot report on imminent threats. Instead, they often detail attacks in places with active armed movements in order to make the case that law enforcement and the private sector in the United States report information to fusion centers. This dynamic was evident in both of the DHS-recognized fusion centers I studied, the New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC) and the New York State Intelligence Center (NYSIC). In March 2012, the NYSIC, for example, released a threat assessment on major terrorist attacks on hotels in Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, India, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, and Somalia. The report contained no information about threats to the United States. It simply asserted that there was a threat to hotels:

Radical Islamic groups, including al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda linked groups, continue to plan attacks against the West, including the United States (US). These groups view civilians as potential targets and will continue to use a variety of attack methods. Lack of information pertaining to a certain category in this report does not necessarily represent the absence of a threat. However, the frequency and tactic of attack analyzed in this report may indicate the most common vulnerabilities to an attack on the hotel sector.⁴⁵

The ROIC put out a similar report following a June 2012 attack on a hotel in Afghanistan. Like the NYSIC report, the ROIC’s briefing contained no specific threat information but made similar assertions about the nature of threat:

The threat to the hotel industry in New Jersey and the surrounding region is high because of frequent attacks domestically [—of which the report cites no examples—] and internationally, and the potential threat from [homegrown violent extremists] to the hospitality industry. As military and government facilities continue to improve their security measures, terrorists are likely to target hotels and other facilities that are easier to attack. While numerous terrorist groups have expressed the intent to target the United States, the ROIC is unaware of any group that has specifically mentioned the hotel sector in New Jersey as a potential target. Law enforcement and private-sector security personnel should remain vigilant for suspicious activity that may be indicative of terrorist activity.⁴⁶

Rather than sobering analysis of realistic dangers, these reports construct the threat of terrorism and call on others to gather intelligence.

This type of analysis is common. For example, I collected 163 of the ROIC’s reports, which were posted on a publicly accessible Google Group for New Jersey fire chiefs. This collection covers the period from January to July 2014. It includes fifty-seven examples of the “ROIC Intelligence and Analysis Threat Unit Daily Overview.” This report is broken into two sections. The first section, “Homeland Security Reporting,” includes three subsections: international terrorism reporting, which summarizes news pertaining to political violence abroad or cybersecurity; New Jersey Suspicious Activity Reports, which lists the content of recently vetted Suspicious Activity Reports; and State Threat Posture, which always closes with this disclaimer/call for vigilance:

The ROIC has no specific or current information regarding a threat to New Jersey; however, large-scale events may create potential targets of opportunity for international and domestic terrorist groups as well as lone offenders. Individuals or terrorists could attempt to utilize these high-profile/high-visibility events as a stage to make a statement or otherwise further their goals.⁴⁷

During the summer months the language shifted slightly to:

The ROIC has no specific or current information regarding a threat to New Jersey; however, large scale events during the summer season will likely generate a large amount of national and regional media attention. These events create potential targets of opportunities for terrorist organizations and Homegrown Violent Extremists (HVEs) that recognize highly populated, high-profile events as an opportunity to further their goals.⁴⁸

The second section of the daily threat briefing is titled “International Threat Environment,” which covers developments in global conflicts, almost exclusively dominated by events in the Middle East. Clearly, these reports are of dubious analytic value, something both the intelligence analyst tasked to produce them and the law enforcement officers receiving them noted in interviews with me.⁴⁹ As examples of the prose of pacification, however, these “problematic and useless” reports communicate a pedagogical mission: to educate and encourage police officers, and private security to “remain vigilant” and report “suspicious activity.”

At both the NYSIC and the ROIC, managers consider this pedagogical mission to be important. As a senior supervisor at the NYISC told me:

After 9-11, obviously, everybody was on board. Everybody wanted to play their part and prevent the next 9-11 from happening, but, as time goes on, human nature kicks in and less and less do people want to be prevented from doing things in their lives or be inconvenienced in any way. So we fight that all the time, not only with the public but also with law enforcement, to keep people on track and keep this stuff in their mind.⁵⁰

A senior supervisor at the ROIC also echoed these comments:

It really comes down to our ability to sell our services and educate the people on the importance of the work that we do. We need to get people to understand the threat environment better so they can act or be proactive in the proper manner and do their jobs better. A better-informed public, a better-informed police officer, a better-informed public safety official is somebody that is going to be doing their job at a higher level and, therefore, the safety of the citizens of New Jersey is impacted in a positive manner as a result.⁵¹

Whether or not fusion centers are effective at counterterrorism, these sentiments and related intelligence products are productive: they organize the work done at fusion centers, while also attempting to construct the threat of terrorism and encouraging others to report information.

This pedagogical mission is also evident in the national programming of DHS and the state-level initiatives of the ROIC and NYSIC. One of DHS’s main programs is the “See Something, Say Something Campaign,” a nationwide public education campaign “to raise public awareness of indicators of terrorism and terrorism-related crime, and to emphasize the importance of reporting suspicious activity to the proper local law enforcement authorities” and “underscore the concept that homeland security begins with hometown security.”⁵² The formal goal of the program is to encourage the public to report information to police who will create a “suspicious activity report” that becomes part of a national database, accessible to fusion center analysts and others. The wider effect of this National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, however, is “to encourage and facilitate a new vigilance in peer-to-peer monitoring—in making it as easy and natural as possible for lay individuals to be the ‘eyes and ears’ that listen to and watch their neighbors, family members, and fellow shoppers, travelers, and sports fans.”⁵³

The ROIC and the NYSIC also run more focused programs with the same goal to recruit intelligence collectors. The ROIC runs a Fusion Liaison Officer Initiative, which, in the words of the trooper managing it, aims to “recruit folks from law enforcement, public safety and the private sector to attend the training. They would see an overview of about four hours of what fusion center is, what we do, how we process information, privacy and civil liberties, and the parameters we operate under.”⁵⁴ The NYSIC makes a similar effort with the Field Intelligence Officer program to “provide basic training on intelligence and counterterrorism and familiarize officers with the NYSIC’s products and services and also national programs like the National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative.”⁵⁵ Both fusion centers also train private sector security personnel and produce a version of their daily reporting for the private sector.

The NYSIC takes their training even further. Through Operation Red Cell, they covertly assess the effectiveness of their outreach to the private sector. An analyst

will go out to a specific area and inquire about information that should trigger that business to make a call or otherwise reach out to us. So, it is a way to see if we’ve been successful or if we need to do more outreach. It tells us what kind of information we’ve gotten out there and what need to improve upon. It’s a test.⁵⁶

The NYSIC also organizes a yearly State-Wide Intelligence Summit to train police executives. It is a “higher-level overview” on terrorism, crime trends, and intelligence tradecraft.⁵⁷ An administrator described the goal of the meeting as “getting new people in the fold, making them aware of terrorism, and get them exposed to the other professionals at that level, and then the upper echelon of communication is opened up.”⁵⁸ In 2012, two hundred police chiefs and sheriffs attended the meeting.⁵⁹ For the NYISC, the conference is an opportunity to build their network of intelligence collectors. “We will have people who are unaware of our services. We have a booth set up at the conference and we market the NYSIC. . . . We’ll see new departments reaching out to us after the summit.”⁶⁰

These counterterrorism products and programs are more than examples of the discourse of terrorism that constructs a terror threat. They are also political acts that assert the professional authority to define “threats” and make collective claims about the appropriate distribution of resources and the direction of state strategy. The massive public investment in the name of counterterrorism is a class project in at least two senses. There is a “law-and-order lobby”—a segment of the capitalist class with allies in government, academia, and popular culture—that has a vested interested in “security.” Homeland security has been a boon for this constituency. For police officers and other security professionals, an assignment at a fusion center can create opportunities for higher-prestige work in and outside of government. For example, the NYSIC catapulted New York State Police Colonel Bart Johnson, its first director, to principal deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at DHS. “He saw an opportunity and made the most of it,” one interviewee told me.⁶¹ From here, Johnson moved to the private sector, becoming the executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), the influential professional association. After IACP, Johnson moved back to government. Today, he is the Transportation Security Administration’s federal security director for fifteen upstate New York airports.

Counterterrorism is also a class project in that it is a systemic reorganization of the state, one that recalibrates and intensifies the ability to pacify disturbances in an era of increasingly sharp social polarization. Drawing on Poulantzas, Christos Boukalas contends that DHS and the related rise of counterterrorism policies signals “the pre-emptive shielding of capitalist rule from anticipated popular struggles against political exclusion and economic dispossession.” Boukalas locates this authoritarian hardening in the reforms of the George W. Bush administration and the related rise of particular capitalist-class fragments—armaments and oil. This important work presents a formal logic of a particular structure of power. He writes:

In line with the discursive construction of the Enemy as being potentially anyone/anywhere, the scope of surveillance seeks to encompass all: all social interaction, by all individuals. The totality of social activity is the ultimate target of surveillance. Thus, the unified police mechanism, operating in a uniform space, is set to police an homogenised target: all of us.⁶²

This provocative argument serves better as a hypothesis, which subsequent chapters explore at length. While a universal, total intelligence state could be activated, this process would be mediated through the previous history of political struggle, which shapes the specific character of the state. In other words, DHS exists to pacify those coded by the prose of pacification as a “threat.” As such, it seems more likely that surveillance and police power would operate along historical lines of power. Not only are more vulnerable groups more likely to feel the ill effects of security expansion, dominant groups are more likely to embody the prose of pacification and invest their energy and emotion into “security.” In this way, this study builds on Boukalas’s contribution to consider some questions: How has the massive investment in intelligence changed the practice of policing? How do these changes affect the criminal legal system and the larger state apparatus? How do they shape politics? These are not the questions taken up by the scholarship on intelligence fusion and ILP.

SEEING PAST THE DISCOURSE

OF ORGANIZATIONAL FAILURE

A discourse of organizational failure also surrounds fusion centers and clouds a full accounting of their effects. Virtually all writing on intelligence fusion and ILP is fixated upon shortcomings and recommendations for reform. No doubt, there are real technical problems entailed in the institutionalization of intelligence fusion and the implementation of ILP that could be redressed through study and analysis. This debate, however, is not simply applied study for public administration. Neither should it be understood as straightforward evidence of the failure of fusion centers. What Foucault said of the prison expresses a tendency implicit in every reform effort: “Prison ‘reform’ is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were, its programme.”⁶³ Similarly, this discourse of failure is not a critical check on the development of fusion centers. Instead, these expert performances are always and unavoidably productive investments in the institution. They are expert interventions in “the problem of fusion centers,” which, in producing both the “expert” and “the problem,” are incapable of solving the latter (just as criminology will never stop crime or deviance). Instead, these individual enactments of expertise expand the list of problems associated with intelligence and ILP. To the extent that this work contributes to conventional reforms, they get caught up in the play of the prose of pacification.

Here, both criminologists and law enforcement practitioners, on one hand, and surveillance scholars and civil libertarians, on the other, reproduce the same logic of argument, even if their content is very different. For both, the abiding concern, whether consciously articulated or implicit, is administrative: how to refine the operation of fusion centers? The de-politicized and objective tone of criminologists and law enforcement on fusion centers masks a professional project to legitimize, institutionalize, and refine intelligence fusion. Hence, scholars and practitioners identify best practices, such as outreach efforts that have measurably increased intelligence sharing or the best use of specific technologies like geospatial mapping.⁶⁴ Others have identified problems—police officers’ passive posture toward fusion centers, low-quality intelligence, poor coordination—that impede intelligence fusion and ILP.⁶⁵

This conversation is not disinterested. It happens in forums connected to large political associations of security professionals like Police Chief, the IACP’s magazine, or the Journal of Intelligence Analysis, a peer-reviewed publication of the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts. These organizations are the political arm of security professionals. They lobby to direct resources to security agencies, promote professional standards, and manage public perceptions of the institution. They are also increasingly involved in policy formation. In the mid-2000s, the young National Fusion Center Association (NFCA)—among older associations like IACP—worked with DHS and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to recommend standards and guidelines that conditioned the consolidation of fusion centers throughout the next decade.⁶⁶ For its part, the NFCA also organizes yearly conventions, which, starting in 2013, were independent of DHS or DOJ.⁶⁷ Instead, security and technology firms “cosponsor” the annual gathering: older titans like IBM and Thomson Reuters, which both sell data analysis platforms, established firms like Esri, the geographic information system (GIS) mapping juggernaut, and relative upstarts like Dataminr and Geofeedia, the early leaders in social media monitoring. Instead of a discourse of failure, this block of professional and corporate interests is producing the prose of pacification, creating the knowledge and practices that animate and organize intelligence fusion and ILP.

In a more oblique way, even ostensibly “critical” voices like surveillance scholars and civil libertarians get caught up in the prose of pacification. While surveillance scholars provide empirical insights on fusion centers, they have not asked how their findings relate to larger power structures. A case in point is Torin Monahan and Priscilla Regan’s survey of thirty-six DHS-recognized fusion centers. They present the bulk of their findings in the same narrow, objective style that characterizes criminology. Hence, they identify the reason the mission of fusion centers has crept from counterterrorism to “all hazards.” They similarly note the administrative and interagency factors that result in weak accountability at fusion centers. They also examine fusion centers’ role in the expansion of suspicious activity reporting.⁶⁸ Their most ambitious argument conceptualizes fusion centers as “centers of concatenation” or clearinghouses where “disparate data are drawn together as needed, invested with meaning, communicated to others, and then discarded such that no records exist of such surveillance activities.”⁶⁹ This theorization, however, does not explore the ends of fusion center surveillance. Why is this monitoring happening? Who is surveilled and with what effects? In short, it does not explore systemic connections with the concrete specificities of “power.” Since surveillance is—by definition—an exercise of power, ignoring these questions leaves the study unfinished.

Most importantly, the tentative nature of these studies coupled with their objective tone leads surveillance scholars to some fraught conclusions. In an article written with Krista Carven, Monahan and Regan consider what is arguably the most egregious example of political policing connected to fusion centers: the policing of Occupy Wall Street and, particularly, Occupy Phoenix (an incident discussed in chapter 5). They use this example “to better understand” the tension between the claims of security officials that “the public should trust police and intelligence communities not to violate their rights” and the dynamic where “the very act of engaging in secretive surveillance operations erodes public trust in government.” While they find that fusion centers are generally “well aware of these dangers and are generally wary of scrutiny by the media or others,” they contend that increased public accountability would formalize this tendency. In other words, ostensibly “critical” scholars of surveillance conclude that enhanced regulation may lead to more public legitimacy for law enforcement intelligence centers, which, they note in the first sentence of the article, operate “in direct tension with ideals of democratic governance and accountability.”⁷⁰

In this way, the work of surveillance scholars underscores the dilemma of traditional reformist politics. Efforts to ameliorate the excesses of state power often entrench and perpetuate those same abuses. Consider the stance of the premier civil liberties organization, the ACLU, toward fusion centers. In 2008, they identified a series of problems with fusion centers—ambiguous lines of authority, private sector and military participation, and wholesale data mining and excessive secrecy. They recommended that the US Congress and state legislatures work to increase oversight of fusion centers, regulate the flow of information between fusion centers and the private sector, clarify “how and when” military personnel can collect intelligence for law enforcement purposes, and strengthen open records laws.⁷¹ The ACLU did not demand an end to these problematic practices. Instead, they sought to regulate and, thus, codify them. Challenging intelligence fusion on these terms will, at best, produce limited public oversight (an ACLU representative on the fusion center’s executive board) and some modest restrictions on intelligence gathering (three-month retention periods for certain kinds of data), which would only be contravened in exceptional circumstances (an emergency warrant or administrative subpoena).

In this way, the analyses of surveillance scholars and the reformist efforts of civil libertarians reify state power. Consider the politics of privacy. Surveillance scholars often focus narrowly on the implementation of privacy policies and their inadequacy.⁷² Civil libertarians view privacy as a universal right that can be asserted against the encroachment of outside parties. They position “the right to privacy” or “the state” as independent entities that stand apart from the social relations and political processes that, historically, created them and still imbue them with meaning. This way of thinking transforms historically specific social relations and the ideas that animate them into abstract “things.” The “private” is not natural condition that is always and already in opposition to the state and capital. Instead, “privacy” is a particular claim articulated within a particular context: sixteenth-century liberal theory, a concession that the consolidating administrative state made to “the public.” Privacy has no essential essence. It is a shifting boundary with demarcations set and reset by the state. The meaningful foil to the “private” is not the state—the “public”—but the “criminal,” or the other activities outside the state but disallowed by the sovereign. Rather than a basis of resistance, privacy is a tool of regulation: privacy as pacification. In a social world already governed by the commodity form and wage relation, privacy

entrenches the very separations between people presupposed by capitalist social relations that security is used to enforce and maintain. Privacy, then, promises a life apart, a mode of existence separate from others and to this end is presupposed by our appearance as individuals who are autonomous from another and can, therefore, “choose” to be further detached and apart.⁷³

The notion of privacy further alienates social relations and fetishizes the processes that define our lives as mystified things.

For this reason, the work of surveillance scholars and civil libertarians often amounts to a moral critique: an appeal to law and a demand, sometimes only implicit, for further state regulation. This moral critique is simultaneously performance of and productive investment in a particular conception of the social world. Insofar as it remains uncritically wedded to privacy, the efforts of surveillance scholars and civil libertarian represent the liberal counterpoint to the law-and-order advocacy of criminologists and law enforcement practitioners. While the former highlights accountability and the latter emphasizes effectiveness, both offer “better” surveillance and policing. In contrast, this study asks how such intensive surveillance and aggressive policing became a common practice in the first place. To meaningfully consider this question, it is necessary to resist conventional understandings of “reform,” a subject the conclusion revisits. Instead of trying to fix fusion centers, Pacifying the Homeland travels inside the secret world of intelligence fusion to unearth and analyze the intended consequences of an apparent organizational failure.

INSIDE THE WORLD OF INTELLIGENCE FUSION

The world of intelligence fusion is muddled and complex. It entails more than just one type of institution, fusion centers. It encompasses an entire network of actors: the police agencies that manage fusion centers; the intelligence analysts from state homeland security offices; and the representatives from a variety of local, state, and federal agencies that work at fusion centers. There are also more arms-length relationships, such as the government and private sector “partners” that may call the fusion center for support or receive their products. Some of these relationships are more administrative, like those with federal officials involved in the funding and evaluation of fusion centers. Of course, there are also the contractors, both the companies that sell and service information technology systems and subcontractors that work at fusion centers.

The confusion is not just a matter of secrecy. It is also a product of a specific set of institutions, a particular state-form. Indeed, when the Senate hammered fusion centers for their ineffectiveness at counterterrorism, the House of Representatives responded that such standardization was never the point. “The strength of the National Network,” the House report contended, “lies in the diversity of expertise, individual fusion centers’ unique identities, and operational independence from the Federal Government; a cookie-cutter approach would be detrimental to the National Network.”⁷⁴ This statement is not just a defensive reframing of the Senate’s criticism. It also gets at an important truth. Fusion centers are a product of a distinct era of public policy, where efficiency is more important than the standardization. The key policies that shape fusion centers are not binding regulations written by legislators or agency heads. They were drafted as “recommendations” and “baseline capabilities” in large working groups, which included the participation of a wide group of “stakeholders,” including the aforementioned police professional associations. “The missions of fusion centers vary based on the environment in which the center operates,” as one of these documents explains. “Some capabilities may not need to be housed or performed within a fusion center itself; instead, the center may rely on another fusion center or other operational entity to provide the capability. This approach is particularly appropriate, since one of the founding principles of the Fusion Center Guidelines is to leverage existing resources and expertise where possible.”⁷⁵

These arrangements reflect a reorganization of political authority, one aptly cast as the workfare state, which, in contrast to the more centralized welfare state, seeks to promote innovation with competition. The next chapter discusses these changes at length. For now, it suffices to note that what most reformers, policy advocates, and academics systematically misrecognize as signs of failure are more properly understood as the variegated outcomes produced by the decentralized planning and competitiveness baked into the system. To better understand how these outcomes are produced, I examined two very different institutionalizations of intelligence fusion and ILP: the two adjacent states connected by the metro area that was the “ground zero” of 9/11. I compare New York and New Jersey to illustrate a larger structural shift. In both states, police—empowered by the increased emphasis on and investment in intelligence—are enabling a leveling-off of the prison population and a shift to more surveillance- and police-intensive pacification practices. The overall context of the workfare state clarifies the cumulative effects of intelligence fusion and ILP, while explaining the institutional differences between New York and New Jersey.

There is also an important historical aspect. The New York Police Department (NYPD) is the largest police department in the world, with great power and influence. It is a trendsetter that pioneered some of the techniques now being exported across the country under the rubric of intelligence fusion and ILP. Indeed, as the federal government began to advance fusion centers, New York State’s Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS), an agency dedicated to supporting and training other criminal justice agencies, launched Operation IMPACT, a grant-driven interagency partnership between DCJS and the major law enforcement agencies in the seventeen counties that, together, account for 80 percent of the crime outside of New York City. The goal of IMPACT was to export New York City’s policing innovations throughout the state, including intelligence-led policing. As a result of IMPACT, New York State has what is likely the most robust state-level intelligence network in the United States: thirteen county crime analysis centers located throughout the state. These miniature fusion centers specialize in criminal intelligence and serve New York’s other urban centers. Between the NYPD and IMPACT, New York’s DHS-recognized, statewide fusion center, the NYSIC, has to compete for its mission space and niche. It has largely lost this battle. As a result, New York, an early innovator in policing, has a DHS-recognized fusion center that appears to be redundant and dysfunctional. In contrast, the ROIC has little competition and struggles to meet the intelligence needs of a densely populated state with high rates of violent crime.

In this way, the comparison between New York and New Jersey strengthens this book’s central claim that intelligence fusion and ILP are the central components in the reconfiguration of the state. A focus on just DHS-recognized fusion centers would present a false picture, where New Jersey is a model and New York is laggard. A broader focus, however, reveals that the nationwide attempt to institutionalize intelligence fusion through DHS counterterrorism initiatives is part of a larger structural transformation that some of the policing innovations in New York City prefigure. In short, this comparison shows a common outcome produced through different institutional means. It highlights a new configuration of the state’s security apparatus, while explaining the complex—and regionally varied—political and institutional transformations through which this change unfolded. It moves the conversation beyond hyperbolic claims about terrorism and a nearsighted obsession with failure and reform.

Instead, this study of intelligence fusion incorporates the comparison of New York and New Jersey into a larger investigation of the development of the state-form. A conventional comparison would produce “objective” knowledge about some abstracted “thing.” Consider, for example, Renee Graphia-Joyal’s comparison of four fusion centers to determine how interpersonal relationships and trust affect information sharing and collaboration. Each fusion center is taken at face value as a discreet “case” comparable to similar “cases.”⁷⁶ In contrast, the comparison given in this study does not assume a given fusion center operates as an independent entity, a case that can be isolated and studied. Instead, it constructs a larger totality formed, in part, by different moments or processes of intelligence fusion. It compares the operation and institutionalization of intelligence fusion in New York and New Jersey in time: What resources do these intelligence centers muster? How are they used? How are these fusion centers institutionally situated? How are they connected to other agencies and entities? It also compares their development through time: How were these intelligence centers put in place? How have they changed over time? How have they helped define or refine the work of “intelligence fusion”?⁷⁷

These simultaneous synchronic and diachronic comparisons avoid the common problem of abstracted empiricism. In one of the classic texts of sociological methods, C. Wright Mill denounced the “pronounced tendency to confuse whatever is to be studied with the set of methods suggested for its study.” Hence, he criticized “public opinion” research for assuming the existence of “the public” and conflating it with the statistical survey. This approach lost sight of the “problem of the public” as it developed during the transformation of Western societies from the collapse of the medieval order through the modern period up to the consolidating “mass societies” of Mills’s time. By the late 1950s, the relevant question was not, what does “the public” think? but, does “the public” exist? and, what relevance does its opinion hold when “men at large become ‘mass men’ each trapped in quite a powerless milieux”?⁷⁸

Similarly, Graphia-Joyal’s comparison of fusion centers conflates her object of study with her methods, a four-part case study. The very problem of fusion centers—What is intelligence fusion? How did it develop? How is it institutionalized and with what effects?—is lost to her assumption that fusion centers exist as a “thing” or “case” that needs no explanation or investigation. Graphia-Joyal’s problem—like the questions taken up by criminologists, surveillance scholars, and civil libertarians—is much narrower. She asks how to improve information sharing and interagency collaboration at fusion centers. While her answer may help fusion center managers refine their operations, it will do little to advance “public” understanding of intelligence fusion or its consequences. In contrast, incorporating the comparison through history and within the present allows us to consider intelligence fusion as both a constitutive component of a state-form and a dynamic variable in ongoing processes of state-formation. In other words, this study places intelligence fusion within the broader social and historical context of the crisis of the workfare-carceral state and uses the analytic insights of the comparison to identify a shift in state strategy toward mass supervision, a more surveillance- and police-intensive practice of pacification. The next chapter details the necessary historical background to situate this comparison.