Alex Wong
Is this the U.S. government, or the plot of Get Smart? Congressional investigators will release a report Wednesday citing regional intelligence-gathering offices called “fusion centers”—which together make up one of the country’s biggest domestic counterrorism programs—for being, arguably, useless. According to the report, the centers, which are financed by the Department of Homeland Security, “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.” Homeland Security officials are claiming the new report conducted by Senate investigators is “out of date, inaccurate and misleading.”