Intellectual Property Law

A D.C. privacy group that is curious about the activities of a Virginia domestic intelligence center filed a government sunshine lawsuit Friday, after Virigina's so-called fusion center rebuffed its requests for documents about what the center was doing.

Civil liberties groups want to know more about how fusion centers will fuse data on Americans.
Photo: Jan Tik

The Electronic Privacy Information Center's complaint (.pdf) asks a Virginia judge to force state police to cough up records about meetings with the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, especially in regards to discussions about how the center would or would not comply with state open government laws. Virginia state police denied the request, saying the documents were "criminal intelligence data."

Fusion centers are relatively new creatures on the homeland security scene and are intended to allow local and state police to combine their criminal and intelligence information with information shared by government agencies.

The idea is to break the chokehold the feds have had on intelligence and to find ways to integrate beat cops information with the feds' intel. Private companies, such as banks and chemical plants, are also expected to funnel reports of suspicious information to the centers, which can then look for patterns and run down leads.

While the original idea was to focus on anti-terrorism, both states and the federal government are now touting an all-encompassing "alll threats, all hazards" model. That means the centers would focus not just on anti-terrorism, but also gangs, immigration, floods and common crimes -- under the justification that these other areas sometimes have links to terrorism.

Privacy groups are cold on fusion centers, the latest growth sector in the homeland security industrial complex. There are now some 50 such centers around the country. The feds recently attempted, with little media interest, to tout their cooperation with the centers as a symbol of the change in how Washington operates after 9/11.

One of the main objections of groups like EPIC and the ACLU is that as information gets fused, it's not clear what privacy laws apply.

Do state open-access rules apply? What about the federal Privacy Act? Will state rules only apply to data collected by states? How does one clear one's name if a center adds false information to their database and then share it with the feds and all the other states?

EPIC is focusing on Virgina, since the legislature is considering legislation that would exempt the fusion center from the state's open government rules.

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