Collaborative Research: Gauging the Mission Creep Potentials of Homeland Security "Fusion Centers"

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Collaborative Research: Exploring Homeland Security Fusion CentersIn the United States, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has supported the creation of 'fusion centers' to share data across government agencies as well as across public and private sectors. This collaborative project will begin to document and evaluate the information sharing practices of fusion centers. Specifically, the research will focus on variations in data sharing across fusion centers. The research questions are (1) What types of data sharing are occurring with, or are enabled by, fusion centers? and (2) What factors contribute to the data-sharing practices of fusion centers? Using qualitative methods, research will be conducted through document analysis of government and media sources, observational studies at government-sponsored security conferences, and a minimum of 40 semi-structured interviews with representatives of government agencies, private companies, and civil society organizations. The intellectual merit of this project is its contribution to an understanding of the implications of new organizational and technological developments for the provision of national security. This study is theoretically valuable because it will contribute to scholarship on surveillance and society, the privatization of security, and the politics of technological systems. In addition to producing refereed articles and conference presentations, this research will provide an important empirical piece to a larger international project called "The New Transparency" which is facilitating multi-national and cross-cultural comparisons of the global security industry. The broader impacts of this project include an increased awareness of the roles, contributions and implications of fusion centers.