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Author | Brendan McQuade |
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Language | English |
Subject | Mass surveillance in the United States; fusion centers |
Publisher | University of California Press |
Publication date | August 6, 2019 |
Pages | 304 |
ISBN | 978-0-520-29975-7 |
Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision is a 2019 book by Brendan McQuade about mass surveillance in the United States and specifically fusion centers. Published through the University of California Press, Pacifying the Homeland took McQuade six years to write. The author views fusion centers as a means to pacify the population, defined as a means to "create and maintain a flexible labor pool and a docile citizenry".
The book examines fusion centers, formed to further intelligence gathering between federal and state agencies, local police departments, private companies and professional associations, not as points of counterterrorism or as failures as an organization, but instead as rejigging of state-forms, defined as "institutional condensation[s] of social relations". The book received mostly positive reviews, with one reviewer comparing it to an ice-cold shower for those accustomed to intelligence gathering in everyday life. It won two book awards.
The United States federal government established Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence in 2003. Fusion centers fall under the DHS auspices. Formed to further intelligence gathering, the centers connected federal and state agencies with local police departments, private companies and professional associations. The focuses of fusion centers are on counterterrorism and crime trends, among other things. There were 79 fusion centers in the US in 2018. [1] The author views fusion centers as a means to pacify the population, defined as a means to "create and maintain a flexible labor pool and a docile citizenry". [2]
As of the book's publication, author Brendan McQuade was a criminology professor at the University of Southern Maine. [3] The University of California Press published the book on August 6, 2019. [4] According to McQuade, it took him six years to write. [5]
There are three sections in Pacifying the Homeland, each of which consists of two chapters. In chapter one, McQuade challenges scholarship that accepts fusion centers as points of counterterrorism or as failures as an organization. Instead, McQuade views fusion as a rejigging of state-forms, defined as "institutional condensation[s] of social relations". In chapter two, the author places fusion centers at the end of a history of intelligence-led policing (ILP), criminalization, and securitization. McQuade notes the change of the United States from a herrenvolk-welfare state to a post-industrialization workfare-carceral state. [6]
Parts two and three constitute the main premises of the book. [6] In chapter three, McQuade examines the New York State Intelligence Center (NYSIC) and the New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC) as intelligence sharing organizations that do not operate as intended. The NYSIC, for instance, competes with five intra-state Crime Analysis Centers on intelligence gathering in centers of population outside of New York City, while the ROIC has a state monopoly on intelligence within New Jersey. [1] According to the author, the primary purpose of the NYSIC and ROIC is to "address localized pockets of perceived social disorder"; in chapter four, McQuade examines how exactly the state addresses this goal, including through ILP, warrant sweeps, and saturation patrol. [6]
In chapter five, the author focuses on political policing and a compliant with human rights form of political policing post COINTELPRO. In chapter six, McQuade looks at poverty's moral economy. [6] In the book's final chapter, the police abolition movement in the United States is examined, including We Charge Genocide , BYP100, and the Movement for Black Lives. [7]
In Punishment & Society , Michelle Brown of the University of Tennessee called the book "part of a wave of much needed critical policing studies that at once echo an earlier era in the study of radical criminology". [7] Johns Hopkins University's Corey R. Payne, in the Journal of World-Systems Research , described the book as interesting in particular for world-systems analysts due to its critique of capitalism and its complex methodology, which draws on other scholars in the field. Payne goes on to state McQuade rejects a simple analysis of the ROIC as a model and the NYSIC as a laggard. Instead, Payne states the author allows for a varied analysis whereby the true composition of fusion centers can be evaluated as inherently competitive among the two states and as decentralized by design. [8]
In the Journal of Criminal Justice Education, Kevin Revier stated "[t]hrough comprehensive research, McQuade offers a substantial contribution to studies in policing, surveillance, historical sociology, and social justice", though he stated he wanted more information on how the individuals McQuade interviewed potentially withheld or gave information. The reviewer then asks if the researcher was, at times, a surveillance object or an intelligence conveyor. [1]
In Crime, Media, Culture , Marnie Ritchie of Pacific Lutheran University examined the book in the context of BlueLeaks, a 269 gigabyte data leak published by Distributed Denial of Secrets with most documents therein from fusion centers. Ritchie called Pacifying the Homeland "necessary to account for why [BlueLeaks] matters". [6] In Contemporary Sociology , Kevin Walby compared Pacifying the Homeland to an ice-cold shower for individuals acclimatized to mass surveillance due to its pervasiveness in daily life. [2] The book was a runner-up for the Surveillance Studies Network Book Award in 2020. It won the Marxist Section of the American Sociological Association's book award, as well as a book award from the American Society of Criminology's Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice. [6]
The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the U.S. federal executive department responsible for public security, roughly comparable to the interior or home ministries of other countries. Its stated missions involve anti-terrorism, border security, immigration and customs, cyber security, and disaster prevention and management.
Counterterrorism, also known as anti-terrorism, relates to the practices, military tactics, techniques, and strategies that governments, law enforcement, businesses, and intelligence agencies use to combat or eliminate terrorism.
Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), or interception of electronically transmitted information like Internet traffic. It can also include simple technical methods, such as human intelligence gathering and postal interception.
The concept of a carceral archipelago was first used by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 publication, Surveiller et Punir, to describe the modern penal system of the 1970s, embodied by the well-known penal institution at Mettray in France. The phrase combines the adjective "carceral", which means that which is related to jail or prison, with archipelago—a group of islands. Foucault referred to the "island" units of the "archipelago" as a metaphor for the mechanisms, technologies, knowledge systems and networks related to a carceral continuum. The 1973 English publication of the book by Solzhenitsyn called The Gulag Archipelago referred to the forced labor camps and prisons that composed the sprawling carceral network of the Soviet Gulag.
In the United States, a Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) is a locally-based multi-agency partnership between various federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies tasked with investigating terrorism and terrorism-related crimes, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Department of Justice. The first JTTFs were established before the September 11 attacks, with their numbers increasing dramatically in the years after.
The Department of Public Safety of the State of Texas, commonly known as the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), is a department of the state government of Texas. The DPS is responsible for statewide law enforcement and driver license administration. The Public Safety Commission oversees the DPS. However, under state law, the Governor of Texas may assume command of the department during a public disaster, riot, insurrection, formation of a dangerous resistance to enforcement of law, or to perform his constitutional duty to enforce law. The commission's five members are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Texas Senate, to serve without pay for staggered, six-year terms. The commission formulates plans and policies for enforcing criminal, traffic and safety laws, preventing and detecting crime, apprehending law violators, and educating citizens about laws and public safety.
The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) is a United States government organization responsible for national and international counterterrorism efforts. It is based in Liberty Crossing, a modern complex near Tysons Corner in McLean, Virginia. NCTC advises the United States on terrorism.
Gary T. Marx is a scholar in the field of sociology. He was born on a farm in central California, raised in Hollywood, and grew up in Berkeley.
The Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany is the federal investigative police agency of Germany, directly subordinated to the Federal Ministry of the Interior. It is headquartered in Wiesbaden, Hesse, and maintains major branch offices in Berlin and Meckenheim near Bonn. It has been headed by Holger Münch since December 2014.
In the United States, fusion centers are designed to promote information sharing at the federal level between agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Justice, and state, local, and tribal law enforcement. As of February 2018, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recognized 79 fusion centers. Fusion centers may also be affiliated with an emergency operations center that responds in the event of a disaster.
The National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA) is the primary intelligence gathering and analysis arm of the Government of the Philippines in charge of carrying out overt, covert, and clandestine intelligence activities. The NICA directs, coordinates, and integrates all intelligence activities, both foreign and domestic, concerning national security, serving as the leading intelligence collector of the national government, focusing on the country's strategic intelligence requirements. It is mandated to prepare intelligence estimate on local and foreign situation for the formulation of national security policies by the President and the National Security Council.
The Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group was designed by LT John Sullivan. It provides local responders and community leaders with information on the current threat and future prevention. Terrorism Early Warning (TEW) Groups are a model of fusion center that emphasizes operations-intelligence fusion for all phases of response and community protection. TEWs serve law enforcement investigative needs, fire service response, and medical, as well as public health. The LA TEW was named among the "Top 100" innovative programs by Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government: 16th Annual Innovations in American Government Awards (2003), and as a Finalist in Mitretek Innovations in Homeland Security Award issued by Mitretek and the Ash Institute for Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School (2004).
Intelligence-led policing (ILP) is a policing model built around the assessment and management of risk. Intelligence officers serve as guides to operations, rather than operations guiding intelligence.
The counter-terrorism page primarily deals with special police or military organizations that carry out arrest or direct combat with terrorists. This page deals with the other aspects of counter-terrorism:
Criminology is the interdisciplinary study of crime and deviant behaviour. Criminology is a multidisciplinary field in both the behavioural and social sciences, which draws primarily upon the research of sociologists, political scientists, economists, legal sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, social workers, biologists, social anthropologists, scholars of law and jurisprudence, as well as the processes that define administration of justice and the criminal justice system.
BlueLeaks, sometimes referred to by the Twitter hashtag #BlueLeaks, refers to 269.21 gibibytes of internal U.S. law enforcement data obtained by the hacker collective Anonymous and released on June 19, 2020, by the activist group Distributed Denial of Secrets, which called it the "largest published hack of American law enforcement agencies".
The Fort Worth Intelligence Exchange is a fusion center housed within the Fort Worth Police Department.
White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement is a 2006 FBI Intelligence Assessment from the FBI Counterterrorism Division. It provides an overview of white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement in the United States. On September 29, 2020, Jamie Raskin, the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, released an unredacted version of the report.
Reuben Jonathan Miller is an American writer, sociologist, criminologist and social worker from Chicago, Illinois. He teaches at the University of Chicago in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. He is also a research professor at the American Bar Foundation.