Yesterday we attended an intriguing seminar in Downing Street by Raytheon. It seems they’ve managed across America to introduce something entirely new called fusion centres. The way they work is that all the different public services - local police, FBI, NSA, and CIA work together at local level to tackle terrorism at state level. To achieve this they pool and link all the information they come across, as described in my “astral soup” theory of data sharing.
Once they’ve set up the fusion centre (or the ring of astral soup as we’d call it this side of the Atlantic as per my theory) there’s nothing to stop them ramping up the service. For this they deploy a technique they call “mission creep”, so it tackles all sort of anti-social and suspicious activity. They actualy showed us examples beamed over from Los Angeles, and we saw, “in real time” as they say, shocking live cases of people taking notes in the street, drawing diagrams or using binoculars. I need hardly go into the sorts of consequences that such activity, left unchecked, might lead to.
The clever thing about the fusion centre approach, as the IPS man there rightly pointed out, is that we can achieve desirable social outcomes without the single large database our critics accuse us of wishing to create. I continue to be unimpressed by our own IT manager, who just nodded sheepishly and said we were doing all this already. His time will be up soon, I predict.
This is what I admire about our American cousins. They invent things. They find new words for things. They’re not afraid to spend a bob or two on what is really needed. And they are excellent salespeople; one is hardly aware one is being sold to, such is their subtlety. We shall have no difficulty in turn selling this to Ministers, I’m confident.
So there is a new word in the corridors of Whtehall his morning, and it is fusion centres.
