Maine State Senator Pinny Beebe-Center has introduced S.P. 527, or An Act to End the Maine Information and Analysis Center Program, a bill that would defund the Maine Information and Analysis Center (MIAC), also known as Maine’s only fusion center. EFF once again pleased to support this bill in hopes of defunding an unnecessary, intrusive, and often-harmful piece of the U.S. surveillance regime. You can read the full text of the bill here. A version of this bill managed to pass 88-54 out of the Maine House of Representatives in June 2021 before being defeated in the state senate.
Fusion centers are yet another unnecessary cog in the surveillance state—and one that serves the intrusive function of coordinating surveillance activities and sharing information between federal law enforcement, the national security surveillance apparatus, and local and state police. Across the United States, there are at least 78 fusion centers that were formed by the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the war on terror and the rise of post-9/11 mass surveillance. Since their creation, fusion centers have been hammered by politicians, academics, and civil society groups for their ineffectiveness, dysfunction, mission creep, and unregulated tendency to veer into political policing. As scholar Brendan McQuade wrote in his book Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision:
“On paper, fusion centers have the potential to organize dramatic surveillance powers. In practice however, what happens
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