My lead story today on the Iowa Intelligence Fusion Center follows Minnesota Independent’s investigation of their fusion center, the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center, published yesterday.

In “You don’t know MN-JAC,” reporter Dan Haugen found that the agency, created in the wake of 9/11 to collect and analyze suspicious activity reports from across Minnesota, is operating without an important and widely used safeguard meant to check against inappropriate use of data.

Most law-enforcement databases are protected with software that automatically keeps a record of every search that’s performed. That way supervisors can easily monitor who is accessing what information.

A records-management system at the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center (MNJAC), however, relies on employees to manually record searches. Data-policy consultant Robert Sykora calls it “an anxiety-provoking flaw” that leaves part of the system open to abuse.

Because the fusion center phenomenon has been neglected by the mainstream media, our sister sites in Colorado, Michigan and New Mexico will also report on fusion centers later this week.