This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 15, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

Fusion Centers were supposed to help federal crime fighters find and prosecute terrorists,

but most of the money has been wasted, and some of the resources have been more than wasted.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, comments.

Fusion centers are state, local, federal collaborations, information sharing hubs that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has described

as a centerpiece of our counterterrorism strategy.

Other top Homeland Security officials have called them a proven and vital tool and a critical

source of threat information.

But a new bipartisan report from the Senate that is the result of a two-year investigation

has come to the conclusion that all along,

Homeland Security officials have had every reason to know that that is false, that

these fusion centers, these information sharing hubs, have in fact been

essentially useless. They have clogged the arteries of our intelligence

information centers with overwhelmingly useless data.

And this at a cost to the federal government of anywhere between $289 million and $1.4 billion.

The reason they don't know, by the way,

is that they produced multiple estimates.

So they were unable, even to get a consensus estimate of the amount of money spent.

Worse than that, they were unable to accurately determine how many fusion centers there are.

For years, the Department of Homeland Security has been saying that there are 77 fusion

centers nationally. It turns out, according to the sense investigation, that they were

only able to identify 68. Unsurprisingly with the level of accountability that this indicates there has not

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