The Post-9/11 Surveillance Payday

Part of the Twenty-Five Years Since 9/11 series published in collaboration with Acacia magazine.

Twenty-five years ago this September, the twin towers fell. The story we tell ourselves about that day is one of trauma and resolve: a nation attacked, a war declared, a homeland secured. But there’s another story, one less comforting and more material, about what 9/11 actually did for a U.S. economy and state that were, in the summer of 2001, in deep trouble.

The dot-com crash had wiped out $6.4 trillion in financial assets—two-thirds of GDP. The NASDAQ had lost 70 percent of its value. In the first nine months of 2001, 1.4 million jobs disappeared. The country was officially in recession by March 2001. And below that economic crisis, a political one: the anti-globalization movement had grown from Seattle to Genoa, where half a million people branded G8 leaders “assassins” just six weeks before the attacks. The economic order was under fire from both above and below.

As Christos Boukalas argues in his indispensable study Homeland Security, Its Law and Its State, the attacks provided an opportunity to escape this economic and political impasse via what he calls “accumulation through crisis”: a new economic order centered on state-orchestrated security spending, fed on a steady diet of emergency politics. The spending surge that began with the creation of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in November 2002 and related reforms did not just create new market opportunities to sell “security solutions” to the public sector. It also created new models of security firms, exemplified by integrated platforms, such as Flock and Axon, that sell surveillance technologies that in turn feed into their own expansive, public–private data sharing networks. In this ecosystem, DHS is not so much big brother as midwife.

One of the best illustrations of the new public–private surveillance economy created in the wake of 9/11 is the emergence of fusion centers. Arguably the centerpiece of the post-9/11 domestic security apparatus, the National Network of Fusion Centers is composed of eighty state- and city-based intelligence hubs that collect, analyze, and share supposed threat information.

Beginning in 2004, little more than a year after DHS opened its doors, the department began recognizing and funding these secure, secretive government facilities, where teams of analysts “fuse” disparate data sources into intelligence—mining everything from license plate readers and suspicious activity reports to social media, utility records, and private-sector databases. Their mandate quickly crept from counterterrorism to “all crimes, all threats, all hazards,” which in practice has meant surveilling racial justice and environmental activists, tracking Occupy and Black Lives Matter organizers, and building “terror identities” that cast broad swaths of Muslim American life as suspicious. All of this unfolded with almost no public accountability: the centers operate in near-total secrecy, largely exempt from the legal guardrails meant to constrain law enforcement spying.

The results are scandalous. A 2012 Senate investigation found that after two years of scrutiny and upward of a billion dollars in federal funding, fusion centers had produced no reporting that uncovered a single terrorist threat—while the FBI and CIA, seven months later, failed to share information about the Boston Marathon bomber with the very center designed to catch him. The Washington Post summed up the findings: fusion centers as “pools of ineptitude and civil liberties intrusions.”

The institutional form these centers have taken was not spontaneous. It was actively shaped by the National Fusion Center Association (NFCA), the trade association created to represent fusion center interests. The NFCA—alongside older professional bodies like the International Association of Chiefs of Police—worked directly with DHS and the Department of Justice in the mid-2000s to recommend standards and guidelines that would shape fusion centers throughout the next decade. The NFCA’s mission statement declares it exists to “advocate for the commitment of adequate resources to support a national, integrated network of state and major urban area fusion centers” and to “represent fusion center concerns to the federal government through an education process”—a polite way of saying the association was built to lobby for the centers’ permanent institutionalization.

From its earliest days, DHS provided seed money to establish fusion centers, but, critically, the department does not provide the bulk of the funding necessary to sustain their ongoing operations. Fusion centers receive only about 20 percent of their budgets from federal grants distributed by DHS. The remaining 80 percent must come from state appropriations—and for states, therein lies the trap: once a fusion center exists—with its personnel, its leased space, its data-sharing agreements with state police and local departments—it cannot easily be dismantled, and the state is on the hook for the bill. The federal seed money creates an institutional form that states must now fund themselves, in perpetuity.

This dynamic was visible during the Great Recession. Austerity put immense pressure on some police agencies. Across the nation, jurisdictions eliminated 58,000 positions in state and local law enforcement, a 5.7 percent decrease between 2008 and 2013. Fusion centers, meanwhile, became even more essential as cash-strapped departments outsourced their intelligence work to the centers. As one senior supervisor at the New Jersey’s fusion center explained in 2013, “The recession is actually pushing people towards us.”

The DHS-distributed federal grants that partially fund fusion centers themselves operate on a competitive, market model. Funding is performance-based, results-driven, and conditional, a mechanism for imposing federal priorities on local police forces. The result is a system where states are locked into funding centers that have surveillance priorities state and city authorities did not set, in a structure that resists democratic oversight. For example, a 2022 Brennan Center report found that fusion centers have repeatedly portrayed racial justice and environmental activists as “violent extremists.” The same Brennan Center report also found that fusion center have produced no major successes in counterterrorism, despite operating a vast surveillance apparatus with “almost no public accountability.”

There are non-DHS sources of federal funding that states and cities can receive to help balance the budget for fusion centers. Many of these funding opportunities invite fusion centers to engage in sustained, lucrative contracts with the private surveillance economy. For example, the Department of Justice’s Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) program—the leading source of federal justice funding to state and local agencies—distributes roughly $250 million annually through a formula that states can spend on, among other things, “criminal justice information systems,” technology, and equipment. The COPS Office’s Technology and Equipment Program (TEP) Invitational grants serve a similar function, letting Congress direct funds to specific agencies for surveillance hardware.

Security technology vendors coach public police agencies through the process of applying for these and similar grant opportunities. Motorola Solutions, for example, publishes a grant-writing guide to help police departments apply for JAG money to buy Motorola products. Motorola Solutions also maintains a full FAQ on how agencies can use Byrne JAG funds for its radios and cameras. SoundThinking, the maker of ShotSpotter, the gunshot detection system, walks departments through how multiple kinds of federal grants, each with slightly different restrictions, can be braided together to purchase its surveillance products.

Still, much of the funding for fusion centers comes out of state budgets, and since 9/11 and the creation of DHS, state budgets for law enforcement have increasingly come to looking similar to the federal data-driven grant funding opportunities for law enforcement.

California, for example, has CalVIP, a competitive grant program that has distributed over $250 million since 2017. Pennsylvania’s Commission on Crime and Delinquency runs the Gun Violence Investigation and Prosecution (GVIP) Grant Program and the Local Law Enforcement (LLE) Support Grant Program, which fund “information technology improvements,” equipment purchases, and training. The specifics of what programs will fund differ by state, but the structure is everywhere the same: competitive, performance-based, evidence-mandated grant funding that pushes local agencies toward contracts with private surveillance and enforcement technology companies.

In this ecology, the federal government does not so much command as underwrite—seeding an array of overlapping funding streams that state and local agencies learn to braid, match, and leverage in a perpetual hustle for security dollars.

If fusion centers were the first-generation architecture of the homeland security state, the second generation is something more insidious: the fusion of public security infrastructure with various private and competing surveillance infrastructures answerable only to investors and often not subject to the legal guardrails meant to limit how law enforcement can spy on citizens.

And here the lobbyist trade group for fusion centers, the NFCA, serves as the institutional bridge. Its annual conventions—which by 2013 were independent of DHS and the Department of Justice—are cosponsored by security and technology firms, which in the past have included IBM and Thomson Reuters (data analysis platforms), Esri (geographic information systems), and upstarts such as Dataminr and Geofeedia (social media monitoring).

These are dealmaking venues where directors of public fusion centers meet private surveillance vendors, and where the boundaries between public intelligence gathering and commercial data extraction are negotiated over catered lunches. The NFCA’s sponsorship program explicitly offers “opportunities to engage with the fusion center community throughout the year”—a standing invitation for private capital to integrate itself into the public security apparatus.

Police and sheriffs across the country have increasingly sought similar arrangements with surveillance technology companies. Before 9/11, only the largest police agencies could afford to build and introduce new hardware and software, but post-9/11 DHS funding programs shifted the conditions. Through annual grant programs, DHS has played the role of market-maker, flooding states with cash for strengthening policing, with a particular focus on growing the infrastructure of technologies designed for mass data collection and mass data sharing. These grants have manufactured police demand for a variety of surveillance and analytics technologies, opening the door for a massive new market. Now, the technologies that were once only accessible to the largest of police forces are being rapidly adopted by small police departments across the country. DHS has manufactured its dream web of surveillance through the market.

In response, a marketplace of new companies and products has popped up to answer the demand. We can see the workings of this marketplace in the rise of Flock Safety. Flock was founded in 2017 and quickly supplanted Motorola Solutions, a longtime ICE partner, as the largest automated license plate reader (ALPR) vendor. Flock has faced significant backlash over the years in response to reporting that police use its products for immigration enforcement, abortion monitoring, surveilling protestors, and countless examples of stalking and domestic violence. Presently, Flock owns an ever-growing network of more than 120,000 AI-powered license plate reader cameras across the United States and has surveillance contracts with 40 percent of the nation’s law enforcement agencies. The company, which remains privately held, is valued at $7.5 billion and claims it will “eliminate almost all crime” within a decade.

Axon, which makes $2.8 billion in annual revenue from products that includes Tasers and police cameras, was an early investor in Flock. For years, Axon and Flock were deeply integrated: Axon’s Fleet 3 cameras—the most popular front-facing dash cams for police vehicles—fed raw footage into Flock’s software, which applied its proprietary “Vehicle Fingerprint” technology and made the data searchable across its national database. A police department using Axon cameras was, without necessarily knowing it, paying for the privilege of supplying the data to a billion-dollar private surveillance network—the very thing that gave the company its valuation. In early 2025, the partnership collapsed, as both companies realized that total data control required owning the entire surveillance apparatus.

When Axon ended its business relationship with Flock, it severed Flock’s access to its police camera data feed and launched its own direct competitors: Axon Outpost (a pole-mounted ALPR camera) and Axon Lightpole (a streetlight retrofit). The company has also built Fusus, a real-time crime center platform that integrates data from police body-worn cameras, ALPR data, drone feeds, and private camera networks into a single subscription-based operating system for policing. Part of what Fusus sells is fantasy: it aims to actualize the police dream of a full map of total intelligence for their jurisdiction. So doing, the product acts as an invitation for police to adopt more technologies to integrate into Fusus, forever chasing the platform’s potential for absolute surveillance.

This is a manifestation of what digital humanities scholar Nick Srnicek calls platform capitalism—the ownership of the digital infrastructure that others depend on. Surveillance technology fuses platform capitalism with the post-9/11 homeland defense goals of mass data collection and mass data sharing across all levels of policing. In practice, it produces what scholars call “platform policing”: a model where public safety agencies pay private corporations for continuous access to mass, automated surveillance tools hosted on corporate servers.

The implications are staggering. Flock’s cameras now cover highways, parking lots, and residential streets across 6,000 communities. The company has partnered with Amazon’s Ring system of doorbell and home cameras to bring home security footage into the same network. Axon’s Fusus platform is used by more than 400 police agencies, stitching together public and private camera feeds into a single real-time map. Both companies are investing heavily in drone-as-first-responder programs, turning the sky itself into a surveillance platform.

Flock and Axon are just two of the many vendors building their companies via the post-9/11 surveillance marketplace. Additional companies, including Motorola Solutions, Peregrine, Genetec, Penlink, and Cellebrite, sell a variety of surveillance tools designed for mass data collection and mass data sharing to local police, sheriffs, and state police. This ecosystem is vast and continually evolving, and being turbocharged by emerging AI technology.

Since 9/11, with the birth of DHS and the rise of fusion centers and platform policing, a state of permanent public crisis has driven private accumulation like we have never previously witnessed. This has been accompanied by the construction of institutional forms and funding streams that aim to make it impossible to ever reverse course.

The dot-com crash was resolved, in part, by a massive state-led investment in security. That investment created the DHS, which created the fusion centers, which locked states into funding structures they cannot escape. Those same fusion centers now serve as the institutional backbone for the data-sharing networks that companies like Axon and Flock depend on. The homeland security grants that sustain the centers also fund the purchase of Axon cameras and Flock subscriptions. The public money flows in one direction; the data flows in another.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the security state is no longer a response to any particular threat. It is an accumulation regime—a machine for converting tax dollars into corporate revenue, public data into private assets, and the permanent condition of emergency into the permanent condition of profit.

_{Source image: Héctor J. Rivas / Unsplash}

Contributors

Brendan McQuade Brendan McQuade is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Southern Maine and author of Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision.

Ed Vogel Ed Vogel is a member of the Stop ShotSpotter Chicago campaign and national coalition.

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• big tech
• Carceral AI
• muslims and the law
• policing
• surveillance