Two years ago, a thorough, bipartisan Senate report concluded that the federally created information-sharing hubs known as “fusion centers,” long billed as a “centerpiece of our counterterrorism strategy,” were in fact an expensive boondoggle. Despite being funded by the Department of Homeland Security to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars over a decade, the centers produced no useful counterterror intelligence and often focused instead on local law enforcement matters unrelated to any legitimate national security purpose.

For years, top officials at the Department of Homeland Security have touted  “fusion centers“— designed to share security information between state, local, and federal government agencies — as a “vital tool for strengthening homeland security,” a “proven and invaluable tool,” and “one of the centerpieces of our  counterterrorism strategy.” But a blistering new bipartisan Senate report paints a radically different picture, exposing these centers as a costly boondoggle that flouted civil liberties safeguards, lacked basic accountability, and produced “intelligence” that was overwhelmingly useless or irrelevant—or as one particularly candid official put it, “a load of crap.”