Current State of (Dis)Integration: Public Health and Fusion Centers

ObjectiveResponding to large-scale public health emergencies relies heavily on planning and collaboration between law enforcement and public health officials. This study examines the current level of information sharing and integration between these domains by measuring the inclusion of public health in the law enforcement functions of fusion centers.MethodsSurvey of all fusion centers, with a 29.9% response rate.ResultsOnly one of the 23 responding fusion centers had true public health inclusion, a decrease from research conducted in 2007. Information sharing is primarily limited to information flowing out of the fusion center, with little public health information coming in. Most of the collaboration is done on a personal, informal, ad-hoc basis. There remains a large misunderstanding of roles, capabilities, and regulations by all parties (fusion centers and public health). The majority of the parties appear to be willing to work together, but there but there is no forward momentum to make these desires a reality. Funding and staffing issues seem to be the limiting factor for integration.ConclusionThese problems need to be urgently addressed to increase public health preparedness and enable a decisive and beneficial response to public health emergencies involving a homeland security response.

Fusing Race: The Phobogenics of Racializing Surveillance

This paper sets up a framework to assess how purportedly passive state surveillance comprises an infrastructure of active racialization. Frantz Fanon’s concept of “racial phobogenics,” or the process of making a raced body into an object of anxiety, can be useful for scholarship at the intersection of communication, race, data, security, policing, affect, and biopolitics. To read how local state surveillance justifies the aggregation of data by means of phobogenics, I analyzed 120 hours of field observations and conducted fourteen interviews from June 2017 to March 2018 in one US Homeland Security Fusion Center, part of the integrated intelligence system and national security strategy after 9/11. I argue that Fusion Centers’ use of “situational awareness,” the trained ability to know what is deemed “suspicious” in everyday life, fuses race or taxonomizes what is out of place and what is inflammatory according to nonconscious racializing affects. I therefore urge for a critical scholarship that attends to “prelogical rationality and affectivity” (Fanon 1986: 133) as exercises of power.

Intelligence Fusion Centers for Homeland Security

This exploratory case study evaluates how effectively federal agencies share terrorism intelligence with fusion centers through interviews with senior leaders, federal agents deployed to fusion centers, and intelligence analysts working in fusion centers. Findings indicated that information sharing was hindered by both technology and inter-organizational relationships between the fusion centers and federal agencies. This study recommends enhanced information sharing approaches in order to alleviate the tension between federal and local agencies and remove obstacles, particularly related to classified intelligence related to counterterrorism. Doing so can improve the dynamics between federal and local agencies, thereby allowing critical information to be shared with state and local governments in a proactive manner that may better protect communities from catastrophic terrorist attacks.

Surveillance and Public Space

Current communications research takes up the political and ethical problems posed by new surveillance technologies in public space, ranging from biometric technologies adopted by state security apparatuses to self- and peer-monitoring applications for the consumer market. In addition to studies that examine new surveillance technologies, scholars are tracking intensive and extensive expansions of surveillance in the name of risk management. Much of the scholarship produced in the last 15 years looks at how the establishment and expansion of the Department of Homeland Security within the United States and its international counterparts have dramatically altered security, military, and legal practices and cultures. Within this context what were once science fiction dystopias have become funded research and development projects and institutionalized practices aimed at remote data collection and processing, including facial recognition technology and a variety of remote sensing devices. Private-public partnerships between companies like Google and Homeland Security fusion centers have made it possible to use GPS technology to network data that promises to help manage a variety of natural and man-made disasters.

PREDICTION OF CHRONIC BACTERIAL INFECTION BY IDENTIFICATION OF INTER CELLULAR RESPONSES OF GENETIC FUSION CENTERS

In the present study we have designed an algorithm for early detection of DNA fusion to discover the potential transcription which embodies the fusion of gene products derivable from the human DNA with that of bacterial and cancerous viruses, resulting from the several breakage points and re-assembling of different chromosomes, or that of within a chromosome. Without relying on existing annotations the proposed algorithm proves its efficacy in detecting alignment of RNA sequences from unannotated splice variants of known genome strands. Using this algorithm in the age of Big Data analytics the potential threat of cancer, tuberculosis, tumors & asthma can be predicted beforehand while scaling such effects, ranging from individual to population scale. We have also reported the results of the algorithm for over 90 samples with solid supporting evidences and opens a new virotherapy approach of numerically quantized cure for disease like cancer, tumors & asthma.