Mitt Romney was a huge advocate of "Fusion Centers" across America.

A devastating new report that found homeland security officials have wasted perhaps billions of dollars on intelligence-gathering complexes known as fusion centers that haven't detected a single terrorist threat, even as they invaded citizens' privacy, could present another political headache for one of their biggest advocates: Mitt Romney.

Romney played a pivotal role in promoting the establishment of these counterterrorism centers across the country to "connect the dots" and stave off another 9/11, as The Huffington Post reported in May. In his role as chairman of a national task force on intelligence sharing, the then-Massachusetts governor used his bully pulpit to call for a nationwide network that would meld together local, state and federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to detect threats.

At a New Hampshire town hall meeting during his first run for president, Romney, who as governor had opened two of the country's first fusion centers, explained enthusiastically what they were all about :

"We put together something called a fusion center, and what we do is take crime information from all over the state and it goes to one place -- it happens to be in our case the state police in Massachusetts. And we look at the patterns and determine if there are people -- gangs in particular, organized crime and terror, potential terror networks -- that are working throughout our state or throughout our regions, and we're sharing information I know with New Hampshire and other states on a regional basis to help identify, if you will, patterns of violence that suggest groups that are organizing criminal activity. And that's something. We need to be a little smarter than we used to be. We have technology, we have the eyes and ears of all our citizens. We need to collect the information we get to make sure we are using that information to crack down on crime in a very significant way."

In 2004, Romney told Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge and members of the federal Homeland Security Advisory Council that other states should follow Massachusetts' lead and set up fusion centers. "We have to be able to find the bad guys before they carry out their acts, and that can only be done through intelligence," he said. "The financial resources of our nation and our states should be increasingly devoted to this effort.''

"He was definitely instrumental in laying the intellectual framework for fusion centers and the role of state and local law enforcement in domestic counterterrorism and the need for clear guidelines concerning state and local domestic intelligence gathering," Joshua Filler, director of the Department of Homeland Security's Office of State and Local Government Coordination from 2003 to 2005, told HuffPost this past spring.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/03/mitt-romney-homeland-security_n_1935308.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular