Surveillance Today

At a fusion center, “an analyst determines whether the SAR meets certain behavioral criteria and has a potential nexus to terrorism,” the Ninth Circuit wrote in Gill. A yes sends the report into eGuardian, the FBI’s database, open to federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies across the country, and into the FBI’s classified system and Homeland Security’s intelligence office. The Ninth Circuit calls that reviewer an analyst. At the Fusion Center in Norwalk, 21 to 28 of the people doing that work are not County employees; they are contract IT technicians. They are supplied by General Dynamics Information Technology, the government computer-services and staffing arm of General Dynamics, which builds Abrams tanks, nuclear submarines and Gulfstream jets, under a contract capped at $39,500,248.96. The contract it replaced, with SRA International, was $19.7 million.

The Sheriff’s statement of work for that contract, RFP 707-SH, Exhibit A, sets out who may hold the jobs.

The federally approved course the technicians need can be short. One widely taught course whose cost Homeland Security grants reimburse, the Foundations of Intelligence Analysis Training, runs five days, 40 hours, for $750; “Legal Issues” is one topic on its list. The contract does not say which approved course they take.

California’s policy requires each fusion center to have a “trained privacy official.” The Fusion Center names no one. A General Dynamics IT posting for Norwalk, “Senior Intelligence Manager,” describes the top job as “Executive Director of the Joint Regional Intelligence Center,” at $142,792 to $184,000 a year; it lists no privacy duty. In twenty years, no one has reviewed the center’s privacy practices.

The County did not buy Palantir with its own money. A $250,000 pilot in 2009 grew into a $9.3 million sole-source contract in 2016, approved after eight months of work had already been done without one, and $23.9 million by 2019, all from federal homeland security grants. Palantir built 29 applications for the center. One, Tips and Leads, “automatically submit[s]” every tip to eGuardian, the FBI’s national database, open to agencies across the country. Others search 911 calls, jail visits, DMV records, confidential informants, warrants, tattoos, and license plates by plate or by location.

In December 2023, the Board gave $6.3 million to Pat V. Mack, Inc., a Palantir reseller and the only bidder, to keep the system running “while the Department seeks a replacement platform.” A replacement was solicited in October 2025. No award has been found. The bridge ends November 30.

The countywide rule in September was a further 5.5 percent cut in each department’s county-funded budget. In April, the first round of cuts, the Sheriff’s Department had been exempt. The county’s posted budget does not give the Inspector General’s office its own line, so his total cannot be checked against the county’s paper. [CHECK: get the office’s budgeted positions for 2024-25 and 2025-26.]

For 2025-26 the office had asked for three more positions, at $1.23 million; the Civilian Oversight Commission asked for three of its own. The Board’s Executive Office listed both requests as “unmet needs.” The budget record we have does not say what the three positions were for. [CHECK: obtain the OIG’s 2025-26 budget request narrative for the purpose of the three positions.] Instead of three more, the office lost ten: one Assistant Inspector General, three Deputy Inspectors General, four Inspectors and two Investigators, a third of its staff by Huntsman’s count. “Most of those people they simply took away,” he said.

The County’s answer came from its Chief Executive, Fesia Davenport: countywide, only seven or eight people would lose their jobs, because “most of the positions are vacant.” The County’s budget letter marks some deleted positions as vacant. For the Inspector General’s ten, it does not say.