Before the 9/11 attacks, interoperability was not high on Washington’s agenda. A little-noticed federal program had studied the issue, recommending a handful of “best practices,” and the few bureaucrats who took an interest in the problem worked without much encouragement.

“My boss said, ‘If that’s what you want to work on — interoper … whatever it is — go ahead,’” recalls David Boyd, who now heads a Department of Homeland Security division focused on improving communications. “It was at a meeting three years later that he finally said, ‘I get it. This is kind of important.’”

The 2001 terrorist attacks changed the rhetoric dramatically. Since 9/11, DHS officials and members of Congress who focus on homeland security have repeatedly assured first responders that interoperability ranks high on their list of priorities. But the budgets and staffing of the programs designed to focus on the issue tell an entirely different story. For most of the past eight years, the federal government’s interoperability initiatives have been under-funded, sparsely staffed, and buried in layers of bureaucracy.

When a cop or a fire fighter pulls out a radio in a television police drama, his message goes through, whether he’s in the basement of a building or deep in a forest. In the real world, clear communication is rarely so easy, particularly among first responders from different disciplines and jurisdictions. This reality was dramatically brought home at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, when crucial observations from the police department’s helicopters did not reach fire chiefs, commanders lost radio contact with responders who ascended the towers, and brigades in the north tower did not hear calls to evacuate.

Since then, an unprecedented amount of federal money has been spent on communications gear and technology, expenses traditionally borne by state and local governments. The goal is to fix the communication problems faced on 9/11 — to create “interoperability” that allows first responders from different disciplines and jurisdictions to communicate. From 2004 to 2008, the only years for which detailed figures are available, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) approved more than $4.3 billion in grant money to improve interoperability among first responders nationwide. DHS officials have said that more grant money has gone to interoperability than to any other initiative, and it continues to be a major focus for DHS grant programs, while also drawing funding from the economic stimulus package.

Yet for years, results have failed to live up to expectations. In 2004, then-DHS Secretary Tom Ridge promised that by year’s end, it would be possible for most first responders to talk to each other in a crisis. But in 2005, Hurricane Katrina proved that the country was nowhere near ready to handle a real disaster. By 2009, DHS officials were still struggling to convince Congress that first responders could reach basic communications goals.

It seemed impossible that John C. Mattman could fail.

But a mere seven months after his company went public in 2006 and began selling shares boasting that its success was assured, the unthinkable happened.

By the end of that year, Mattman had just $200 in a personal bank account and $2.3 million in outstanding claims from creditors. To make matters worse, someone had stolen his Ford pickup truck.

Mattman Specialty Vehicles was one of dozens of businesses that experienced a meteoric rise after the Sept. 11 attacks. Demand for sophisticated law-enforcement gadgets, baggage screening technology, and emergency preparedness gear was insatiable. Police and firefighters had to be equipped for the next major catastrophe, and Mattman was well-positioned as the all-American company ready to satisfy a boundless need to keep the nation safe.

The abrupt and dramatic collapse of Mattman illustrates how small businesses and communities alike struggled to manage the seemingly limitless spending spree on homeland security that emerged after 9/11. Not until years after the hijackings would California officials in charge of federal homeland security funds for the state enact rules to prevent local communities from losing money as a result of companies going bankrupt without warning.

Congress helped fuel the industry’s explosion by appropriating vast pools of money to local governments across the country in the form of antiterrorism grants. Topping wish lists everywhere were new muscle-bound but tremendously expensive incident-response vehicles that authorities wanted for fighting terrorism and disasters.

Packed with elaborate tools such as bomb robots, satellite communications, video monitors, biological-testing equipment, computer terminals, and more, the vehicles can cost as much as $1 million. These custom trucks were Mattman’s specialty.

Soon after hijackers obliterated the World Trade Center towers eight years ago, Marin County received more than $100,000 in surveillance equipment to keep its water treatment system safe from a terrorist attack.

But four years after the funds were awarded, state authorities found more than $67,000 worth of the gear still boxed in its original packaging.

It had never been used.

The rest of the homeland security money went toward an alarm system to protect remote tank and pump sites. Because of the region’s hilly terrain, the system didn’t even work.

The Marin County example is not an isolated one. Under the state’s open-records laws, California Watch found scores of instances of wasteful spending, purchasing violations, error-prone accounting, and shoddy oversight at agencies across the state during the years immediately following 9/11.

California Watch, a new unit started by the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, examined thousands of pages of documents from 160 monitoring reports written by state homeland security officials who visited cities and counties across California to inspect equipment and grant records for compliance with federal guidelines.

Among the findings:

The Center for Investigative Reporting sought to examine documents from fusion centers in both Denver and St. Paul to better understand what roles they played in the security preparations for last year’s Democratic and Republican national conventions. But authorities in Colorado refused a public-records request sent by CIR.

The Colorado Information Analysis Center is run by the state’s Department of Public Safety. In a response letter, Spokesman Lance Clem said that releasing the records would be contrary to the public interest and “not only would compromise [the] security and investigative practices of numerous law enforcement agencies but would also violate confidentiality agreements that have been made with private partner organizations and federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.”

The Denver Police Department, for its part, has a history of conducting activities that concern civil libertarians today — spying on individuals engaged in peaceful activities. As a result of a lawsuit filed in 2002 by the American Civil Liberties Union, hundreds of pages of records became public proving that starting in 1953, Denver police spied on as many as 3,200 individuals and 208 organizations. The list contained not only suspected criminal elements but also human rights, education, and peace groups such as Amnesty International and the American Friends Service Committee.

Police collected names, home addresses, personal descriptions, and other information on individuals, including writing down license plates of vehicles used by those attending peaceful protests. This appeared to be in violation of a city policy prohibiting the collection of intelligence “unless such information directly relates to criminal conduct or activity and there is reasonable suspicion that the subject of the information may be involved in criminal conduct or activity.”

The Republican National Convention was scheduled to begin Sept. 1 in St. Paul last year. With just days left on Aug. 26, a pair of videographers from New York who film street protests wandered around downtown Minneapolis lost and looking for a Greyhound station where a friend from Chicago was arriving. After finally retrieving her, they lugged a pile of heavy gear onto a city bus headed for the northwest section of the city to a house they planned to stay at for the night.

The tired trio climbed off the bus well past midnight near a busy corridor of cargo trains. Two police cars showed up and flooded them with search beams. The officers, saying they were investigating auto burglaries in the area, began searching their packs. They discovered pamphlets handed out by the Welcoming Committee and became alarmed. “It was like they’d found Al-Qaeda or something,” Vladimir Teichberg, one of the filmmakers on the scene, recalls.

Cameras, phones, laptops, notebooks, and cash were taken away. Each was questioned individually in the squad cars. Their IDs came up clean. The group made sure, for the record, to deny consent to the searches before demanding itemized receipts of everything confiscated. None were given, nor was anyone charged with a crime. “This is your case number. Call tomorrow,” the officers said. They rushed to the house and began contacting lawyers.

The officers later sought approval for a warrant to examine all the electronic equipment they’d taken. The case was assigned to Minneapolis police Sgt. Thomas Stiller, who attempted to establish that the group had committed a “gross misdemeanor” by trespassing on the railroad property. That would mean a violation of the Minnesota Anti-Terrorism Act of 2002, which forbids anyone from nearing a “critical public service facility” without permission. Employees of such facilities are even empowered to carry out arrests of trespassers under the post-Sept. 11 state law.

Initially created with the promise to help fight terror at the local level, the majority of fusion centers across the United States since have shifted to a general crime-busting mission, partly to justify their annual operating budgets as state lawmakers face greater fiscal pressures due to a wilting economy.

Robust political support for them proliferated swiftly after 9/11 when reports blamed a failure to foresee the tragedy on bureaucratic turf wars and reluctance among federal, state, and local agencies to share information with one another. Today, fusion centers collaborate with federal intelligence agencies that once eschewed state and local partnerships.

“Homeland security in a post-9/11 world requires a new paradigm for intelligence support,” Charles Allen, former chief intelligence officer for the Department of Homeland Security, told a crowd at the National Homeland Defense Foundation in Colorado last October. “This shift has led to a new information-sharing landscape — one including new partners, new roles, and new rules that are still evolving.”

But a report on fusion centers issued in January of 2008 by the Congressional Research Service expressed concern that people without a sophisticated knowledge of intelligence operations and adequate guidance “will engage in intelligence collection that is not supported by law,” a reminiscence of spying abuses that occurred in the United States during the ’60s and ’70s, which led to widespread reforms.

The spying began late in the summer of 2007, after police in St. Paul discovered an amateur video online. It showed youths dressed in black, their faces covered with dark bandanas, tossing home-made fire bombs and seeming to prepare for an assault.

The group called itself the “RNC Welcoming Committee.”

For authorities in St. Paul, the whole thing seemed like serious business. The city was deep in preparations for the Republican National Convention, scheduled to take place in September of 2008. Security was their paramount concern, and nothing worse than a terrorist attack could happen during the four-day event.

In the year leading up to the convention, police would spend countless hours working to identify those behind the video and others who might be planning to disrupt the Republican Party’s nominating bash. They would draw on a new domestic intelligence infrastructure and take unprecedented advantage of laws expanded after 9/11 that give police more intrusive authorities to halt potential subversives and terrorists before they attack.

But far from yielding major revelations, some police work prior to and during the RNC resulted in a series of missteps, poor judgments, heavy-handed tactics, and inappropriate detentions, according to interviews and a review of official documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Critics say many of the police actions were unconstitutional and a judge called one seizure illegal after the fact. Law enforcement officials a year later continue to defend their handling of the convention, arguing it was the only way to keep extremist hoodlums from disrupting the RNC and prevent violent incidents.