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 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.

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.

Don Gemberling spent his earliest years as a civil servant during the late 1960s helping Minnesota establish its first criminal-justice information system and teaching police about the emerging technology. At the time, officers in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul collected police intelligence on biker gangs and other organized criminals, Gemberling said in an interview.

By the early 1970s, however, the then-head of Minnesota’s infant IT infrastructure converted Gemberling to the cause of privacy rights long before many anticipated the threat posed by government databases, criminal or otherwise. His mentor, a moderate Republican named Dan Magraw, warned that the easier it became to preserve large volumes of personal information electronically, the greater the risk it could be abused and entered incorrectly, potentially destroying someone’s credit rating or erroneously leading to an employment denial.

So Magraw helped persuade the state legislature to pass a bill in 1974 that became one of the first government computer privacy laws of its kind in the United States. Gemberling drafted language for the bill, and after it was enacted, he spent the rest of his career until he retired in 2004 teaching Minnesota’s public workforce how to comply with the law.

It came to be known as the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act, and the state’s unique effort to address privacy implications created by new databases preceded even the groundbreaking federal Privacy Act of 1974, passed months later in the wake of Nixon-era spy scandals to ensure the confidentiality of personal information such as Social Security numbers held by U.S. government agencies.