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.

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.