66. Group Finds Intelligence Gap Persists

Remember when I said I would post every Sunday and Thursday…rocket fire permitting? Well, suffice it to say that I’m just getting back to posting today after a brief, necessary delay here in Iraq. We’ll leave the details to the reader’s imagination!

The following article is from the March 10th Wall Street Journal. If at first you struggle to find the link between an ineffective system of intelligence sharing and the Smart Power of Powerful Peace, please consider that whenever a mighty power like the United States is unable to “connect the dots” between groups, motives and capabilities (in other words, Threat), our responses to threat are far more likely to be off the mark.

The most common such response (reaction, really, which is no higher a choice than the response of a dumb animal) is force. Casual force leads to unecessary violence, which leads to more unintended harm to innocents, which leads to more grievance…which leads to greater threat against us.

Hmmm….

I may be dumb…but I ain’t stupid!

Group Finds Intelligence Gap Persists

March 10, 2009 

By Siobhan Gorman

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government still can’t link critical pieces of information that could warn of an impending terrorist plot, despite more than seven years of effort since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a new report from a bipartisan national-security group warns.

Getting security officials to connect information about threats is the “single most important step” the Obama administration should take to improve national security, the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age said in a report to be released Tuesday.

“Today, we are still vulnerable to attack because — as on 9/11 — we are still not able to connect the dots,” the group said, according to a copy of the report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “At the same time, civil liberties are at risk because we don’t have the government-wide policies in place to protect them as intelligence collection has expanded.”

In an interview, outgoing Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said the group’s advice is similar to what he told his successor, Dennis Blair. “It was my recommendation that he make [intelligence sharing] one of his top priorities,” said Mr. McConnell, who praised the task force’s efforts to focus attention on the issue.

“It continues to be a priority for us,” said Mr. Blair’s spokesman, Ross Feinstein. “We look forward to reviewing the report and continuing our efforts to improve information sharing.”

The Markle task force, which has been studying information sharing since 2002, is a bipartisan group of about 40 current and former security and technology officials from the government and private sector, a number of whom are now working at senior levels in the Obama administration, including the attorney general. The Markle Foundation is a nonprofit public-policy group.

Officials at the office responsible for improving information sharing said the report doesn’t give enough credit to efforts under way, particularly to improve the sharing of threat information with state and local officials. “It to some degree understates the progress that’s been achieved,” said John Cohen, a senior adviser in that office, which reports to the director of national intelligence. “What it correctly states is that we still have much to do.”

Since the 2001 attacks, the government’s urgency in fixing intelligence sharing has diminished, the task force says. Cultural, organizational and technical obstacles have slowed efforts to move information across agency boundaries. A recent inspector-general report assessing the intelligence agencies’ information sharing found that the agencies have considerable work left to do.

The group recommends that Mr. Obama order a high-level review focused on how to integrate all threat information, not just terrorism tips. It also says the information-sharing office that reports to the president through the director of national intelligence should be moved into the White House to elevate its position within the government.

To change agency culture, the Obama administration should evaluate individuals and agencies in part based on their effectiveness at sharing information, the task force says.

On the technology side, all national-security agencies should launch programs to categorize data by the same standards. Under Mr. McConnell, the intelligence agencies launched an effort to do that with a program to create a Google-like search engine among intelligence agencies. The task force said that type of effort should be expanded.

Such programs must also include strong privacy protections, the group says, including automatic auditing of who accesses what information and what is done with that information. Many government agencies still need to establish privacy policies, the report added, and the accuracy of data in terrorist watchlists needs to be ensured.

Mr. McConnell said such efforts were similar to what he was working to do when he was the intelligence director. While “it’s fair,” he said, to want a faster rate of change, he said working on the problems inside the government was like “trying to move a glacier.”

Write to Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com

Powerful Peace Copyright © 2009 by Jack Oatmon. All rights reserved.

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