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U.S. Response: CIA, FBI Moving Closer, But Not Fast Enough By Greg Seigle Utilizing the types of high-speed supercomputers already used by private industry to conduct marketing research, the CIA and FBI need to move beyond Counterintelligence-21 — an information sharing system currently being used by the 32 federal agencies that handle classified information — and adopt a faster, much more comprehensive database, sources said. CI-21 — in which the ‘21’ signifies “21st Century” — is already outdated and insufficient, and should be quickly replaced by a newer, more reliable system, a prototype of which is being used by the U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., they said. “All of the [military services] are moving in this direction because they know it’s the tool of the future,” Representative Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) told GSN yesterday before he met with the architect of the special operations prototype, a retired 20-year CIA veteran with two doctorates in information technology. “The only ones who don’t get it are the CIA and the FBI,” Weldon said. “That’s not acceptable in this day and time.” “You can’t have the FBI have someone on their list that the [Immigration and Naturalization Service] can’t see,” said L. Paul Bremer, a terrorism expert who noted that five of the 19 hijackers from Sept. 11 were on various government watchdog lists but were never detected prior to the airline attacks. “If CI-21 was doing what we want to do then we might have known about 9-11 before it happened,” Weldon claimed. “The CI-21 argument to me is shallow.” Good Vibrations In recent months CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies are working more closely together than ever before, exchanging liaisons and communicating frequently, spokesmen for the two agencies said. While the CIA and FBI spokesmen were keenly aware of widely publicized complaints that the two agencies had not been working in harmony prior to Sept. 11 — deficiencies the agencies have moved to correct — they were unaware of any moves to link their computer systems. Analysts have long speculated that it is extremely difficult to persuade the two secretive organizations to open up and share their findings, even during times of war. Such openness is tested by recent efforts to create a new national database that can be accessed by agencies involved in the war on terrorism, they said. “The vibrations are positive, the movement is positive, but it’s still moving too slow,” said Weldon. “Our battle is still getting the agencies to open and work with each other.” “No government agency likes to share its information with other agencies, that’s just a fact of life,” according to Bremer, who co-chaired a January Heritage Foundation report, Defending the American Homeland, that deemed as ‘critical’ more information sharing between intelligence agencies. “You do have to break down some of these bureaucratic barriers, and that takes time.” In December Weldon and Representative Dan Burton (R-Ind.) met with Tom Ridge, director of the Office of Homeland Security, to brief him on Weldon’s proposed National Operations and Analysis Hub (NOAH), a proposed supercomputer data mining system based on the military special operations’ prototype (see GSN, Dec. 6, 2001). The military’s data-mining prototype can search a wide variety of databases — and provide profiles on terrorists or companies that participate in WMD development — that otherwise could not be obtained by CI-21 or human sources, Weldon said. Ridge supports the development of such a comprehensive database to be used by the CIA, FBI and 30 other agencies, as shown by the $722 million earmarked for “information and intelligence sharing” in the White House fiscal 2003 budget request, according to Homeland Security Office spokesman Gordon Johndroe. The proposed funds represent a dramatic increase over the $155 million being spent on such endeavors this year, Johndoe said. “Everyone’s been working well together,” Johndroe said, adding that the funds are to “make sure the CIA and the FBI and all the other agencies have compatible computer systems.” An Old Problem Currently when intelligence agencies share information they do not provide raw data — instead they offer outside agencies their interpretations of such data, a slow, cumbersome and often incomplete process, sources said. “This is an old problem,” said Bremer, who served as Reagan administration ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism. “Ideally there should be a single database” that all the intelligence agencies can use. To make the most of their scarce resources, intelligence officials need to make their raw data available to pertinent agencies or officials, analysts have said in recent months. There are effective ways to disperse sensitive information without revealing sensitive sources, analysts said. The CIA, FBI and other secretive agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency have been reluctant to share their resources for three reasons, Bremer said. The first is a “legitimate concern” about sharing intelligence and protecting sources, he said. The second is money — competition for funding is sometimes fierce and “it takes a hell of a lot of money” to build new computer systems, he added. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly if serious change is going to occur, are cultural hindrances —intelligence and law enforcement agencies simply are not used to working together and openly sharing information, Bremer noted. NOAH, the data-mining center proposed by Weldon, would employ massive high-speed computers endowed with cutting-edge software to monitor various threats to the United States. The hub would track and profile the capabilities and contacts of terrorist networks such as al-Qaeda and the movement of weapons of mass destruction from Russia, China and others to countries such as Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. “It’s a tool that can not only be used to identify all the bad actors, the terrorists such as al-Qaeda, it also can be used for [tracking] the proliferation problem,” Weldon said. ‘Still Holding Out’ A comprehensive system such as NOAH could enable the United States to combine its intelligence resources to identify and root out terrorist groups or countries engaged in the transfer of nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological materials, Weldon said. Such a system would enable officials to identify and monitor the front companies and hidden bank accounts of terrorists and wayward nations, he said. In addition to the prototype NOAH system at the Special Operations Command there is a smaller, less-capable data mining system functioning at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. It can already tap into raw data from various intelligence agencies, but the army has little, if any, authority to distribute any of the information it obtains. Still, it appears that CIA and FBI officials are reluctant to embrace any supercomputer databases they must share with outsiders, despite the $722 million White House officials want to offer for such purposes. “I’m not convinced that they’re doing it yet,” Weldon said. “They’re still holding out somewhat.”
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