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IT Deficiencies Blamed in Part for Pre-9/11 Intelligence Failure
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July 28, 2003 (Computerworld) -- WASHINGTON -- An antiquated IT infrastructure and turf battles among federal agencies resulted in a lack of information sharing and analysis that contributed to the national security community's failure to head off the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
That was a key finding of the long-awaited joint inquiry by the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence into the 9/11 attacks, the results of which were released in an 858-page report last week.
The report cites the failure of government agencies, particularly the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA), to ensure that their agents had adequate IT support. The absence of a centralized counterterrorism database drew particular criticism.
"The FBI is a member of the intelligence community," the report quotes an FBI agent as saying. "We have to be able to communicate with [other intelligence organizations]. We have to be able to have databases that can be integrated with them, and right now we do not. It is a major problem."
That lack of IT capability was a major problem for the FBI's pre-Sept. 11 investigation into potential al-Qaeda plans, according to the report. In fact, when a Phoenix FBI field office agent drafted an e-mail in July 2001—known now as the infamous "Phoenix memo"—he had no reliable way of querying a central FBI system to determine whether there were other reports on radical fundamentalists taking flight training in the U.S., or whether other FBI field offices were investigating cases of the same nature. Another agent had expressed similar concerns.
In addition, congressional investigators found that because of the limitations of the FBI's Automated Case File system, a number of addressees who should have received the Phoenix memo, including the chief of the FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit, weren't aware of the communication before the attacks occurred.
Correcting the Problem
FBI Director Robert Mueller, however, told members ofthe Senate Judiciary Committee last week that the bureau is only months away from completing work on a massive upgrade of its global IT infrastructure, including desktop upgrades for all of its field offices around the world and ongoing software upgrades .
Congress also singled out the NSA, the electronic eavesdropping arm of the Pentagon, for its inability to provide adequate IT tools for its analysts. And congressional investigators were surprised to learn that many of the problems at the NSA have persisted well after the attacks.
"NSA could not demonstrate its current analytic tools to the Joint Inquiry and could not identify upgrades that will assist NSA analysts in identifying critical intelligence amidst the large volumes of information it collects," the report concludes.
And despite the $282 million Trailblazer contract that the NSA signed last October with San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp. to help the agency upgrade its data collection and analysis capabilities , Congress warns in its report that the implementation of Trailblazer remains three to five years away. "Confusion still exists at NSA as to what will actually be provided by that program," the report states.
Aside from the lack of IT infrastructure and tools, information sharing and timely collection of intelligence were also significantly hampered by what congressional investigators characterized as a turf war between the CIA and the NSA over the control of certain technologies.
"While CIA and NSA have had many successful joint counterterrorism technical operations, the Inquiry was told that overlapping targets and greater use of similar technologies caused friction between the two agencies in some instances," the report says.
To-Do List
IT-related recommendations from the congressional report include the following:
Make better use of existing and emerging technologies to exploit terrorist communications.
Improve and expand the use of data mining technologies and analysis tools.
Develop an operating system that supports multilevel security clearance access.
Use existing IT to modernize intelligence reporting and trend analysis.
Develop an all-source intelligence fusion center within the Department of Homeland Security.
Solve the FBI’s “persistent and incapacitating information technology problems.”
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