IT Deficiencies Blamed in Part for Pre-9/11 Intelligence Failure

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.