August 20, 2002
(Computerworld)
PHILADELPHIA -- Legislation that Congress failed to adopt two years ago would have created an interagency data mining capability that could have detected and helped prevent the terrorist attacks of last September, a senior Republican member of Congress asserted yesterday.
Speaking near his home district at this week's Information Sharing & Homeland Security conference here, Rep. Curt Weldon, (R-Pa.), lambasted the government, including Congress, for failing to act on critical data mining and intelligence integration proposals that he and others authored years before the terrorist attacks.
"There are 33 classified agency systems in the federal government, but none of them link their raw data together," said Weldon, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Military Research and Development. "We could have and should have had a better data-fusion capability on and before 9-11."
The eight-term Republican referred specifically to a governmentwide data mining agency he proposed two years ago as part of the fiscal 2001 Defense Department budget. The National Operations and Analysis Hub, or NOAH, as he called it, would have been responsible for supporting the intelligence community in developing threat profiles of terrorists and global hot spots.
According to Weldon, he briefed John Hamre, then deputy secretary of defense, on the idea, and Hamre agreed to fund the new agency.
But "on Sept. 11, that capability did not exist and we paid the price," said Weldon.
His plan had been to model the agency after the Army's Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) at Fort Belvoir, Va., which Weldon credits with having one of the most effective open-source data-mining capabilities in the intelligence community.
Weldon came up with the idea for the agency in 1999, when he led a high-level delegation to Vienna to help negotiate the terms of Russia's participation in peacekeeping operations in Kosovo. Arriving in Europe, he found himself negotiating with Dragomir Karic, a member of an influential Kosovan family and a close ally of Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic. Faced with the prospect of bargaining with an individual he knew nothing about, Weldon asked the CIA for a profile of Karic. But the agency knew very little about him and was unable to deliver the details Weldon needed.
He turned to LIWA, which handed over eight pages of documentation, including detailed information on Karic's association with Milosevic and his financial dealings.
When word got out about the source of Weldon's information, he was contacted by the FBI and the CIA, neither of which knew about the LIWA, said Weldon.
Now Weldon is convinced that a centralized data mining capability within the intelligence community would have gathered indications and warnings that a terrorist attack was being planned. In fact, a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, an Italian newspaper printed an interview with an alleged member of al-Qaeda who told the newspaper that the terrorist organization was training pilots for kamikaze-style attacks, said Weldon.
"We had never anticipated this type of incident," he said. "The problem was that the CIA didn't have data mining technology to pore through open-source information."