Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Report: Inadequate IT contributed to 9/11 intelligence failure

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 17:22:35 -0400

Report: Inadequate IT contributed to 9/11 intelligence failure

By DAN VERTON
JULY 24, 2003

WASHINGTON -- A lack of information sharing and analysis stemming from an
antiquated IT infrastructure and cultural turf battles throughout the FBI and
various intelligence agencies contributed to the national security community's
failure to head off the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, according to the results
of a congressional investigation. The 900-page report of the long-awaited joint
inquiry by the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence into the 9/11
attacks was released today.

It found that despite the collection of a massive amount of intelligence and clues
that a major terrorist operation against the U.S. was under way, significant
deficiencies in IT and political battles between the CIA and the National Security
Agency (NSA) over which agency should control the use and development of certain
technologies allowed critical clues to be overlooked.
Commenting on the report, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) said he believes that, given
the clues that were available, the attacks could have been prevented. "If people
want to place blame, there is plenty of blame to go around," he said.
The report specifically blames the failure by government agencies, particularly
the FBI and the NSA, to ensure that their agents had adequate IT support. It
cited, for instance, the absence of a centralized counterterrorism database.

FBI field agents from Phoenix, Minneapolis and New York all cited the FBI's
technology problems as among the top three things they would like to see fixed to
improve counterterrorism efforts. "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 them. 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 similar cases. Another agent had expressed similar concerns.

In addition, congressional investigators found that because of the limitations of
the FBI's Automated Case File (ACS) system, a number of addressees on the Phoenix
communication, including the chief of the FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit, were
not aware of the communication before the attacks occurred.

The FBI deployed the ACS in 1995 to replace a system of written reports and
indices. However, FBI agents told congressional investigators that the system was
limited in its search capacity, difficult to use and unreliable. The system was so
difficult to use, in fact, that FBI officials informed Congress that as of Sept.
26, 2002, 68,000 counterterrorism leads dating back to 1995 remained outstanding
and unassigned.

Concerns about the security of the ACS also hampered its use. Before Sept. 11,
2001, many FBI field agents did not include sensitive information in the ACS
because they believed the system was not secure, the report found. In addition,
many agents who did include information in the ACS blocked access to it in order
to limit the number of FBI personnel who could obtain the information. "Given
these limitations, ACS does not provide assured retrieval of complete,
authoritative information on any subject," the report concluded.

The chief of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit described the FBI's situation for
congressional investigators as "a setup for failure in terms of keeping a
strategic picture of what we are up against.

"Communications coming into our building from NSA, from CIA, cannot be integrated
into our existing databases," the FBI official said. "So if an analyst is working,
say, on a subject in a Phoenix division and they run that person's name through
our databases, they will not retrieve information on that person that other
agencies may also have. It is required of them to get up, walk over to a ...
different computer that has access to a different database and search that name in
that database; and the two databases will never come together and be integrated."

FBI Director Robert Mueller, however, told members of the Senate Judiciary
Committee on July 23 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, based
primarily on analyst applications and tools (see story).
Congress also singled out the NSA, the electronic eavesdropping arm of the
Pentagon, for its inability to provide adequate IT tools for its analysts. More
important, however, congressional investigators were surprised to learn that many
of the problems at NSA 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
concluded. "In the absence of such tools, NSA language analysts must still conduct
the bulk of their work with pencil and paper. Many develop their own personal
databases on index cards that cannot be made readily available to counterterrorism
analysts at other agencies," according to the report.

And despite NSA's $282 million Trailblazer contract, signed in October 2002 with
San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp. to help the agency
upgrade its data collection and analysis capabilities, Congress warned in its
report that the implementation of Trailblazer remains three to five years away and
"confusion still exists at NSA as to what will actually be provided by that
program."

Aside from the lack of IT infrastructure and tools, information-sharing and timely
collection of intelligence was also significantly hampered by what congressional
investigators characterized as a turf war between the CIA and the NSA over 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 said. Intelligence officials told congressional investigators that
while individual relationships and cooperation between CIA and NSA at the working
level had often been very good, relationships at the mid- and upper-management
levels of those agencies were often strained.

"CIA perceived NSA as wanting to control technology use and development, while NSA
was concerned that CIA was engaged in operations that were NSA's responsibility,"
the investigation concluded.

According to the report, NSA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden told members of the
joint inquiry that "the old divisions of labor are impractical -- the new
electronic universe requires more and more cooperation." He added that he "would
not be surprised if someday the closeness of this relationship would require
organizational changes."
Sen. Richard Shelby, (R-Ala.), said he believes that if all of the information
available to the intelligence community prior to Sept. 11, 2001 had been stored
and mined in an all-source "fusion center," then "maybe things would have been
different."

Recommendations from the congressional
report on the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks:

Make better use of future technologies to exploit terrorist
communications.

Improve and expand use of data mining technologies and
analysis tools.

Develop a multilevel security operating system that gives
analysts access to different classifications of data on one
system.

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."

http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/story/0,10801,83426,00.html?nas=PM-83426

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