Report Calls for Plan of Sharing Data to Prevent Terror

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

I was a member of the study board. Djf

Report Calls for Plan of Sharing Data to Prevent Terror

October 7, 2002
By JUDITH MILLER 

A bipartisan report by some of the nation's leading
information technology and national security experts
recommends that the Bush administration develop a system to
share intelligence gathered in the United States and abroad
among local, state and federal agencies while developing
guidelines to protect against abuses.

The 173-page report, which is scheduled to be released
today, outlines what its authors call a "road map" for
establishing truly national, decentralized information
systems that would both protect privacy and prevent terror.


Toward that end, the report, "Protecting America's Freedom
in an Information Age," strongly endorses giving
responsibility for analyzing such information not to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, but to a new domestic
intelligence center inside President Bush's planned
Department of Homeland Security. Legislation to create the
department is mired in Congressional wrangling over such
issues as whether labor laws should apply to the agency's
employees. 

The study also calls upon President Bush to devise new
guidelines on what information federal agencies may and may
not collect about individuals in the United States and with
whom, and under what circumstances, such data may be
shared. 

Finally, it warns that while Washington must play a
critical role in gathering and analyzing data aimed at
preventing terror, state and local officials will
inevitably provide much of the information needed to
protect the nation. Information systems that exclude them,
or prevent them from receiving and contributing to such
federal data, are destined to fail, the study concludes.

Unless information provided by state and local officials,
as well as the private sector, is shared with Washington,
"we may wind up getting all of the disadvantages of
invasion of privacy with none of the national security
gains," conclude the task force's co-chairmen, Zoë Baird,
the president of the New York-based Markle Foundation, and
James L. Barksdale, a businessman and former chief
executive of Netscape.

Although the Bush administration did not commission the
report or formally participate on the 44-member panel that
studied the issues for more than six months, senior
administration officials who followed the group's work
praised the effort.

"This impressive group of people was definitely asking all
the right questions, and have come up with some very
reasonable first answers," one senior administration
official said. 

Several task force members are scheduled to meet today with
Tom Ridge, the president's homeland security adviser, to
discuss their findings. "They've gotten people who normally
don't talk to one another - privacy advocates and former
intelligence and national security officials - to agree on
some basic prescriptions for safeguarding civil liberties
and protecting America," the official said. "That's fairly
impressive." 

The study, sponsored by the Markle Foundation, was
conducted with two influential research groups - the
Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and
International Studies - and with the Miller Center for
Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. The center's
president, Philip Zelikow, a former White House official
who is close to Bush administration officials, is the task
force's executive director.

"Our study shows that the information and technology that
could have prevented the 9/11 attacks already exists," Mr.
Zelikow said in an interview. "Had such systems been in
place," he said, "Sept. 11 might have been the nation's
most important intelligence coup, instead of a day of
national tragedy." 

The report says that while federal agencies are investing
some $50 billion a year on information technology partly to
prevent terrorism, "almost none of this money is being
spent to solve the problem of how to share this information
and intelligence among those agencies." In this fiscal
year's $38 billion request for domestic security, for
instance, the Bush administration has asked for only $200
million for "information integration, and is having trouble
getting even that."

Ashton Carter, a professor at the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University and a former defense
official, said the group's endorsement of presidential
guidelines for safeguarding privacy was based on the
standards developed by the National Security Agency, which
monitors telephone and electronic communications overseas.
The agency has "a good history of discipline" about
monitoring conversations of Americans abroad, he said.

The report argues strongly for automated, interactive
information systems that include data collected by the
private sector as well as tips from local and state
agencies, which the study calls the "real front lines of
homeland security." The F.B.I. has 11,500 agents, but there
are more than 50 times as many state and local law
enforcement officers. Whereas the F.B.I. has some 100
analysts working on domestic counterterrorism intelligence,
the report states, the Los Angeles Police Department alone
has 40 such analysts, and New York's counterterrorism
effort is larger still.

"America will make a mistake if we create an old-fashioned
centralized mainframe supercomputer architecture rather
than a network of personal computers," Ms. Baird said.

Treading carefully in one of the most sensitive policy
areas, particularly for conservative Republicans, the task
force avoids recommending the creation of a stand-alone
domestic collection agency - such as Britain's MI-5 - or
placing that responsibility under the F.B.I.

"The people running criminal investigations should not be
seeking all kinds of information from businesses, state and
local officials all over the country," Ms. Baird said.

The case for "fundamental separation" of criminal
investigation and domestic counterintelligence "is strong,"
the report concludes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/07/national/07HOME.html?ex=1034980614&ei=1&en
=d0b1ee04a450c7e5


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