Agencies urged to share intelligence data

To substantially improve homeland security, federal agencies must learn to share and use intelligence data much more effectively than they do now, Rep. Curt Weldon, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday. Weldon spoke to a group of federal managers and business executives attending a homeland defense briefing in Washington.

Thirty-two federal agencies have classified intelligence systems, Weldon noted. "They are not interconnected to do data mining, which is ridiculous," he said. "A corporation doing marketing would never operate that way." Data mining is the process of using software designed to gather and integrate targeted information, often from unrelated sources.

The problem was brought home to Weldon three years ago when he traveled to Vienna with 10 colleagues to meet with a group of Russians to lay the foundation for negotiating an end to war in Kosovo. Weldon wanted to know more about a Serbian official the Russians planned to bring to the meetings. He knew the individual had ties to Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic but he didn't know the extent of the relationship, which could prove crucial in the negotiations.

Weldon called the CIA and asked for a briefing on the man. The CIA obliged, but didn't have much information on the individual, other than reports of shady business connections in Russia. When Weldon asked State Department officials for information, he couldn't find anyone who had even heard of the man.

Weldon then turned to the Army's information dominance center at Fort Belvoir, Va. The center is responsible for protecting information technology systems in the service, but can do much more.

Using data mining tools, the Army created an eight-page profile of the individual that contained detailed information on his social and business connections. Weldon learned the man's wife and sister-in-law were close to Milosevic's wife, and his business dealings in Serbia and Russia included arms smuggling and banking scams.

When Weldon returned from meeting with the Russians, he found urgent messages from the CIA and FBI seeking to debrief him in order to give the State Department a deeper understanding of the players before heading into formal negotiations.

"I had two CIA agents and two FBI agents in my office with four pages of questions for me. I answered every one of their questions, and they I asked them how they thought I got this information," he said. The agents had no idea Weldon had received the vast majority of the information from U.S. intelligence sources--through the Army--before he even left the country.

"Our federal agencies are so stovepiped they don't want to share their data, except for public transmittals of information person to person."

Weldon said it is imperative that the new Office of Homeland Security in the White House have access to integrated data from all U.S. intelligence sources. "We don't have that capacity. We've made some progress, but we're not there yet."