State, local officials seek better info from feds on terrorist threats

State and local officials have been frustrated by the "imprecise and inadequate" information on terrorist threats they receive from the CIA, FBI and other federal agencies, several homeland security officials said on Wednesday.

"They don't feel like they have all the cards in the deck that we have," John Pistole, the FBI's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, said during a conference sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

Pistole said state and local officials have sought more frequent and thorough intelligence analyses from federal agencies about "where we are in the entire threat arena." He noted, for example, that many communities wanted to know more about why the Bush administration raised the color-coded alert level earlier this month.

Although it is "very rare" for intelligence agencies to obtain information about specific terrorist targets, according to John Gannon, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, they must provide state and local officials with better information about how the threat-alert level might affect their communities.

"What we have now is not adequate, and it does not meet the serious needs of people who are out there protecting our critical infrastructures," said Gannon, who recently served as a captain of the homeland security transition office's information analysis and infrastructure protection team. "If you take imprecise and inadequate intelligence and you color code it, then you're just color coding imprecision and inadequacy."

Gannon added that the increased threat level is impacting state and local budgets "in a very significant way" because even if officials perceive a low risk of the threat affecting their regions, such alerts will prompt a public demand for increased police protection.

Intelligence and law enforcement officials on the panel said they are working to improve communications with state and local agencies. For example, the CIA hopes to create "profiles" of authorized intelligence recipients throughout the country and disseminate information on a targeted basis, according to William Dawson, deputy chief information officer for the CIA's intelligence community office.

Dawson said that type of system would help state and local officials to "get the information they're interested in rather than having to go look for it."

Pistole said the FBI is providing state and local officials with counterterrorism information on a daily basis, but he said much of that data distribution "is basically a manual system."

The agency needs an automated "push system" to quickly disseminate data to thousands of officials every day, according to Pistole. "Our greatest vulnerability is not having the [information technology] system we need yet," he said.

But Gannon said he is optimistic that over time, counterterrorism agencies can create a system that is "much more sensitive" to the specific needs of certain regions and critical infrastructures. "It's always going to be an imperfect system in an imperfect world, but we can do a lot better than we're doing now," Gannon said.