Agencies still grapple with data-sharing policies

Government officials said Tuesday the U.S. intelligence community is grappling with policies to effectively share information and define agencies' counter-terrorism responsibilities.

House Homeland Security Intelligence Subcommittee Chairman Rob Simmons, R-Conn., said he is not satisfied with progress on reforming national intelligence capabilities to counter threats.

"The process is painfully slow," Simmons said at an annual conference on information sharing and homeland security in Washington. "I'm very, very frustrated by it."

Congress mandated modernization through a 2004 intelligence law, which created a director of national intelligence position and a counter-terrorism center to coordinate intelligence activities and disseminate information. Simmons said Congress should not mandate more changes. Rather, he said the administration must offer solutions.

"The last thing you really want to do, in my opinion, is have Congress solve the problem," Simmons said.

Russ Travers, the counter-terrorism center's deputy director for information sharing and knowledge development, said the "single-biggest question" that needs answering is what is each agency's specific responsibility.

He said the center is "clearly not there yet" on fully implementing the intelligence statute. For example, the center does not have standards for evaluating and incorporating suspicious activity reports created by state and local law enforcement.

Travers cited some of the center's accomplishments, such as analyzing information and improving the government's ability to track people through databases and watch lists. But he said the center still should develop policies and procedures for dealing with non-disseminated raw information.

He added that the intelligence community faces an "extraordinarily complicated environment" with the rise of terrorist groups around the world. Travers said the community's tasks are further challenged by the threat of home-grown terrorist cells, such as the ones that bombed transit systems in Madrid, Spain, in 2004 and London last year.

Army Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said one of the biggest challenges for the intelligence community is reforming information-sharing policies. He said the community has outdated policies for disclosing intelligence collected abroad, the way information is classified and who has the power to classify information.

He said the government needs to develop systems and procedures for information distribution, meaning that intelligence analysts would be immediately notified when data becomes available that might interest them.

"One size does not fit all in the information game," Maples said.