Come Together

n the evening of Oct. 29, seven weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in Washington, New York and Pennsylvania killed more than 3,000 people, a group of Boston police officers stood guard in Charlestown, a neighborhood adjacent to Boston Harbor. From parked cruisers they watched as a giant tanker floated into the harbor under heavy guard by tugs and patrol boats. The ship carried 33 million gallons of highly combustible liquid natural gas, a substance that, when heated, expands sixfold in volume. The fuel was the lifeblood of an energy-hungry Massachusetts heading toward winter. But it was also a potential terrorist target, local and federal law enforcement officials believed.

One Boston police officer vividly remembers the scene: Officers sat in their cars, eyes fixed on the still, black water. When the tanker came into view, they all switched on their flashing lights. But that was all. The police stood by, waiting for the tanker to pass safely. All the while, the officer wondered, if someone were to attack that ship, what he could possibly do.

The Coast Guard had barred the tanker from entering the harbor in late September out of concern about the waterway's security. When the Coast Guard lifted the ban three weeks later, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino strongly criticized the agency for dropping the problem in the city's lap without adequately addressing lingering safety concerns. In late November, Menino learned from an Internet news report that the FBI had for some time possessed information about possible terrorist attacks on gas tankers. He was so outraged that Justice Department officials hadn't contacted him directly about the threat that he called for a reinstatement of the ban on all gas tankers in Boston Harbor. Menino was just one of a number of big-city mayors raising post-Sept. 11 complaints about the federal government's failure to share critical information about terrorism. "Law enforcement cooperation is not nearly what it should be, given what is at stake," Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley told members of Congress at an October hearing of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Efficiency, Financial Management and Intergovernmental Relations.

To anticipate and prepare for terrorist attacks, federal, state and local law enforcement officials need access to critical information generated by ongoing investigations and anti-terrorism initiatives. The FBI, as the only agency with the statutory authority to investigate terrorism, controls most of that information. Since Sept. 11, law enforcement officials at all levels of government have been struggling to put potentially lifesaving data into the hands of the people who can best use it. But, as the Boston Harbor story shows, federal investigators sometimes aren't willing to share leads or tips. They say some information is too sensitive to release even to law enforcement colleagues because it could compromise investigative techniques and reveal too much about confidential sources. And when information sharing does occur, state and local officials complain, it's often too little, too late, or too basic to be of much use.

Roger Baker, the former chief information officer at the Commerce Department, says law enforcement agencies share little information because they "operate in almost completely distinct universes," separated by jurisdictional boundaries as well as turf battles over which agencies have access to valuable investigative and intelligence data. If agencies at all levels of government could devise a way to break down historic boundaries and share information, they would be better able to fight and prevent terrorism, says Baker, now executive vice president for telecommunications and information assurance at CACI, a systems integration firm in Alexandria, Va. Law enforcement officials have struggled with the information-sharing problem for years, according to Michael Kirkpatrick, the assistant director in charge of the Criminal Justice Information Services Division at the FBI. Kirkpatrick oversees the bureau's automated fingerprint identification system, which enters electronic fingerprint records provided by officers from federal, state and local agencies into a massive database that all of them can query. Kirkpatrick was promoting information sharing through his program long before Sept. 11. But he has no regulatory authority to compel agencies to work together. The best he can do is tout the benefits of contributing and sharing information.

Federal statutes have prevented information sharing between federal agencies and state and their state and local counterparts for decades. Many federal agencies can't share information among themselves. For example, law enforcement agencies have been barred from sharing some grand jury and wiretap information with one another and with intelligence agencies. The USA Patriot Act, signed by President Bush in October, has eased some of those restrictions, but barriers still keep federal agencies from sharing some information with state and local governments. Two bills before Congress would address that problem by giving state and local law enforcement agencies more access to federal databases and foreign intelligence. But legislation won't ease the resentment of state and local law enforcement officers toward their federal brethren, whom they often view as being intrusive and ignorant of local conditions.

For example, Boston police point disdainfully to a pamphlet produced by the local intergovernmental anti-terrorism task force led by the Justice Department. Intended to help local police prevent terrorism, the pamphlet lists potential targets throughout the city. But it includes every major building, public space and monument in Boston, irritating a local officer who says police are already paying as much special attention to these sites as limited resources will allow. Boston officers say training sessions sponsored by the anti-terrorism task force were similarly unhelpful. Lasting only a few hours, the seminars offered common-sense tips most officers already knew. For example, an officer says, he didn't need a seminar to point out that that a lone van parked in front of the FBI building should be checked out. He also has little confidence in the federal government's ability to collect and disseminate information or to decide who should get it in an effort to prevent another terrorist attack. "They don't know," he says.

Law enforcement officials at all levels hope a solution to the information-sharing problem, and to intergovernmental head-butting, lies in new anti-terrorism task forces. On Sept. 18, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he had ordered the Justice Department and the FBI to establish anti-terrorism task forces in every one of the 93 federal districts in the United States. Each includes dozens of high-ranking federal, state and local law enforcement officials from such agencies as the FBI, the Justice Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Coast Guard and state and local police departments. The U.S. attorney and the special agent in charge of the FBI field office in each district lead the task forces, which operate alongside a network of joint terrorism task forces created in 1997 in Boston and 30 other cities. The joint terrorism task forces already included many of the same federal, state and local law enforcement agencies that sit on the new anti-terrorism task forces. Until now, the joint task forces were the conduits for sharing information about terrorism.

The mission of all these groups is straightforward enough: Prevent terrorism and disrupt terrorist organizations. But to keep all the players from working at cross-purposes, FBI and Justice Department officials must find an effective way to manage the astounding amount of information generated by the Sept. 11 investigation, the largest in U.S. law enforcement history, as well as from other anti-terrorist efforts.

Support Groups

Bostonians carry a special burden of guilt about the Sept. 11 attacks. "Those were our planes," say city and state officials and even people on the street, noting that two of the four hijacked airliners took off from Boston's Logan International Airport. Officials say Boston's role in the attacks adds urgency to the work of the anti-terrorism task force, which has jurisdiction over all of Massachusetts. And it almost seems that officials are assuaging their grief in a massive circle of support groups bringing together every agency with a conceivable interest in preventing terrorism.

U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan and FBI Special-Agent-in-Charge Charles Prouty coordinate and oversee the efforts of all law enforcement agencies involved in the anti-terrorism task force. But day-to-day operations are carried out by a working group in Boston led by Sullivan's second-in-command, Associate U.S. Attorney Gerard Leone Jr. The group consists of nearly 70 people drawn from federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, public health agencies, emergency management and response departments and several other organizations. From Sept. 11 until Christmas, the group met once a week to discuss the progress of investigations and to come up with better ways to share information, Leone says. Now it meets formally on a monthly basis.

In addition to leading the working group, Leone oversees six subgroups, each of which addresses a specific issue, such as establishing an emergency notification system for participating agencies in the event of another attack or training and education of law enforcement officers. One focuses on information sharing, which, in light of the sheer volume of information and the number of players in Boston today, probably is the most critical work of all.

In the first few weeks after Sept. 11, the Boston FBI field office took in 8,700 leads relating to the attacks, Prouty says. To help cull the data, the FBI had to call in reinforcements in the form of 400 law enforcement officers from agencies as distant as the Massachusetts fish and wildlife office. Right now, Leone relies on low-tech methods to keep information flowing. Members of the task force and its subgroups hold regular meetings, talk by phone and exchange e-mails. There is no sophisticated information management system in place to automate this process.

One-Way Street

Deciding who needs to know what and when is tough. The work of each task force member agency helps determine what it needs to know, Leone explains. Members are reaching agreements on what information will and won't be shared, but some classified information never will leave the FBI, Leone says. Terrorist threat warnings issued from the Justice Department or the Office of Homeland Security may or may not be forwarded to the governor or the mayor, Leone says, depending upon the sensitivity of the information that led to the warning and the Justice Department's assessment of what state or local officials could do if they had it.

Law enforcement experts point out that the FBI's role as the sole investigator of terrorism creates a one-way relationship with other agencies. The FBI wants everything it can get from everyone else, they say, but sets limits on what it will reveal. That often creates resentment on the part of other agencies, particularly those charged with preventing and investigating crime at the state and local levels. Leone, who has helped run a local district attorney's office and has worked for the Massachusetts attorney general, says he is sympathetic to state and local concerns. He understands that the FBI has to show some reciprocity to get what it wants. For example, if the bureau wants access to intelligence information gathered by the state police, he says it must make some of its information more available. To that end, Leone says the bureau is trying to improve access. One way is by reformatting documents to be electronically compatible with state and local agencies' information systems.

Since that's about as far as formal information sharing has gone, Boston anti-terrorism task force officials rely on a more informal means of collaboration. The foundation for the system goes back years and is based on a network of friendships among senior task force members.

Ties That Bind

Acting Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift named Richard Swenson director of the Office of Commonwealth Security last December. The former special-agent-in-charge of the Boston FBI field office, Swenson is close to Prouty, Leone and a host of other insiders at Boston's FBI and Justice Department offices. Those ties have given the governor's office valuable access to the upper reaches of the anti-terrorism network in Boston. At the same time, federal investigators have come to rely on Swenson, the state-level version of federal Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, for direct access to Swift and Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly. "We'll talk about anything," says Swenson of his exchanges with Prouty, Leone and other senior task force members. "Virtually every player in this field I know well." Swenson reports directly to the governor to keep her apprised of everything the terrorism task forces are doing and of any breaking developments in the anti-terrorism campaign.

Officials in Boston agree that more of the information shared in those high-level and often informal conversations must trickle down to cops on the street. James Hussey, superintendent-in-chief of the Boston Police Department and a strong advocate of intergovernmental cooperation, says his force had focused primarily on domestic terrorism until Sept. 11-investigating anti-abortionists, animal rights advocates and some of the student groups at Boston's approximately 90 colleges and universities. "We weren't looking to get involved" in international terrorism, he says. But the hijacked airliners' connections to Boston shocked the police force and made everyone eager to get all three levels of government talking, Hussey says.

Hussey has no illusions about the ability of the FBI or Justice to solve every problem. "We can't expect the federal government will carry this ball all by itself," he says. But he adds that federal officials must bring the Boston police up to speed on international terrorism and show officers how to investigate a threat he never thought the United States would face. Hussey believes federal agencies need to tell officers on the street what's expected of them. Short of that, at least the anti-terrorism task force is "creating the network" of communication among agencies in Boston, Hussey says. "[They] open the doors."

For its part, the police department will begin requiring all officers to take courses on weapons of mass destruction, Hussey says. And officers have gone into Afghan immigrant communities to educate residents about their civil rights in the event that they're stopped or questioned by the police. "We will not allow people's rights to be stepped upon," Hussey says.

Technology Catalyst

Before Sept. 11, how information was shared depended on the personalities of the people involved in an investigation, says Gary Cote, the acting deputy district director of the Boston office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Since the attacks, hoarding of information has begun to ease, especially when technology can act as a catalyst.

For example, the INS now plans to enter the names of more than 300,000 immigration absconders into the FBI's National Crime Information Center, a massive database of criminals that every state and local police agency in the nation can access. Absconders are people who not only have overstayed their visas in the United States, but are attempting to avoid detection by authorities. A technological interface now being built also will allow the INS to enter its database of immigrants' fingerprints into the FBI's criminal fingerprint database. Denis Riordan, acting district director of the INS in Boston, says his office also is setting up a pilot program with Suffolk County, Mass., to allow officers there to electronically compare fingerprints of people they arrest with INS absconder records.

Technology companies are pushing law enforcement agencies to use their wares to solve the information-sharing problem. Debate about the best solutions has been spirited, and usually turns on the question of who needs to know what, rather than on technological obstacles, which experts say are few and manageable. Some companies have proposed software that could capture data from various agencies and aggregate it to create multi-dimensional reports that several agencies could use.

Siebel Systems, a San Mateo, Calif., software manufacturer, has outfitted its software for homeland security duty. The company modified a data collection and dissemination system used by financial institutions to aggregate customers' account histories. Theoretically, law enforcement and intelligence agencies could use it to share information and to coordinate investigations. Frank Bishop, vice president and general manager of Siebel's public sector practice, reports that a federal agency and a large city are using the software for homeland security.

Most corporate and government officials strongly object to creating a single, central repository of law enforcement or intelligence information, arguing that doing so would pose security risks, shed too much light on investigative techniques and sources, and make government too dependent on a single technology system. But Oracle, the leading seller of database software to the government, is busy designing an information "schema," or commonly agreed-upon set of definitions, for all law enforcement databases, says Steve Perkins, senior vice president of Oracle's public sector business. The company is lobbying for a uniform national identification card and has offered to help build a system to back it up.

Former Commerce CIO Baker cautions against viewing technology as a panacea. Effective information sharing requires putting technology and its products in the hands of end users-in this case, the front-line officials, investigators and officers in the field, he says. Rear Adm. George Naccara, who commands the Coast Guard's first district, headquartered in Boston, agrees that technology is valuable only to the degree that it serves the front lines. Naccara, the former Coast Guard CIO, says that to do his job effectively, he has to be certain that no vessel entering his territory has been compromised anywhere along its journey. That means making sure a container loaded in Yemen wasn't filled with explosives and turned into a floating bomb bound for Boston Harbor. Naccara believes that technology, effectively applied, could help him sleep better at night.

Naccara would like to see global positioning technology and security sensors used to track ships and containers, telling the Coast Guard where they've been and whether individual containers have been breached. He also advocates the selective integration of agency databases so information can be pushed back and forth more easily. So far, Naccara has been pleased with the FBI's willingness to share classified intelligence with the Coast Guard through the anti-terrorism task force. But in the end, Naccara says his ability to properly secure the air and water around Boston depends on getting technology to fill in where overworked human beings can't. "I can't do it without technology," he says.

For all its promise, software can't bridge some divides. Though critics have pointed out that some of the 19 suspected Sept. 11 terrorists were in the United States on expired visas, none of them was targeted for investigation as an absconder. Even if the hijackers had been under investigation, 3 million people are in the United States on expired visas, the INS estimates, while there are just 2,500 agents in the INS interior enforcement unit responsible for rounding them up. No amount of technology alone can solve that resource mismatch.

Ultimately, Boston officials say, discussions about fighting terrorism will always come back to the question of resources. The number of police officers on the street is just as critical to success as quality information, they say. In December, the National Governors Association told Senate leaders that the states need $4 billion to guard against terrorist threats to public health and the nation's infrastructure. Vermont Gov. Howard Dean told reporters that was a low estimate and added that "every state in this country has found its resources extraordinarily stretched" since Sept. 11.

The National League of Cities reports that as homeland security costs continue to rise, cities could experience a 4 percent decline in revenues due to increased unemployment and slackening tourism. The U.S. Conference of Mayors has called on the federal government to help by creating homeland security block grants and putting more money into existing law enforcement assistance programs so local police departments can buy communications equipment and hire additional officers when necessary. In January, President Bush said that in response to the September attacks, he would ask Congress to double homeland security spending in 2003 to $37.7 billion. Of that, $3.5 billion-10 times the amount allotted to similar purposes in 2002-would go to training, equipping and aiding police, fire and emergency medical personnel. But until additional funds are approved, law enforcement agencies at all levels are compensating for shortfalls in resources by picking up the pace of investigations. "We're running full speed ahead," says the INS' Cote, "times two."