Communication Breakdown

he best technology never replaces human intuition. Sophisticated sensors and high-powered X-rays that are used to search for bombs and other weapons are worthless if their users don't follow their noses and their hunches. In 1999, when an alert Customs Service inspector at a border crossing in Washington state searched a car from Canada because the driver seemed nervous and evasive, technology didn't tell her what was hiding in the trunk. But she looked anyway-and found bomb-making materials that law enforcement officials say the driver planned to use to blow up the international terminal at the Los Angeles airport. As the Sept. 11 blame game revved up in Washington earlier this year, critics attacked the FBI for not letting field agents act on their hunches during investigations and for not sharing information later found relevant to the Sept. 11 attacks with other law enforcement agencies. The FBI also wasn't sharing that information with its own investigators. These facts became public after a communications breakdown between agents in the FBI's Minneapolis and Phoenix field offices and their superiors in Washington. But FBI agents had known for years how bad things were.

In the summer of 2001, Minneapolis agents were monitoring suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, who was enrolled at a local flight school, training to fly commercial jetliners but not to land them. Moussaoui, who was eventually indicted for involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks, was detained that August on an immigration violation. Also that summer, Phoenix agents were following tips that known terrorists were enrolled in flight schools in Arizona. Special Agent Kenneth Williamson wrote of his suspicions in a memo to officials at FBI headquarters, but the agents in Minneapolis never saw it.

The two groups of agents never heard about each other's work, in large part because the FBI has no way to place leads, tips and other potentially useful information in an electronic repository that agents and analysts can search. In a speech in May, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted the agency had hoarded vital investigative information in the past and bemoaned the agency's technological deficiencies: "It would have been very nice if, at some point in time, [agents could enter] into our computer system a request for anything relating to flight schools . . . and have every report in the last 10 years that had been done that mentions flight schools or flight training or the like kicked out. We do not have that capability now. We have to have that capability."

Before he assumed office, Mueller had said he wanted to bring the FBI out of the technological Dark Age it has always inhabited. Most field offices lack modern desktop computers and Internet access. Former FBI Director William Webster, who chaired a commission studying FBI security failures after Special Agent Robert Hanssen was caught spying for Russia, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in April that the FBI's technology programs have been "under-financed for years. There's so much evolution in the computer world today that it's strange to me to think that, when companies are getting new equipment and new procedures every two or three years, the FBI would go along for 10 years trying to . . . limp along in an area where data was coming in at them from all directions."

Since Sept. 11, dozens of commercial technology firms have tried to sell the FBI and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies on the notion that their software can integrate disconnected and archaic databases. Executives from one company even claim that if the FBI, INS, CIA and about a half dozen other agencies had just used their "homeland security solution," they would have "prevented" the Sept. 11 attacks. Such hubris has yielded few results for any firm. Experts who understand the FBI's technological shortcomings question how quickly any solution can be devised.

One source, who asked to remain anonymous, has reviewed the FBI's technology systems and says they were put together piecemeal over the past 10 years. The current infrastructure is "very Rube Goldberg-like," the source says. The source "was not at all surprised" about the revelations from Phoenix and Minneapolis that agents were operating at cross-purposes and in conflict with their superiors. "It's the culture."

It's questionable whether the FBI even understands how much technology it owns. The Webster Commission found that about 80 different information systems operate within the bureau's various offices. That figure was based on interviews with FBI personnel, who were able to give only rough estimates, one commission member says.

Over the Rainbow

On May 27, a top CIA intelligence analyst named Mark Miller was named to head the FBI's new Office of Intelligence. Miller, a former Soviet and Russian analyst, most recently headed the Interagency Balkans Task Force, which focused on mujaheddin and the activities of Islamic militants in Bosnia. The task force was created in 1992 in response to growing political and ethnic turmoil in the former Yugoslavia and includes representatives of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Miller may be the right person to bring the CIA and FBI together, if his experience is any guide. The Balkans task force has been praised as a template for cross-agency information sharing.

"On a typical day,"said John Gannon, former CIA deputy director for intelligence, in a speech in 1997, "a [task force] analyst . . . might exchange information with military personnel in Bosnia across a classified network. The analyst would consult with analysts from other intelligence agencies and policy counterparts over our classified e-mail and videoconferencing systems. . . .Their analytic papers and memoranda would be automatically routed, archived and indexed for future reference."

Still, the FBI is far from achieving the seamless vision of the task force. Information sharing between the bureau and other law enforcement agencies occurs only sporadically, and when it does, the data is often of limited use. State and local police officers run names and license plate numbers through the FBI's master criminal file, for instance, with wireless computers in their patrol cars hooked up to the database. But the database itself isn't thorough enough, critics say. Two of the suspected Sept. 11 hijackers were actually stopped and released by Maryland and Florida state police officers before the attacks because their names never appeared in the master file as suspected terrorists.

Information sharing is useless if the data on which it depends is incomplete. For example, Customs inspectors targeting shipping containers for examination rely on shipping companies to supply detailed information about the cargo. Yet some containers arrive in ports with their contents listed as "unknown." So even if the containers are scanned with powerful gamma rays that can make out what's inside, inspectors can't know what suspicious objects to look for if they don't know what they're looking at.

The FBI isn't the only agency in dire need of an information system overhaul. Across government, data stagnates within organizations because relinquishing it often means giving up power. Under President Bush's proposal for a new Homeland Security Department, numerous agencies would be squeezed together and presumably forced to give up some control over their various caches of data.

Before agencies can address their technology challenges, they'll have to overcome decades-old behaviors.

The FBI seems ready to cede some of its authority to field agents, but it's questionable whether simply increasing the flow of data from one point to another will really improve homeland security.

In a 13-page memo to Mueller detailing the efforts of agents in Minneapolis to investigate terrorist suspect Moussaoui, Special Agent Coleen Rowley indicated that the agents she worked with didn't need further information to understand the threat they faced. "The agents in Minneapolis who were closest to the action and in the best position to gauge the situation locally, did fully appreciate the terrorist risk/danger posed by Moussaoui and his possible co-conspirators even prior to Sept. 11," she wrote. "Even without knowledge of the Phoenix communication . . . the Minneapolis agents appreciated the risk."