Unconnected Dots

"This new department will analyze intelligence information on terror threats collected by the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency and others," President Bush said in November 2002, when signing the law creating the Homeland Security Department. "The department will match this intelligence against the nation's vulnerabilities-and work with other agencies, and the private sector, and state and local governments to harden America's defenses against terror."

More than two years later, things haven't worked out that way. For starters, the department isn't collecting vast amounts of terror-related information from intelligence agencies, according to reports from the Homeland Security inspector general and from current and former department officials. That's partly due to the difficulty of hiring enough staff with the proper security clearances to support the department's analysis mission, former DHS Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin reported in August. The department competes with other agencies for terror analysts, who've been in high demand since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The department also has come up short trying to protect the nation's critical infrastructure: water systems, nuclear reactors, electric power plants and other facilities, and their data networks. A 2003 presidential directive requires Homeland Security to develop a comprehensive plan to protect those assets; it is not yet out. The department's efforts to secure cyberspace suffered a blow last year when Amit Yoran, the first director of the National Cyber Security Division, left government following a failed legislative attempt to transfer cybersecurity duty to the White House.

The department's leaders share the blame for its intelligence shortcomings. Insiders say former Secretary Tom Ridge and his directorate chiefs failed to boldly assert the department's leadership in domestic anti-terrorism. As the department's Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection directorate struggled to its feet, the FBI, CIA and other agencies that historically handled counterterrorism kept doing the same jobs.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security didn't take on the new responsibilities that Ridge and others had promised-chiefly, consolidating the nation's disjointed and inefficient set of terrorist watch lists. Today, an FBI-led unit known as the Terrorist Screening Center does that job, though Ervin has contended that the law creating Homeland Security gave the department watch list duty.

Meek leadership doesn't fully explain problems like these. The law creating the department didn't compel other counter-terrorism agencies to share responsibilities or information. The FBI is known to be especially recalcitrant and parsimonious, to the point that its unwillingness to cooperate impedes Homeland Security's ability to function.

Perhaps most troubling, no agency has stepped up to play the role of information traffic cop in the war on terror in Homeland Security's absence. In January 2005, the Government Accountability Office put security information sharing on its list of top federal management risks. The Sept. 11 attacks succeeded in large measure because the government's dozens of counterterrorism actors weren't reading from the same script. They weren't telling each other what they did and didn't know. The new department was supposed to put a stop to all that. So far, it hasn't.