Homeland Security has not consolidated terrorist watch lists

More than 100 days after its creation, the Homeland Security Department has failed to meet one of the key goals agency leaders outlined last year.

Months before the department was established, officials said dozens of so-called watch lists of suspected terrorists, maintained by various agencies across the government, would be consolidated in the new department the first day it began operations. But according to a report (03-322) issued Wednesday by the General Accounting Office, nine agencies still develop and maintain a dozen watch lists. "These lists include overlapping but not identical sets of data, and different policies and procedures govern whether and how these data are shared with [other agencies and organizations]," the report found.

In addition to the lists not being consolidated, GAO's findings show that information sharing among agencies isn't happening as frequently as some officials have indicated. Generally, watch list data is more likely to be shared among federal agencies than with state and local governments or private sector groups, according to the report. Homeland Security officials have said repeatedly that improving information sharing among all those parties is one of the department's highest priorities, and they've proposed to do that through electronic means.

However, the extent to which that electronic sharing happens "is constrained by fundamental differences" in the design of the systems that house the watch lists, GAO said. In other words, the agencies that would share the lists have designed their software, hardware and computer networks so incongruously that their enterprise architecture inhibits information sharing.

The report said this proliferation of systems "is inconsistent with the most recent congressional and presidential direction" to design enterprise architectures that are consistent among agencies. The push to do so has been led by the Office of Management and Budget, and agencies have expectantly looked to Homeland Security as a leader in the effort.

The report's authors said the Homeland Security Chief Information Officer, Steven Cooper, told them the department was creating a plan to consolidate the watch lists as part of its enterprise architecture. However, the department didn't provide GAO with enough information to evaluate the effort, the authors said.

Homeland Security officials were working on that architecture for months while they were still assigned to the White House. They didn't respond to request for comments about GAO's findings.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., Tuesday criticized the administration for not giving Homeland Security a more central role in the management of terrorist data and intelligence. Specifically, he said the administration's plan to build a new terrorist intelligence center under the management of the CIA was "misguided and potentially calamitous" because it wouldn't solve years' old rivalries between the agency and the FBI, which will move its counterterrorism division to the new center. Those rivalries, Lieberman said, have inhibited information sharing.