Intelligence Agencies
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Date: April, 2004
The 9-11 commission has concluded that "the FBI didn't know what it knew". To address this situation, they have talked about restructuring the intelligence agencies. On the other hand, others such as Janet Reno have protested that no such intelligence restructuring is needed.
I think what is needed is a classified Google, for the FBI and other agencies. All the information should be entered into the classified web, and it should be searchable. An FBI agent should be able to type in "planes" and "terrorist", and come up with all the matches in the FBI system.
This seems to contrast with the current FBI mentality. The current mentality seems to be that each case will be handled in detail by an agent. This approach may be fine for certain cases. But in the case of globalization, it is clearly ineffective in linking distributed threats.
The famous PDB to President Bush is an example of the problem. The PDB states that Al Qeuda may seek to hijack airplanes. Clearly President Bush did not react, and I am not blaming him. He is only one man, and presumably not especially bright. But what if this information had been accessible to every agent in the FBI? Maybe one of them would have connected the dots. The classified Google will allow our agents to properly connect the dots.
Every intelligence agency in the U.S. should maintain a classified Google system that is accessible to the other agencies. A huge problem to this is the different levels of classification. Within any intelligence agency, some matters are secret, some matters are top-secret, and some are completely black. So a search engine cannot have black data accessible to the agent in the field.
Making a secure search engine with different levels of classification available is a substantial challenge. But the search engine could be adjusted to account for this. If the search returned a result that the user was not authorized to view, it could notify the user to contact his superior, to obtain access to the desired result.
Similarly, this approach could also be used across agencies. The search engine could tell you that something was found, and that a formal request must be made for more information.
So, in summary, further centralization of the intelligence agencies would not be helpful. For example, if we appoint an intelligence czar, this would not solve our problems. One man can only know a finite amount. Instead, information de-centralization is needed. All agencies need to have a common information infrastructure so that all agents in all agencies can perform sophisticated searches. This will enable our intelligence agencies to connect the dots.