Chairman GRAHAM. Senator Shelby.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

President Bush, back in May when he signed the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act, he said: "We must know who's coming into our country and why they're coming. It's knowledge necessary to make our homeland more secure."

Now today, October 1, we don't really know-in other words, you don't know who's present even in this country today, everybody that's come in here, legally, illegally, legally overstayed. Is that a correct statement?

Mr. GREENE. That's correct, sir.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. And basically at this point you don't have the system in place to track people, know exactly where they are, when they come into the country legally and they overstay their visa, and how you are going to pick them up and get them out of here or whatever?

Mr. GREENE. That's correct. We have a system that provides us with some limited capability in that regard, but we're working toward the goal.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. And you need help. I understand. You need resources. But having said all this, some of you are probably familiar with, a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Brent Scowcroft, who is very well respected in the security business. General Scowcroft, he sat right here at this table; in his judgment, the safest place in the world for terrorists was in the United States of America. That's frightening. I hope that's not true, but I kind of believe it might be true. So we have our challenge, do we not?

Mr. GREENE. Yes, sir, we certainly do.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. Mr. Andre, you spoke eloquently this morning about the potential for cross-database, data-mining and information-sharing. You spoke a great deal about the community, how the community should approach these problems. Why aren't we hearing this from the DCI? How much of what you described is actually being implemented at the Intelligence Community level currently as of today?

Mr. ANDRE. I don't think I'm in a position to answer that.
Vice Chairman SHELBY. You don't know, do you?

Mr. ANDRE. No, sir, I don't know.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. Governor Gilmore, you spoke about the need for a government-wide all-source fusion center for terrorist threat information. Do you think that a new Department of Homeland Security, which we keep debating, would be a logical place for such an organization?

Mr. GILMORE. Could be, Senator. The sense of the Commission is it may be more effective as a stand-alone agency, one similar to EPA or a structure of that nature, reporting directly to the President for supervision purposes. But that is the sense of the Commission, as opposed to placing it within one department.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. But if you had a stand-alone agency, how would it function? If you report to the President, couldn't you be creating another bureaucracy?

Mr. GILMORE. Well, you could. It would be the danger. The sense of things, though, is that there is-and the Commission thought about this-we tend to be very reluctant to recommend to the Con

gress or to the President the establishment of yet another piece of bureaucracy. We tend to approach things with great reluctance. The challenge we were looking at is where else can you put this in order to make it effective as a fusion center for CIA, FBI, NSA, State police departments, local police departments, FBI. Where does it reposit in order to achieve that? And the thought was that an independent stand-alone agency might end up being the best possible option.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. Mr. Pease, could you come up to the table and I'll ask you the same question. Why aren't we hearing from the DCI regarding the database, cross-database, data-mining and information-sharing? You know, we haven't yet. Will we hear from them and when?

Mr. PEASE. I think you'll certainly hear more on 10 October when he's scheduled to testify next in the open. We have talked about both the existing mechanisms that are working better lately, like to the CT Link that helps us share classified information and the need for more of those.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. My time is up, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman GRAHAM. Thank you, Senator Shelby.

Next will be Congresswoman Pelosi, and then in order, Congressmen Roemer, Gibbons, Boehlert.

Ms. PELOSI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Andre, first I wish to extend condolences of my constituents, and from my colleagues, to the families who lost their loved ones in the Pentagon, working bravely for the DIA to protect our country, and welcome you in that spirit.

My question was about force protection which, of course, up until September 11 was our main focus in terms of intelligence to protect our forces. And some of those forces are in the United States. If, for example-well, we can use Baltimore as an example. Are there any bases still left in Baltimore?

Well, we'll go to California then. We have some there. If you had intelligence that a base in San Diego was threatened, do you have a way or do you have a way to channel information to the local police on that so you can let them know? And if they get the intelligence first, do you have a well-established channel of communication from that direction to the DIA?

Mr. ANDRE. Actually, we do. One of the elements that's embedded in the Joint Intelligence Task Force for Counterterrorism are the security and investigative arms of the military service; for example, NCIS agents and Air Force OSI agents that have domestic law enforcement authorities and are quite connected to and wired into their colleagues assigned to security details or bases around the United States. So that's a very active and very reliable channel both for two-way flow. It is that bridge for us between the law enforcement and foreign intelligence world for domestic threats.

Secondly, you might have seen an article in today's Los Angeles Times announcing an experiment that we are conducting with CADIC in California and with the New York Police Department and the new Northern Command and Defense Intelligence Agency using what is called RiskNet. It's an unclassified law enforcement network to share information. It's only at the unclassified or for official-use-only level, but we think it offers some real potential be

cause we may not, to use Admiral Jacoby's paradigm, we may not own a lot of information we can share but there's no constraint on us loaning our brainpower, our analytical expertise to local authorities.

Ms. PELOSI. I assume everything you said applies to the Office of Naval Intelligence as well in terms of your communication. Mr. ANDRE. Yes, ma'am. They are embedded.

MS. PELOSI. Thank you.

Mr. Pease, is the CIA prepared to share the kind of background data to all sources across the Intelligence Community required to do the analysis without filtering the information?

Mr. PEASE. Indeed we have made some conscious choices, especially since 9/11, to put more and more of the raw information out as published intelligence, so that there's very much less that is on what anybody would call the "cutting room floor." There will always be a certain filtering when you get to the identity of the source and the circumstances of meeting that source. And analysts across the community have said we do not want that information— or do not want that information. The problem for us has been, and remains, the repository that has that information and also has other information. It is simply a challenge to pull the information that they do not need, and we don't want to give up, and let them see the rest of that database.

Ms. PELOSI. Following up on that, Governor Gilmore, can the Homeland Security Department Intelligence Directorate, which has been proposed, function without access to raw data and/or function as the fusion center referred to earlier? And you elaborated on wanting it to be separate. So why don't we focus on the raw data side of it?

Mr. GILMORE. No, I think they would have to have raw data in order to be able to apply proper analytical skills to that, depending upon what the nature of the division would be, whether it is going to receive information already through analysis and then determine how they want to use that information, or whether they want to go through an analytical process themselves.

Ms. PELOSI. If I may, Governor, do you think that that entity should be able to task for getting additional follow-up intelligence on information they have received?

Mr. GILMORE. Yes, Congresswoman, and we have recommended that to the Congress.

Chairman GRAHAM. Thank you, Congresswoman Pelosi. Congressman Roemer.

Mr. ROEMER. Thank you again, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Manno, the alleged terrorist Ahmed Ressam was stopped on the way to the Los Angeles airport in January 2000. The FAA did some analysis of his bomb equipment. What did you find with regard to that bomb equipment, and did it relate to other terrorist trends or activities?

Mr. MANNO. I think what our bomb techs found when they looked at it was that there were some similarities in the timer that Ressam was in possession of and some of the timers that were used

Mr. ROEMER. So what you found at that-when did you do the analysis? He was stopped in January, January 2000. When did the FAA make that tie to Yousef?

Mr. MANNO. What our bomb techs did, and I don't know the exact date, but they worked with the FBI Bomb Data Center to come to that conclusion. They were not identical.

Mr. ROEMER. But you made some conclusions that it was very similar to Yousef, who had helped devise the plot in the Philippines in 1995 to blow up airliners across the Pacific Ocean.

Mr. MANNO. Yes. However, the other components that he was carrying in the vehicle kind of indicated that what possibly he might have been going after was a different type of target, possibly using a car bomb, because there was a large amount of explosives as opposed to the smaller, more sophisticated devices that Yousef had been working on.

Mr. ROEMER. I just want to see how you reacted to this. If you could get for the committee how long it took you to put this together and when you did associate some of the similarities between the timer that Yousef and the timer that Ahmed Ressam was going to use? Did you then disseminate this information to other law enforcement agencies or did you have discussions with other groups outside the FAA?

Mr. MANNO. We had internal discussions with the people that look at countermeasures. The way we did security in the FAA at the time was, we would assess the threat, collect all the information, and then provide it to the operations and policy people within the Agency, who then looked at our existing measures to try to determine whether or not the baseline measures we had in place would be able to counter the particular threat that had just been identified or whether additional measures would have to be applied.

Mr. ROEMER. So you had these internal discussions, but the intelligence agencies had been brought into this plot, the Bojinko plot in 1995. Why wouldn't you expand this outside the external conversations within the FAA and go back to the intelligence agencies or the FBI and share this information, which I would think would be significant, that this timer is very similar to something being used in a plot that involved a host of different airliners and had two or three key people associated with it with the Bojinko plot. Mr. MANNO. Our bomb techs did work with the FBI.

Mr. ROEMER. How about the CIA and intelligence people who had shared the information with the-I guess it was the Philippines initially, according to public documents.

Mr. MANNO. I don't know if the FBI went back to the CIA with that. I don't believe that we did in a formal way.

Mr. ROEMER. Why wouldn't you though? Why wouldn't you be looking at all the different sources at this point to try to discover if you have a similarity to extend this through law enforcement channels and intelligence agencies to really get at the root of this? Mr. MANNO. Well, again, our focus at the time was, because of the similarity that we had identified, was to try to determine if this was some sort of a plot against aviation. The indications weren't there, other than the similarities of the timer. Yousef had gone through training in Afghanistan along with many, many others and

this was a common technique that was taught in the camps. So that part itself was not unusual. There was no other information that we were aware of that would tie Ressam at that time to a plot against aviation. It wasn't until much later.

Mr. ROEMER. I think I am running out of time, if I haven't already. I would just say whether it was tied to a plot, you are tying him to people. The equipment may be tied to people in the Philippines with similar intentions. And I would have hoped that that would have been followed up on.

Chairman GRAHAM. Thank you, Congressman Roemer, and we will have a third round if you would like to continue to pursue that.

Congressman Gibbons and Congressman Boehlert.

Mr. GIBBONS. Let me take off on just a little bit different approach to this intelligence-sharing question which got going here today. There are two opportunities for the United States Government to interface with an individual who is attempting to either visit or immigrate to the United States, the first being of course our consular offices that are overseas and our embassy where this individual will approach to get a visa. And the second is our port of entry, Customs or whatever.

Let me ask-and I don't know if this is a question for State Department, and I don't see the Ambassador here, but if anybody could answer-are all our consular offices overseas equipped with the same systems, same databases and the same capability as each other would be? Is it a uniform system that is available? And obviously there is going to be an individual speaker.

Mr. KOJM. I am going to invite Tony Edson from the Bureau of Consular Affairs, who took the oath as I did at the start of the hearing and ask him to respond to the question.

Mr. EDSON. In the aftermath of the first World Trade Center bombing, we were given authority to retain visa fees, and used those funds for a major systems development and deployment exercise.

Mr. GIBBONS. So we're talking in 1993.

Mr. EDSON. Beginning in 1994.

Mr. GIBBONS. What's the current status today?

Mr. EDSON. As of 1998 the platform was uniform worldwide, and it remains that way today.

Mr. GIBBONS. Who provides consular offices or the INS with the information necessary to make a judgment and the evaluation of the acceptability of a visa applicant?

Mr. EDSON. If I understand the question correctly, it's a combination of factors that come into play there, of which the lookout information that's available to us through the CLASS system that's been discussed today is one of those factors. It's the primary factor for antiterrorism information.

Mr. GIBBONS. So all consular offices have access to the data and can make a judgment as to what's in these database systems on every applicant for a visa?

Mr. EDSON. Yes. It is physically impossible to enter data on an individual applicant into our system without generating the check against these databases as a background task.