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Questions for the Record
Joint Congressional 9/11 Inquiry
Responses of the Department of State

October 31 Committee letter, Question #5:

Does your agency ever communicate classified information to state and local law enforcement organizations? If so, by what means is this information communicated and typically to whom?

Answer:

The Bureau of Intelligence and Research's TIPOFF program office (INR/TIPOFF) has no current capability or mission for data sharing with state and local law enforcement organizations. We are in discussions with the FBI on a Memorandum of Understanding to make TIPOFF's database of suspected foreign terrorists available to state and local law enforcement organizations through the FBI's National Criminal Information Center and its Violent Gang/Terrorist Organization File. This would give state and local law enforcement officials access to TIPOFF's Sensitive But Unclassified biographic information for the first time. TIPOFF currently responds, at the appropriate classification levels, to ad hoc requests (usually telephonic) from the FBI.

The Bureau of Intelligence and Research's Office of Analysis for Terrorism, Narcotics and Crime (INR/TNC) has never done so directly. Some of the threat warning products that we draft or clear on for the IICT (Interagency Intelligence Committee on Terrorism) may be downgraded at FBI and passed on to state and locals, but not at our initiative. The IICT is the IC's CT umbrella organization; it is housed at CIA/CTC and answers to the

Questions for the Record

Joint Congressional 9/11 Inquiry.
Responses of the Department of State

October 21 Committee letter, Question 6:

What are the key policy and technical impediments to implementing an effective information architecture that facilitates information sharing between agencies?

Answer:

The basic technical requirements for information sharing between agencies are:

-

secure links between agency internal networks
(intranets);

shared and searchable staff directories that
include office responsibilities and contact
information (including email address); and
agreed security standards and some basic

agreement on the use of software and data applications
that can work seamlessly across agency boundaries as
necessary.

Interagency networks such as SIPRNET (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) and OSIS (Open Source Information System) may be the technical means towards realizing these information sharing requirements.

Key policy questions include whether to build upon existing interagency networks, or seek to create new networks, or extend a single agency's network to others.

Information sharing will not mature rapidly without effective risk management countermeasures to enable

classified information exchanges among Federal agencies in

JOINT COMMITTEE HEARING ON THE FUTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY AND LEGAL ISSUES THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY FACES IN DEALING WITH TERRORISM

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2002

U.S. SENATE, SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, AND
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, PERMANENT SELECT
COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE,

Washington, DC.

The Committees met, pursuant to notice, at 10:12 a.m., in Room SH-216, Hart Senate Office Building, the Honorable Bob Graham, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, presiding.

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Members Present: Senators Graham, Rockefeller, Feinstein, Durbin, Mikulski, Shelby, Roberts, DeWine, and Thompson.

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Members Present: Representatives Goss, Castle, Boehlert, Gibbons, LaHood, Hoekstra, Pelosi, Harman, Roemer, Condit, Boswell, Peterson and Cramer.

Chairman GRAHAM. I call to order the Joint Inquiry of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

This is the seventh open hearing of our Committees as we conduct our joint inquiry into the Intelligence Community's performance regarding the September 11 attacks. The committees have also held 11 closed hearings.

The purpose of today's hearing is to receive and review suggestions for the future organization of the United States Intelligence Community and to consider legal issues that the Intelligence Community faces in dealing with terrorism. Among other matters, we have asked our distinguished witnesses for their thoughts on the role and responsibility of the Director of Central Intelligence, the Secretary of Defense and the law enforcement community in counterterrorism and domestic intelligence programs. In that context, we have also asked that they address how proposals for the organization of domestic intelligence functions might impact on civil liberties in the United States.

Today's hearing will be in two parts. First, we will hear from Ms. Eleanor Hill, staff director for the Joint Inquiry, who will give us a presentation in relation to this portion of our inquiry. We will then hear from a panel of very impressive witnesses-our former

House colleague, Congressman Lee Hamilton; Judge William Webster; Lieutenant General William Odom; and Frederick Hitz, who I will introduce more fully after Ms. Hill's presentation.

I will now ask my colleagues if they have an opening statement. Congressman Goss?

Chairman Goss. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I regret that the House is in the middle of a journal vote, and our members will be back shortly. But I look forward to the input we are going to receive today. We have a very distinguished group of people, and I am very grateful they've taken the time to come forward and assist us in our efforts. Thank you, sir.

by.

Chairman GRAHAM. Thank you, Mr. Congressman. Senator Shel

Vice Chairman SHELBY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'll try to be as brief as I can.

Mr. Chairman, in the wake of a well-publicized series of significant intelligence failures, including the failure to prevent the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the failure to prevent the bombing of Khobar Towers in 1996, the failure to anticipate the Indian nuclear test in 1998, the failure to prevent the bombings of our embassies in Africa that same year, 1998, the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in 1999 in Belgrade, the failure to prevent the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and, of course, the failure to prevent the attacks of September 11, there has been no shortage of proposals to reform the U.S. Intelligence Community in light of that.

Most of them, Mr. Chairman, have involved variations on the theme of empowering the Director of Central Intelligence, the DCI, to exercise more real authority within the mostly Defense Department-owned Intelligence Community. Other proposals, such as one being discussed in the defense authorization conference, would empower the Pentagon by creating an Under Secretary of Defense for intelligence. All of them so far have gone nowhere.

When such ideas do not founder upon the rocks of interdepartmental rivalry and what the military calls rice-bowl politics, they simply fail to elicit much interest from an Intelligence Community that, even to this day, insists that nothing is fundamentally wrong. Too often, serious reform proposals have been dismissed as a bridge too far by administration after administration and Congress after Congress and have simply fallen by the wayside. While very modest attempts at reform have been enacted, they've been ignored by succeeding administrations and openly defied by our current Director of Central Intelligence.

With this in mind, I asked our Committee's Technical Advisory Group, what we call the TAG, last year to undertake its own look at these issues. The TAG is a group of prominent scientists and technologists that volunteer their services to advise our Committee on very difficult technical and program management issues. And I think history shows they've done an excellent job.

We worked with them over several months on these matters, and we came to some interesting conclusions. Rather than rest our hopes for reform upon plans destined to run headlong into vested interests wedded to the current interdepartmental vision of intelligence resources or to be smothered by pained indifference from

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