FBI, for Example, Couldn’t Track Flight School Data
by Bill Miller, Washington Post
When a Phoenix FBI agent became suspicious of Middle Eastern men training at an Arizona flight school last summer, he wrote a now well-known memo suggesting a canvass of all U.S. aviation schools. FBI headquarters staff rejected the idea; the bureau didn’t have the personnel to do it.
But agent Kenneth Williams and his FBI colleagues might have been able to do some of the research on their own -- if their computers had been able to tap into FBI databases for references to flight schools. The FBI’s 56 field offices don’t have such technology.
“It would have been very nice if . . . you put into our computer system a request for anything relating to flight schools, for instance, and have every report in the last 10 years that . . . mentions flight schools or flight training and the like kicked out,” FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said.
“We do not have that capability now. We have to have that capability.”
The FBI, notorious for its antiquated computer system, isn’t the only federal agency facing that problem. Most federal law enforcement databases cannot communicate well with each other. Local and state databases can’t share information in a comprehensive way with federal agencies. Police agencies across the nation have their individual computer systems, which, for the most part, aren’t linked.
The process of sifting crucial information from countless databases is called “data mining,” a practice used every day by some private-sector companies but woefully lacking among government agencies. Fixing that problem is a cornerstone of President Bush’s proposal to create a new Department of Homeland Security that he said “will review intelligence and law enforcement information from all agencies of government and produce a single daily picture of threats against our homeland.”
Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said that getting the databases to communicate with one another and then analyzing the results is as crucial as reforming the FBI and beefing up border protection -- and perhaps as a big a task.
Getting the right details into the right hands is “at the heart of everything we do,” Ridge said in an interview. “It’s not a matter of getting more information. Right now we’re not doing a good enough job of processing the information that we have.”
Designing or obtaining the right technology likely will prove a much easier task than overcoming other barriers, such as cost, privacy concerns, legal restrictions, access questions and summarizing classified information in a way that protects secrets and sources, according to government officials and outside specialists.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has convened hearings on the issue, said the problem represents “as serious a threat as a biological or chemical agent.”
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday, Schumer and others lamented the inadequate technology that plagues the FBI in particular. “Before 9/11, the FBI’s computers were less sophisticated than the one I bought for my son for $1,400,” Schumer told Mueller.
Mueller has vowed to overhaul technology, but cautioned that it could be a multiyear effort. “We’ve got something like 35 separate investigative database applications that we use,” Mueller said in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters last week. “For us to be able to do the predictive, analytical work we need to do, we have to integrate the information in a way that we have not in the past.”
The FBI director spoke recently with Lawrence J. Ellison, chief executive officer of Oracle Corp., about improving computer links within law enforcement.
Congressional investigators are attempting to determine whether better technology might have enabled FBI agents in Minneapolis who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui last August to have learned of the July memo written by Phoenix FBI agent Williams. Moussaoui, who aroused suspicion at a Minnesota flight school, has been charged as a conspirator in the Sept. 11 attacks, but agents investigating him before the terror assault were unaware of other clues, a point made repeatedly during Thursday’s Senate hearing.
All told, the federal government has more than a dozen terrorist watch lists, run by the FBI, the CIA, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and other agencies. At least 55 databases contain watch-list information, some of it classified, officials said.
Two of the Sept. 11 hijackers were on a CIA watch list, but commercial airlines had no access to the government databases that would have alerted them to the two men. Now, however, the FBI and CIA provide airlines with “no-fly” lists of suspects.
Protecting the borders presents similar technological challenges involving numerous players. Separate databases are maintained by the INS, the Customs Service, the State Department and other government agencies. Ridge said that one benefit of creating a new homeland security department that includes those operations will be the chance to ensure that all government systems are compatible.
Civil liberties groups are closely watching developments, concerned that the government eventually will seek to routinely tap into private databases containing credit data, health information, travel records and other sensitive material, along with video from private security surveillance systems. Those concerns have been magnified by recent changes in FBI guidelines that loosen restrictions on using commercial databases to search for anti-terror leads.
“You have to know precisely what they’re proposing to share, and how they’re proposing to share it,” said Barry S. Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, adding that the ACLU and other groups want to ensure that the government does not attempt to create dossiers on ordinary citizens.
“It creates a specter of Big Brother government,” said Jerry Berman, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group.
Numerous companies are promoting technological solutions to the problems and hoping to tap a potentially lucrative market. The White House is seeking $722 million in the 2003 budget for anti-terror technology, just the start of a long-term funding effort.
Matt Malden, vice president and general manager of homeland security programs at Siebel Systems Inc., a leader in the technology industry, said the best systems will enable the government to track, prevent and address terrorist activities.
Credit card companies and others in the financial industry have used integrated databases for years, becoming extremely proficient in data-mining techniques. Their software can assess credit risks, monitor spending habits and market products. Siebel Systems, for example, contends that its software could have helped authorities spot patterns in the movements of the Sept. 11 hijackers by tracking their residences, credit card purchases and communications.
A key difference for private industry, however, is that customers agree to give up some privacy to financial institutions when they sign up for credit cards.
The government would not have blanket access to such a volume of personal spending information. But the same kind of technology could be used to build and mine government databases, said Steven R. Perkins, a senior vice president of Oracle Corp., a major federal contractor and the world’s largest database technology company.
“This is not [President John F.] Kennedy’s challenge of putting a man on the moon, where the technology doesn’t exist to solve the problem,” Perkins said. “Is it complex? Absolutely. Is it expensive? Absolutely. But it can be done.”
Federal officials agree that the technology exists to create new databases or tie existing ones together in ways that can be mindful of privacy and constitutional concerns. But they haven’t yet decided exactly what information should be tagged for homeland security, or who would get access to it.
Steven I. Cooper, Ridge’s technology expert, has spent the past two months identifying databases from dozens of federal departments and agencies to determinewhich have information pertaining to areas such as border control, bioterrorism prevention and emergency response, a starting point in a comprehensive look at revamping systems.
“You’re culling across a jillion-piece jigsaw puzzle,” said Gary W. Strong, a technology program director for the National Science Foundation, which is funding research on ways to retrieve and analyze information. “The knowledge [comes from] going piece by piece to see if it fits together.”