by Judith Miller, Associated Press
A bipartisan report by some of the nation’s leading information technology and national security experts recommends that the Bush administration develop a system to share intelligence gathered in the United States and abroad among local, state and federal agencies while developing guidelines to protect against abuses.
The 173-page report, which is scheduled to be released today, outlines what its authors call a “road map” for establishing truly national, decentralized information systems that would both protect privacy and prevent terror.
Toward that end, the report, “Protecting America’s Freedom in an Information Age,” strongly endorses giving responsibility for analyzing such information not to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but to a new domestic intelligence center inside President Bush’s planned Department of Homeland Security. Legislation to create the department is mired in Congressional wrangling over such issues as whether labor laws should apply to the agency’s employees.
The study also calls upon President Bush to devise new guidelines on what information federal agencies may and may not collect about individuals in the United States and with whom, and under what circumstances, such data may be shared.
Finally, it warns that while Washington must play a critical role in gathering and analyzing data aimed at preventing terror, state and local officials will inevitably provide much of the information needed to protect the nation. Information systems that exclude them, or prevent them from receiving and contributing to such federal data, are destined to fail, the study concludes.
Unless information provided by state and local officials, as well as the private sector, is shared with Washington, “we may wind up getting all of the disadvantages of invasion of privacy with none of the national security gains,” conclude the task force’s co-chairmen, Zoe Baird, the president of the New York-based Markle Foundation, and James L. Barksdale, a businessman and former chief executive of Netscape.
Although the Bush administration did not commission the report or formally participate on the 44-member panel that studied the issues for more than six months, senior administration officials who followed the group’s work praised the effort.
“This impressive group of people was definitely asking all the right questions, and have come up with some very reasonable first answers,” one senior administration official said.
Several task force members are scheduled to meet today with Tom Ridge, the president’s homeland security adviser, to discuss their findings. “They’ve gotten people who normally don’t talk to one another — privacy advocates and former intelligence and national security officials — to agree on some basic prescriptions for safeguarding civil liberties and protecting America,” the official said. “That’s fairly impressive.”
The study, sponsored by the Markle Foundation, was conducted with two influential research groups — the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies — and with the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. The center’s president, Philip Zelikow, a former White House official who is close to Bush administration officials, is the task force’s executive director.
“Our study shows that the information and technology that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks already exists,” Mr. Zelikow said in an interview. “Had such systems been in place,” he said, “Sept. 11 might have been the nation’s most important intelligence coup, instead of a day of national tragedy.”
The report says that while federal agencies are investing some $50 billion a year on information technology partly to prevent terrorism, “almost none of this money is being spent to solve the problem of how to share this information and intelligence among those agencies.” In this fiscal year’s $38 billion request for domestic security, for instance, the Bush administration has asked for only $200 million for “information integration, and is having trouble getting even that.”
Ashton Carter, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a former defense official, said the group’s endorsement of presidential guidelines for safeguarding privacy was based on the standards developed by the National Security Agency, which monitors telephone and electronic communications overseas. The agency has “a good history of discipline” about monitoring conversations of Americans abroad, he said.
The report argues strongly for automated, interactive information systems that include data collected by the private sector as well as tips from local and state agencies, which the study calls the “real front lines of homeland security.” The F.B.I. has 11,500 agents, but there are more than 50 times as many state and local law enforcement officers. Whereas the F.B.I. has some 100 analysts working on domestic counterterrorism intelligence, the report states, the Los Angeles Police Department alone has 40 such analysts, and New York’s counterterrorism effort is larger still.
“America will make a mistake if we create an old-fashioned centralized mainframe supercomputer architecture rather than a network of personal computers,” Ms. Baird said.
Treading carefully in one of the most sensitive policy areas, particularly for conservative Republicans, the task force avoids recommending the creation of a stand-alone domestic collection agency — such as Britain’s MI-5 — or placing that responsibility under the F.B.I.
“The people running criminal investigations should not be seeking all kinds of information from businesses, state and local officials all over the country,” Ms. Baird said.
The case for “fundamental separation” of criminal investigation and domestic counterintelligence “is strong,” the report concludes.