t2 b2 10-14-03 hearing- intelligence background 2 of 3 fdr- tab 5- draft staff document-...

8/14/2019 T2 B2 10-14-03 Hearing- Intelligence Background 2 of 3 Fdr- Tab 5- Draft Staff Document- Intelligence Community Reform Proposal 909

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Draft Staff Document

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Intelligence Com munity R eform Proposal

A. Introduction and Overview

The following sections outline problems in the intelligence community and

remedies proposed in the accom panying legislative reform package. Some of the

problems have been recognized for many years. Others have been revealed only recently

by such events as September 11th and the mistaken estimates of Iraq's weapons of mass

destruction capabilities. The reform proposal a lso is intended to address the rise of

homeland security intelligence requirements. As we approach the third anniversary of

September 11th, while the D efense Department by bulk and variety remains by far the

largest consumer of intelligence, hom eland security intelligence support requirements are

growing substantially, and the consumer base for nationa l intelligence in the Departmentof Homeland Security, national and local law enforcement, and emergency response

communities could in time rival that of the military. These new consumers need a seat at

the table, they need the concerted a ttention of the DCI, and they need strong support fromthe nationa l collection and ana lysis agencies, including those within the Defe nse

Department. The DCI must devote more time and attention to helping the Department of

Hom eland Security, the FB I, and the Terrorist Threat Integration Center to master the artof intelligence collection and analysis as rapidly as possible.

The reform proposal needs to be eva luated in its totality, since most individua l

elements are interdependent and mutua lly reinforcing. The reform proposal's major

elements include establishing a D irector of Na tional Intelligence who wo uld not also

serve as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; "dual-hatting" the Under Secretary

of D efense for Intelligence as the senior D eputy Director of Nationa l Intelligence;

restricting the role of several of the intelligence agency directors to "organizing, training,and equipping" their agencies, as the Goldwater-Nichols Act did for the chiefs of staff of

the m ilitary services; in another parallel to Goldwater-Nichols, creating a De puty D irector

of National Intelligence for Operations in charge of a large joint tasking organization,

with a senior deputy from a Defense Department com batant command; establishing an

Senior Advisor for Hom eland Security; requiring personnel rota tions as a condition for

promotion, modeled after the G oldwater-N ichols Act personnel reforms; creating other

joint organizations and processes to provide the DNI improved capabilities to monitor the

expenditure of funds, reprogram funds, and oversee major procurements within the

intelligence agencies; ma ndating a single, streamlined security clearance process for all

intelligence comm unity personnel, an d decisively shifting authority for classifying

information and deciding who gets access to information from the agencies that collectintelligence to the D NI, to facilitate information sharing; and directing tha t the D NI, the

Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Homeland Security jointly apply modern

information technology and business practices to network the intelligence comm unity and

its customers, including state and local officials who are essential to homelan d security,

to fully share information, and to vastly improve the community's agility and efficiency. "1The proposed legislation also w ould require the President to establish policy regarding


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the use of advanced "data mining" tools on government and private-sector databases to

ensure that American citizens' privacy is protected as the government works to better

protect the country from terrorism. More detailed explanations of selected reform

initiatives follow this overview and introduction.

DC1Authorities and Relationship to the Secretary of Defense

The National Security Act of 1947 as originally enacted intended the DCI to be a

coordinator and arbiter of intelligence produced by the cabinet departments and to

provide independent assessments to the President. Over time, the DCI has accumulated

considerably more authority andmore responsibility for managing the intelligence

organizations established within the cabinet departments and under the authority of

cabinet secretaries. Under any circumstances, such an inelegant management

arrangement - shared executive power and dual reporting chains - presents daunting

problems. These challenges are especially acute in the case of the Defense Department.

Most of the resources that the DCI relies upon to produce intelligence products that are

considered to have national-level significance are the same as those that the Secretary ofDefense needs to prepare for and to conduct military operations. As a former Director of

the NRO observes, if the national foreign intelligence community did not exist, the

Secretary of Defense would immediately create almost all of it.

A unique and complex power-sharing arrangement has grown up on an ad hoc basis

between the DCI and the Secretary of Defense. By executive order and statute, the DCI is

assigned tasking authority over national intelligence, and is responsible for producing

assessments for the President and National Security Council. The DCI has the authority

to build the budget fo r national intelligence and to transfer and reprogram funds. The

Secretary of Defense, by executive order and statute, is the President's executive agent for

signals intelligence, executes appropriated funds for most of the intelligence budget, andhas the predominant role in selecting the directors of NSA, NRO, NGA, and DIA. In

addition, NSA, NGA, and DIA are designated as combat support agencies under the

Goldwater-Nichols Act, which among other things means that they are subject to periodic

inspection by the Chairmanof the Joint Chiefs to assess their readiness to support combat

operations.

In the last several decades, there have been many proposals and attempts to strengthen

the ability of the DCI to manage the intelligence community. Usually, reform advocates

have proposed to increase the authority of the DCI by shifting authority from the

Secretary of Defense. However, these proposals typically run into problems because the

reality is that both officials have legitimate claims to authority over the same intelligence /resources.

What is interesting is that the senior leadership in the Defense Department sincerely

believes that the Defense Department is severely disadvantaged with respect to

intelligence matters, at the mercy of the DCI, while the perception of the DCI and his

staff is that they have a hard time controlling the defense intelligence agencies and that


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the Defense Department too often holds sway in conflicts between the DCI and the

Secretary of Defense. Can both be right? To an extent, yes: sometimes one side prevails,

and sometimes the other, in serious disputes. But it is also the case that with two

"bosses", the intelligence agencies often either escape control or are subjected to

competing direction. The two opposing staffs in many instances and in various areas

negate or neutralize one another, and the agencies are adept at playingone against theother to maintain their autonomy. Having two bosses, in other words, sometimes can

mean having none. One example that illustrates this phenomenon: neither the DCI's staff

nor that of the Secretary of Defense has access to budget execution data from the defense

intelligence agencies. The DoD Comptroller has been barred from year-of-excecution

inspections, and the agencies will not report such data to the Community Management

Staff either.

It is of course preferable to have clean lines of authority, and many have argued that

the DCI cannot effectively manage national intelligence without having full control over

the intelligence community, but there are reasons why Congress and the President have

shared power between the DCI and the Secretary of Defense, and politically it is unlikelythat the balance of power between them can be changed in any event. Shared power and

mutual dependence is a reality, and the staffs of both officials must accept that and learn

to make the best of it. In fact, there are ways to encourage the DCI and the Secretary and

their staffs to cooperate rather than confront one another, and through cooperation both

officials can increase their real power over the intelligence agencies. That is to say, the

relationship between the DCI and the Secretary of Defense need not be a "zero-sum

game," where any accretion of power by one can only come at the expense of the other.

The Roman Republic for centuries governed through two Consuls who could either veto

one another or work together to get something accomplished. Likewise, the Goldwater-

Nichols Act has succeeded in taming the intense rivalry of the military services. It ought

to be possible, too, to create a culture of "jointness" between the DCI and the Secretary ofDefense - indeed between the DCI and all the cabinet secretaries involved in national

intelligence.

The proposed legislation would not significantly alter the relationship or distribution

of power between the intelligence community director and the Secretary of Defense, but

would clarify the respective authorities and significantly enhance the DNI's ability to

manage the intelligence communityand make it more effective. In the spirit of

Goldwater-Nichols, the proposed legislation would create several joint organizations and

processes that would give both the DNI and the Secretary of Defense, for the first time,

full insight and control over defense intelligence agency expenditures and acquisition

programs. The proposed legislation also would "dual hat" the Under Secretary of

Defense for Intelligence as the DNI's senior Deputy Director, which will ensure that DoD

interests are fully respected within the intelligence community, assist the DNI in

enforcing decisions, and help to ensure that national and tactical DoD intelligence

programs and capabilities are properly coordinated. In a close parallel to Goldwater-

Nichols, as described below in this section, the authority of the DNI (and indirectly the

Secretary of Defense) would also be significantly enhanced by creating a joint tasking


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organization, and restricting the responsibilities of the directors of the main intelligence

collection agencies to organizing, training, and equipping SIGINT, HUMINT, and IMINT

personnel and systems; like the military service chiefs under Goldwater-Nichols, these

agency directors would play no role in directing the actual operations of collection and

analysis.

Director of National Intelligence

The DCI has been a poor community manager partly because of authority limitations,

partly because of a consistent failure to exercise authority already conferred by executive

order and statute, andpartly because the CIAdominates the DCFs time, attention, and -

some assert - favor. The intelligence community does not regard the DCI as an

impartial and engaged leader. The DCI should be separated from day-to-day management

of the CIA andbecome a full-time manager of the entire intelligence community -

especially in light of the new demands for homeland security and the need to grow

expertise in intelligence collection and analysis in the FBI and DHS. The proposed

legislation would effect this separation by establishing a Director of National Intelligenceand a Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The legislation would abolish the

position of Deputy Director for Community Management, since the intent is for the DNI

to perform this jo b full time. •

hi the past, the DCI has opposed establishing a Director of National Intelligence

separated from the CIAbecause of severe doubt that the office would have enough power

to effectively control the community. Without full and exclusive control over the main

organizations and agencies in the community, it is argued, a DNI would be powerless if

set adrift from the CIA, since the CIA provides the DCI with a strong institutional power

base. To ensure that a DNI could be an effective community manager, it is usually

claimed that the DNI would have to be given full line-management authority over allmajor intelligence agencies, especially including the authority for executing appropriated

funds. In effect, what is advocated is the creation of a "department of intelligence" in all

but name, even if the intelligence agencies and organizations were to be formally left

inside existing cabinet departments. These arguments, and this model, were rejected in

crafting this legislative proposal. A DNI can be an effective community manager using

basically existing DCI authorities - for tasking, building budgets, transferring funds, and

providing substantive intelligence to the President - if they areproductively applied, if

other reforms are implemented and if better partnerships are forged with various cabinet

secretaries, especially the Secretary of Defense.

Moreover, there are substantive reasons to stop short of consolidating line-

management authority under a DNI. Competitive analysis has always been a valued

feature of U.S. intelligence, hi essence, competitive analysis usually means the clash

among departmental analysis organizations and the CIA - the differing views of State,

DoD, Energy, CIA, and so forth. Creating an actual or virtual "Department of

Intelligence" could jeopardize this arrangement; even if the present decentralized

structure of analysis were to be maintained, over time in the name of efficiency pressure

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could arise to consolidate analysis (as proposed in the Boren-McCurdy legislation of

1992). The goal should be to enhance the DNI's ability to coordinate and integrate

operations, focus the communityon priorities, share information better, nurture the skills

needed for the newhomeland security mission, and so on - but not affect the support that

cabinet secretaries need and expect from their intelligence organizations, and not dilute

competitive analysis.

Information Sharing and Information technology

The problems we face demand a shift from the restraining principle of "need to

know" to aggressive adherence to the principle of "need to share." As investigations of

September 11 th show, the intelligence communityhas problems sharing information

within and across organizations, and leaves a wealth of potentially valuable information

"on the cutting room floor" as analysts and reporters within collection agencies screen

masses of raw data to produce finished assessments. The intelligence community's most

basic databases are inaccessible to many analysts both inside and outside the agencies that

collected the data. Information is power, and intelligence organizations tend to hoard it toprotect their interests. Exploitingall available intelligence data and sharing information

across agencies is also difficult because th e technology fo r doing it is new and the

policies andprocedures that need to be implemented to enable it run counter to

longstanding practice. These obstacles must be overcome.

The proposed legislation would require changes in policy governing classification and

access to information, imposition of uniform personnel security clearances, and shifting

responsibility for protecting U.S. persons' privacy from agency directors to the DNI.

These changes will remove major barriers to information sharing and collaboration. The

proposed legislation also includes a series of initiatives to create a networked intelligence

community that shares andexploits all useful information; rather than moving boxesaround on organizational charts, the legislation proposes a "virtual reorganization," ^

exploiting to the fullest America's information technology and the associated novel

business practices, while maintaining competitive analysis.

Penetrating and AssessingHard Targets

The Intelligence Community has not been very successful in penetrating "hard

targets," including the leadership of rogue nations, terrorist groups, weapons of mass

destruction proliferation activities, and other transnational threats. NSA's challenges can

perhaps be met by acquisition management reforms, more aggressive targeting, and by

taking more operational risks. CIA's HUMINT challenge is less tractable, but greateremphasis on language and cultural training, exploiting the cultural and ethnic diversity of

American society, tailoring tradecraft for operations against non-traditional targets, and

aggressively applying advanced technology in partnership with other organizations could

help. Sec. would create a joint tasking organization that would enable horizontal

integration and cross-cueing across the intelligence disciplines. Other solutions have

been andwill be pursued through the normal oversight process.


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Analysis Reforms

The flaws in pre-war analysis of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs include

an unwillingness to take seriously the dissenting views of organizations outside of CIA,

and afailure

to appreciate theimportance

ofbeing aware

of, andconveying

to consumers,the assumptions and methodology used in assessments, and the limits of hard knowledge.

There is a clear need to re-emphasize standards for conducting and presenting

assessments. The proposed legislation would establish such standards and mandate a ,

permanent "red team," modeled after Israeli practice. 'Community Personnel Assignments

A problem that is related to the DCFs infirmities as the manager of the intelligence

community is the weakness of the DCI's staff. This staff does not reflect the intelligence

community in make up and commands little authority and respect within the intelligence

community. Similar and equally serious problems in the Defense Department's JointStaff, and staff serving the unified commanders, defense agencies, and the Office of the

Secretary of Defense, were solved by mandating joint duty tours as a condition for

promotion, which has succeeded in inculcating a joint culture and in vastly improving the

quality of uniformed personnel serving in joint assignments. The intelligence community

needs the same remedy. The proposed legislation would require tours in other agencies

or community positions as a condition of promotion, establishes joint intelligence

specialties, and reserves billets for personnel in those specialties. Also in keeping with

the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the DNI would review and appeal promotion lists of all

personnel to ensure equal promotion rates forpersonnel whohave served in joint /

assignments.

Joint Tasking of Collection and Analysis

The DCI, by executive order and statute, has tasking authority over the intelligence

community, but the exercise of this vital authority is very weak and dispersed; collection

and analysis operations are dominated by the separate agencies and splintered further

within them. Despite the individual efforts of the Assistant Director of Central

Intelligence for Collection to focus collection on the most important problems and to

integrate tasking across the intelligence agencies, we still approach intelligence problems

with three independent collection andanalysis strategies - one for signals intelligence, /

one for human intelligence, and one for imagery. The military learned from long and

bitter experience that ground, air, and naval forces must be combined and integrated

under a unified command. Since this basic principle, reflected in the Goldwater-Nichols

Act, took effect in the Defense Department, U.S. military performance has been the envy

of the world. To achieve cross-service integration and unity of command, the Goldwater-

Nichols Act barred the military service chiefs unequivocally from any role in

commanding operational forces, restricting them to the mission of organizing, training,

and equipping forces for the combatant commands. Themajor collection agencies - CIA,


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NSA, andNGA - are analogous to the military services prior to Goldwater-Nichols.

Their operations are not integrated under a joint, unified tasking apparatus, and the clout

of the agency directors consistently presents a challenge to the authority of the DCI and

the senior staff of the Secretary of Defense.

For the war on terrorism, combating proliferation, and future combat operations, thereis anurgent need for integrated collection strategies andoperations - in military parlance,

for "task organized" operations that combine HUMINT, imagery, and signals intelligence

operations to achieve specific objectives. The Defense Department refers to this concept

as intelligence "campaign planning." The passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act almost

overnight transformed U.S. military capabilities. After a string of embarrassing,

demoralizing failures an d Pyrrhic victories, the U.S. military became an irresistible force

in Panama, Desert Storm, Bosnia, Kosovo, Enduring Freedom, andIraqi Freedom - at no

cost, from unifying command and integrating forces. Since the DCI confronts

independent "stovepipes" at least as formidable, on a relative scale, as the military

services posed to the Secretary of Defense and the unified commanders, establishing unity

of command and integrated operations in the intelligence community might pay similarspectacular dividends.

The proposed legislation would achieve these goals by creating a joint tasking

structure under a Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Operations, and would

restrict the Directors of CIA, NSA, and NGA to organizing, training, and equipping

HUMINT, SIGINT, and IMINT resources. These agencies' operations would be

managed through senior operations officers within each agency, who would be analogous

to military component commanders under the Goldwater-Nichols Act. These changes,

too, will foster a culture of "jointness" and integration within the intelligence community,

and make the intelligence agencies more dependent on, and responsive to, the DNI. The

legislative proposal does not recommend a similar restriction on the heads of otherintelligence organizations to the role of organizing, training, and equipping, but extending

the concept might be necessary in the future.

The proposed legislation would require that a senior military officer from a combatant

command also serve as a senior deputy to the Deputy Director for Operations to integrate

national and DoD intelligence capabilities and ensure effective support for military

operations. This officer would replace the Associate Director of Central Intelligence for

Military Support within the CIA.

Domestic Intelligence Collection and Analysis

The legislative proposal would not alter the current structure for domestic

intelligence collection and analysis within the FBI, TTIC, and DHS, but does recommend

changes to the oversight and tasking of these activities under the proposed Director of

National Intelligence. It is critical to define the policy andprocedures governing how the

intelligence community tasks the FBI to collect and report on terrorism. Under this

proposal, the Director of National Intelligence would define policy and procedures related


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Intelligence Community Reform Proposal

B. "Dual-Hatting" the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence

The legislative proposal would "dual hat" the Under Secretary of Defense for

Intelligence as the Deputy Director of National Intelligence. In this capacity, the DDNIwould be the second-ranking official in the intelligence community and would perform

the duties of the DNI in the absence of the DNI. With the creation of this joint office, the

authorities of the DNI could be augmented by the authorities of the Secretary of Defense,

providing nearly complete, unified control over the defense intelligence agencies. This

joint office also would provide a powerful means to integrate across the national and

defense intelligence communities. The Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint

Chiefs, and the combatant commands would be assured that the intelligence community

would protect the interests of the Defense Department. In terms of DoD's homeland

security mission, the DDNI would provide a mechanism to coordinate between DoD,

DHS, and the law enforcement community. The DNI, likewise, would be assured that

DoD would better understand national intelligence community needs and the needs ofnational-level policymakers for support.

This change would eliminate the ability of agency heads to avoid unwanted /

direction byplaying DoDagainst the intelligence community leadership (and vice versa). 'It also should help to eliminate competing guidance to the intelligence agencies. With this

dual assignment, common functions within the USD(I) and the DNI's staffs should be

considered for consolidation and integration. It should help to eliminate complaints that

the DNI lacks power over the defense intelligence agencies. It should help to reduce the

sharpness of conflicts between the staffs of the DNI and the USD(I) in the Pentagon, and

increase the degree of cooperation. It should, above all perhaps, help to ensure that the

other reforms proposed in the legislation work effectively and are enforced - thejointtasking organization, joint acquisition oversight, joint budget execution oversight,

common personnel security practices, joint information network development, centralized

control over information classification and access policy, and the requirements for

community tours for promotion.

Advocates on both sides of the DCI-DoD divide will tend to see in this proposal

ways for their side, alternately, to triumph and to be trumped. The point, however, is to

blunt the impulse to make these calculations. At the same time, realistically, the proposal

will not eliminate conflicts ~ nor will it solve all problems even when the arrangement is

working as well as possible. That is why it is but one of many reform proposals reflected

in the legislation.

C. Joint Comptroller organization

The proposed legislation would establish a joint Secretary of Defense/DNI

organization as an adjunct to the existing DoD Comptroller's office. The DNI would

provide staff to this organization as would the Secretary of Defense. The DNI and the


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Secretary would jointly appoint the head of this joint office, who would report to the

Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller). Theoffice would use the financial control /

authority of the Secretary of Defense to gain access to any financial information relating

to the National Foreign Intelligence Program executed by the Secretary of Defense. In

addition, under arrangements mutually determined by the DNI and the Secretary of

Defense, the Secretary's authority and processes to withhold funding and transfer fundingcould in principle be used at the request of the DNI; indeed, the dual-hatted

DDNI/USD(I) ought to be able to exercise the authorities of the Secretary of Defense

directly in this area as well as almost anyother. The proposal would not shift budget

execution authority from the Secretary of Defense to the Director of National Intelligence.

The intention, rather, is to devise a mechanism whereby the DNI, with the concurrence of

the Secretary of Defense, could gain access to the Secretary of Defense's authorities in

cooperation with the Secretary's staff. This innovation would directly benefit the Under

Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, in supporting the Secretary of Defense, as well as

the DNI. Also, Sec.103would codify the authority to reprogram funds that is conferred

on the DCI by Executive Order 12333. With respect to reprogrammings that involve a

transfer of funds across departments, consistent with sec. of the National Security Act,the Secretary or the Deputy Secretary of the Department providing the source of funds

may object, hi each case, an appeal may be lodged to the President.

Currently, as various current and former OSD and CMS officials confirm, neither

the DCI nor the staff of the Secretary of Defense get access to detailed budget execution

information from the defense intelligence agencies. It is not clear how this remarkable

arrangement evolved, but logic suggests that each staff neutralized the other and the

agencies cultivated autonomy in the ensuing void, hi anyevent, this situation must be

changed to ensure that the proposed DNI and the Secretary of Defense can exercise their

assigned authorities. The joint organization recommended here, rather than taking power

or authority away from either the DCI or the Secretary of Defense, would actuallyincrease th e real authority of both officials — provided that their staffs can cooperate.

For the first time, under the proposal recommended here, the DNI's and

Secretary's senior staff would have routine access to budget execution information from

the national intelligence agencies in the Defense Department, without which

comprehensive management andreal control is illusory. No doubt there will be /

disagreements between the DNI's and Secretary's staffs at times about what to do with

this information, which will have to be refereed at higher levels of authority, but at least

both staffs will be operating on the basis of real data and an understanding of the facts.

Without insight into the execution of the budget, the reprogramming and transfer powers

of the DNI are empty, because taking money from an organization requires knowledge

about where funds are excess to need and can be withdrawn and applied to higher

priorities. And the Secretary of Defense cannot responsibly manage the overall execution

of appropriated funds without access to all financial information.

Sec. 103 would require that all other non-DoD NFIP organizations provide the

DNI complete access to budget execution data, in a form and on a schedule established by

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the Director.

Sec.101 also would establish a Deputy Director of National Intelligence for

Resources (DDNI/R) who would report to the proposed DNI. At the direction of the

DNI, the DDNI/R would propose reprogrammings and transfers to the DNI based on

budget execution information provided by the Joint Comptroller Office and the non-DODNFIP organizations.

These proposed reforms are essential. Current and former officials indicate that,

under the current system, the DDCI/CM has all but given up on exercising the DCFs

authorities to transfer funds to meet unexpected, higher priority requirements - even

though on paper these authorities appear to be impressive. Experienced officials have

indicated that, without access to budget execution data, the DDCI/CM usually cannot

discover situations where funds areexcess to need, or cannot make a persuasive case to /

present to senior DoD officials or to officials from other departments. Similarly, senior

DoD officials typically reject requests from the DCFs senior staff to reprogram funds, at

times based solely on the opposition of the affected agency director without anindependent understandingof the actual budget situation. These reports are consistent //

with the fact that very fe w reprogramming requests fo r National Foreign Intelligence

Program funds are submitted to Congress compared to Joint Military Intelligence

Program funds, Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities funds, or the DoD budget

overall.

D. Access to Information: Need to Share versus Need to Know

hi the intelligence community, information is the coin of the realm. Here,

information really is power. Protecting sources and methods, and protecting the privacy

of U.S. persons, remain indispensable, but the agencies to some extent use theseimperatives to further their parochial interests in sustaining their control over the flow of

information. In the new security environment, sharing information is paramount, but this

imperative runs headlong into the agencies' monopoly over the intelligence data in their

possession - who gets access, howaccess is provided, conditions on the further use of the

information, the level of classification, and so forth.

This conflict of interest must be broken. As former NSA Director Admiral Mike

McConnell puts it, we must shift from a culture of "need to know" to a culture of "need

to share." Instead of employees being punished for sharing information outside their

group or organization, they should be reproached when they fail to share. "Ownership"

of information must be shifted from the agencies and organizations that collect

information to the analysts who use the data to create intelligence products and

consumers.

Accordingly, this legislative proposal would prohibit the delegation of

classification and distribution authority from the DNI to agency directors or their

subordinates. The DNI would be required by law to establish a joint process, independent


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of the agencies, to make decisions about how all intelligence information is to be

classified, stored, accessed and disseminated and how sources and methods are to be

protected. Analytic organizations and the heads of consuming agencies and departments

can trigger a formal re-evaluation of access policies by request to the DNI.

Today, CIA analysts working on national intelligence estimates for the Presidentof the United States do not get access to information about sources of human intelligence.

As the current Director of the Directorate of Intelligence (DDI) at the CIA stated in a

recent report, CIA analysts preparing assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction

programs did not realize that what they thought were multiple sources reporting on a

topic were really only one source, and that other sources would have been judged less

credible or reliable than they in fact were had analysts been informed of the source's

access and credibility. A former DDI recently noted that some years ago there was a

regular process for analysts to assess the credibility and reliability of Directorate of

Operations assets; it was his opinion that the practice, halted because of DO objections,

was perceived as a threat not to the protection of sources but to the authority of the DO.

The DCI recently agreed to grant greater access once again to DI analysts to humansource information, but his action corrected only one part of one access problem. For

example, why would the DCI limit access to source information only to CIA analysts?

The Defense Department's Joint Intelligence Task Force for Counter-Terrorism (JITF-

CT), set up after the Cole bombing to protect U.S. military forces from terrorist attack,

still cannot persuade the CIA to give its analysts electronic access to CIA's database of

HUMINT reports. Until very recently, JITF-CT also was denied access to NSA's most

basic SIGINT databases. These limitations persisted even after September 11th

investigations established conclusively that extremely important information about some /

of the hijackers lay dormant in these databases. ^

A similar set of problems thwarts access to signals intelligence. The NSADirector currently bears responsibility forprotecting the privacy of U.S. persons whose

communications are inadvertently intercepted. NSA maintains elaborate protections, both

technical and procedural, to sustain privacy andprevent abuse in accordance with statute

and executive order. NSA personnel must be trained in the law, policy, and procedures

for protecting U.S. persons' privacy as a condition for access to "raw" SIGINT and to

databases containing information on U.S. persons. NSA employees from the Director

down take these responsibilities very seriously. As currently managed, however, these

privacy protections needlessly prevent critical information sharing, electronic

collaboration, and joint operations with non-NSA personnel and organizations simply

because the latter are not under the NSA Director's direct control. NSA insists that only

NSA personnel can access certain databases and types of information because since only

the NSA Director has the responsibility for privacy protection, personnel who do not

report to the Director cannot be given access to databases containing information on U.S.

persons.

Congress over the last two years has tried to deal with this problem by mandating

that intelligence community personnel outside of NSA who need to have access to NSA


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data and databases be given the same training as NSA personnel regarding privacy

protection, hi other instances, proposed joint operations have been physically housed at

NSA as a way to meet the N S A Director's requirements for accountability. But these

initiatives have proven to be half-measures at best. All-source analysts need to be able to

"mine" NSA databases on their own, when they need to; they must not be hobbled by

having to use an NSA employee as an agent and filter simply because they do not happento be employed by the Agency. The solution is to make the DNI responsible for

enforcing statute, executive order, and policy regarding protections for U.S. persons, not

the Director of NSA or other agencies, as recommended in sec. 101.

Putting the DNI in charge of all information access decisions should enable,

finally, to open on data mining operations across the intelligence agencies' databases, and

on full electronic collaboration within "communities of interest" and other joint

organizations and operations, while putting in place uniform policy, procedures, and

practices to maintain compliance with the law and protection of privacy.

E. Separation of DNI from CIA

As noted in the Introduction and Overview of this report, the proposed legislation

would create a Director of National Intelligence who would not also serve as the Director

of the Central Intelligence Agency. As described briefly in that section, this reform is

crucial because the CIA has dominated the DCI's perspective and management attention.

DCI's spend very little time on intelligence community issues and problems in agencies

apart from the CIA. This lack of attention undermines the authority of the Deputy

Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management, since it has been

demonstrated time and again that resistance will be successful. Compounding this

problem is the pronounced reluctance of DCI's to overrule the CIA in community

matters, which engenders cynicism and recalcitrance in the other intelligence agencies.Necessary reforms of CIA and the community as a whole, including those that the DCI

himself has proposed, will remain difficult to achieve if the DCI's relationship to the CIA

is not altered. It also will be difficult to transform the FBI, and nurture sophisticated

intelligence collection and analysis capabilities in the FBI and DHS without hard work

and attention from the DCI.

It has been argued that separating the DCI from a powerful institutional base like

CIA without providing full executive authority ~ and especially budget execution

authority — to a DNI would make the DNI a paper tiger. Certainly, sitting on the throne

in Langley adds heft to the DCI, but it also constrains him, and perhaps constitutes as

much an irresistible crutch as an effective bureaucratic club. More important, there are

other paths to power. A DNI separated from the CIA will be forced to make full use of

the very considerable but under-utilized powers conferred by executive order and statute

on the DCI (e.g., building budgets, tasking authority). In addition, as proposed in this

legislation, the power of the principal agency directors with whom the DNI must grapple

would be reduced by limiting their role to organizing, training, and equipping their

agencies. And the DNI's power would be substantially enhanced by creating a robust


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tasking organization and the several joint organizations in partnership with the Secretary

of Defense; by requiring the DNI to exercise centralized control over the personnel

security process and decisions on access to information; and by enhancing the

competence and "joint" perspective of staff serving the DNI. Above all, the DNI and the

Secretary of Defense will be able to wield as much authority as necessary over the

defense intelligence agencies if they can forge a partnership based on a consciousunderstanding that they cannot escape or overcome their mutual dependence — any more

than the President or Congress can govern without cooperating with each other.

For a long time after the establishment of the CIA and the office of the DCI, it

made sense to tie the DCI tightly to CIA and give CIAvery much a primary status, since

originally the DCI was to be a coordinator of departmental intelligence, not a strong

manager over departmental intelligence organizations, hi order to give independent

assessments for the President and National Security Council, the DCI had to rely on the

CIA and the CIA had to be a "full-service" agency, with its hand in every type of

collection and analysis. Over time, however, the DCI has been expected to act as more of

a manager of intelligence than a coordinator, and has steadily gained authority overnational intelligence agencies and departmental intelligence production -- even if it was

not always exercised fully. As a result of this continuing evolution, the DCI should no

longer be so dependent on the CIA and should not confer such favor on the CIA, to the

detriment of other organizations.

F. Acquisition Authority and Oversight

Under Title 10, the military departments' and defense agencies' acquisition

programs are under the direction and authority of senior acquisition executives, who in

turn are to report to the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition. The Service Chiefs,

Service Secretaries, and defense agency directors are not in the chain of command when itcomes to managing acquisition programs. Yet, the directors of the defense intelligence

agencies have operated as though they had been delegated acquisition management

authority by the Secretary of Defense, and all parties have essentially ignored the law.

The DCI has almost no authority under the law or executive order to manage acquisition

programs executed by the defense intelligence agencies. DoD has considerable expertise,

and well-established procedures and machinery, firmly based in law and practice, but the

expertise and processes are under the purview of the Under Secretary of Defense for

Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. The resources and expertise resident under the •

USD(AT&L) have not been applied to the acquisition activities of the defense

intelligence agencies. The OSD staff responsible for intelligence oversight for the

Secretary of Defense have little expertise in acquisition management and oversight,

traditionally have not conducted effective oversight, and have not attempted to exploit the

capabilities resident in USD(AT&L) - presumably because of internal DoD bureaucratic

rivalries, and resistance from the affected agencies and the DCI's staff.

The Senate Armed Services Committee in the National Defense Authorization

Act for Fiscal year 2004 sponsored legislation that forces NSA acquisition programs to be


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managed in accordance with Title 10. The Act makes clear that NSA's senior acquisition

executive reports to the USD(AT&L), who is the milestone approval authority. The

SASC took this action out of frustration with years of poor performance by NSA on its

modernization programs.

Under this legislative proposal, the SASC precedent would be extended to all thedefense intelligence agencies, except the NRO, but with some modifications. Currently,

the DCI's staff has pretensions to become a force in acquisition oversight. The DCI a few

years ago created the position of Intelligence Community Senior Acquisition Executive,

fo r example. But this office is understaffed and has largely been ineffective. Under this

proposal, the D NI and the Secretary of Defense would create a joint acquisition oversight

organization as an adjunct to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense fo r

Acquisition. The Secretary of Defense and the DNI would jointly determine acquisition

management and oversight rules andprocedures that are tailored to the unique needs of

national intelligence, and that take advantage of the DCI's existing special acquisition

authorities. Each defense intelligence agency would be required to have a professionally

certified senior acquisition executive that would report to the joint acquisition officewithin the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (AT&L), and not to the agency

directors. The Director of the Joint Acquisition Office would be the milestone approval

authority for defense intelligence agency acquisition programs. In the case of CIA

programs, the Senior DNI-appointed official within the joint DNI-Secretary of Defense

organization would be the milestone approval authority, hi the case of the NRO, the

Secretary of Defense has already decided to elevate the Director of the NRO, dual-hatted

as the Under Secretary of the Air Force, as the Milestone Approval Authority for all DoD

space programs, not the USD(AT&L). Especially since the NRO has the sole mission of

managing complex acquisition programs, this exceptional arrangement is acceptable.

These reforms would help to ensure that acquisition management within the NFIP

is brought up to professional standards and placed under the control of community

leadership. These changes also preserve the existing (but basically only theoretical)

authorities of the DCI and the Secretary of Defense, but enhance the real power of both to

manage the intelligence community. As in other areas, in the past rivalry prevented

effective management and oversight by either the DCI or the Secretary of Defense. With

the proposed changes, cooperation will replace rivalry, and lead to strong management

within their respective spheres of responsibility.

G. Personnel Management and the Vitality of the Community Management Staf f

The Community Management Staff (CMS) and its predecessor have been

relatively weak organizations, in part because of neglect by the DCI, in part because of

personnel weakness, and in part because of resistance from the agencies, starting with

CIA. However, a strong and competent CMS is as important to the intelligence

community as OSD staff is to the Defense Department, or the Joint Staff is to the

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. It took decades for the OSD staff to mature to the point

where it could hold its own against the staffs of the military services; we cannot afford to


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wait as long to fortify CMS.

The essence of the proposed legislation for personnel management is to promote a

community or "joint" perspective and culture by requiring tours of duty in community

positions outside of one's home agency or department as a condition for senior

promotion. The legislation is modeled closely on the highly successful Goldwater-Nichols Act reforms. The purposes of the provisions are to increase the quality of the

staff assigned to support the DNI and other community-wide organizations and activities,

to reduce the parochialism of the workforce of the separate agencies and departments, and

to enhance cooperation between the various intelligence agencies and organizations. The

legislation is also intended to reduce the predominance of CIA personnel in community

assignments.

A capable, impartial community staff will be vital to successful DNI community

management. By requiring tours in community positions as prerequisites for promotion,

the Community Management Staff , like joint-duty billets in the Defense Department, will

attract the best and brightest from the various intelligence agencies and organizations.The CMS will become more competent and respected, and the agencies from which they

come will also become less parochial as senior officers return from community

assignments. Certain senior positions within the intelligence community will require an

officer who has completed twojoint assignments, hi general, these positions are the most

senior analytic and collection operations positions across the intelligence community.

The DNI will review all promotion recommendations to ensure that personnel who serve

in joint assignments receive the same consideration for promotion as other personnel.

Promotion to the senior executive service will require completion of a joint intelligence

assignment.

An additional step that DoD could take that would complement the reforms

mandated in the current proposal would be to make service in intelligence community

positions military joint duty assignments, and to make intelligence community service a

joint specialty under Goldwater-Nichols.

The role of military officers is especially important in the joint tasking

organization mandated in sec.102. This organization would function like a combatant

command J-3, controlling all operations of the intelligence community. That is, it would

direct the tasking of collection and of exploitation, analysis, and dissemination. This

organization should be staffed with highly qualified and experienced personnel from

across the intelligence community, and should include substantial numbers of military

officers to ensure that the community is always prepared to provide whatever support the

combatant commanders require.

H. Joint Tasking Organization

This section describes the proposal to create a joint tasking organization under a

new Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Operations, to assign a senior military


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officer from a combatant command as the Assistant Director of National Intelligence for

Defense (ADNI/D).

In the mid-1990s, Congress created the positions of Deputy Director of Central

Intelligence for Community Management, and three Assistant Deputy Directors for

Collection, Production, and Administration. This reform measure has proven to bevaluable, as far as it went, but experience has shown that stronger and integrated /

management is necessary.

The D CI by statute and executive order has tasking authority, and all tasking is

done in the name of the DCI. However, his tools and organizational support for

executing these responsibilities are austere and primitive. The incumbent ADCI for

Collection has been an extremely effective and tireless advocate for focusing collection

and analysis on the highest priority and most important intelligence requirements, but his

resources and authority are too limited to make a decisive impact. There is no institution

behind his efforts; if he were to be removed from office tomorrow, every initiative he has

undertaken would likely dissolve. One official, with a tiny staff, and with little more thanmoral authority, cannot fulfill the broad and complex requirement to levy tasking

direction across the intelligence community, especially when, as now, it is necessary to

orchestrate multi-agency, multi-discipline, and multi-system tasking. The authority to task

the intelligence community is an immensely powerful tool available to the DCI that has

never been even remotely fully exploited. Tasking authority provides the basis for the

D CI to control the substantive operations of the intelligence community, hi addition to

representing a neglected avenue to power, there is a compelling need for the D NI to use

this authority to orchestrate the various instruments of intelligence collection and

analysis.

It is axiomatic in the military that integrated operations and combined arms underunified command are keys to success. Armor needs infantry for protection, and vice

versa, both need artillery to suppress defenses, and all need protection from aircraft.

Likewise, the operations of air, ground, and naval forces must be coordinated. This basic

precept, driven home by the spectacular American military successes after the enactment

of Goldwater-Nichols, has yet to be embedded in the routine operations of the

intelligence community, hi tackling intelligence problems and challenges, fundamentally,

we pursue three separate strategies - one for signals intelligence, one for imagery, and

one for HUMINT - just as we used to pursue separate ground, air, and naval campaigns.

Furthermore, collection tasking today is largely separate from managing the

exploitation, analysis, and dissemination of what has been collected. The pace and scope

of modern intelligence operations demands that timelines be collapsed, that authorities

have end-to-end insight into the production cycle to ensure that critical products are

completed and delivered, and that widely distributed production resources can be

efficiently allocated. It need hardly be said that tasking collection means little unless it is

accompanied by tasking for exploitation, analysis, and dissemination, and unless

authorities and consumers have visibility into the process. Furthermore, whereas in the


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past collection was often the limiting factor in the intelligence production cycle, today the

opposite situation is increasingly encountered: in many instances, the volume of

information is swamping the available analytic resources; the key decisions today are as

likely to revolve around what information should be selected for processing, exploitation,

an d dissemination than around what should be collected.

Intelligence challenges today require, and technology allows, real-time, dynamic

tasking of collection, analysis, and dissemination within the intelligence disciplines and

also between them. Signals intelligence information can be used immediately to task

imagery collection, resulting in precise geo-positioning of hostile targets. In addition,

national systems can be used to tip or cue tactical systems, and vice versa. The Defense

Department's combatant commanders arecoming to expect that such capabilities will be

routinely available and will become ever-more sophisticated and powerful. CIA case

officers on the ground in the war on terrorism, likewise, expect and demand this type of

support and the ability to report in real-time.

More classic national intelligence tasks also require horizontally integratedcapabilities. Preparations for a future nuclear test, fo r example, might in the future first

be detected by an Air Force space-based moving target detection radar that picks up the

movement of trucks up a remote mountain road. A national intelligence satellite or

perhaps an unmanned drone could then be immediately tasked to identify the moving

vehicles and to observe the area for an extended time. Similarly, SIGINT, moving target

detection radar, and optical imagery could be utilized together to detect, identify, and

track Chinese mobile missiles facing Taiwan. As the DCI's Transformational Space-Air

Planning Study concluded in 2003, the possibilities are almost unlimited, and the payoff

is very high, from the horizontal integration of intelligence systems, organizations,

processes, and disciplines.

In short, both strategic intelligence and intelligence that supports combat

operations and operations against terrorists and other transnational threats would benefit

enormously from what the Defense Department has recently termed intelligence

"campaign planning." An intelligence campaign involves the methodical, step-by-step

planning for employing intelligence capabilities in an integrated way against specific

objectives to achieve specific results. Such "campaigns" can be regionally based,

topically based, or both. They would involve the close cooperation of all intelligence

disciplines, collectors and analysts, and customers. This type of focused operation is not

possible today.

Another hugely important and accelerating trend is for analysts and consumers to

take the initiative to reach into the intelligence production process at many points to draw

out information of immediate value. Analysts and other consumers demand access to

many forms and types of data before that data is put into a so-called finished product - or

is left on the cutting room floor. Analysts and consumers require the tools and the

networks necessary to access information and the experts who are working with or on that

information when required. The structure and operation of the joint tasking system must


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accommodate these initiatives.

Controlling the work of the intelligence community from above, and ensuring that

analysts and consumers can access the data they need from below, require a horizontally

integrated community that is networked to its customers. Both NGA and NSA are trying

to develop modern collection and workflow management systems that will allow dynamictasking, provide insight into the status of the enterprise, and enable analysts and

consumers to track the progress of their requests for support. Likewise, the DCI has

sponsored a program to develop an information system (called 1C MAP) to provide

transparency into tasking across the intelligence community, including HUMINT

operations. None of these development efforts is mature, but they are the building blocks

fo r an integrated, joint tasking capability. It is essential that NSA, NGA, and DoD's

collection tasking and workflow management programs ensure that the systems they are

building for managing collection and exploitation are able to operate seamlessly with

each other and with those developed for the joint tasking authority to enable rapid tipping

and cueing and other joint operations. The capability to operate the intelligence

community, in whole or part, as a unified enterprise is essential for supporting militaryoperations, CIA personnel on the ground, and any other intelligence activity where

timing, timeliness, and coordination are crucial.

Somehow, too, the intelligence community must find methods to tap the potential

of soldiers, police officers, and case officers on the ground as information sources. The

Chief of Army Intelligence has adopted the phrase "every soldier a sensor" to express the

Army's appreciation of the value of all potential sources of human intelligence, and the

Army's commitment to finding ways to take advantage of this resource. Likewise, police

officers on the streets of America could provide vital information for counter-terrorism.

In addition to tapping into tactical HUMINT sources, the national intelligence community

must be able to receive data from the large number of Defense Department collectionsystems - satellites, aircraft, andships - and to know ahead of time how they aregoing to

be tasked. The Defense Department has committed to ensuring that its assets will be able

to provide data to the national intelligence community. The intelligence community, for

its part, must develop the ability to ensure that it is able to ingest, analyze and disseminate

that data.

Creating an effective joint tasking structure is directly analogous to the

empowerment of joint commanders by the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Goldwater-Nichols

made unity of command a reality by fully subordinating for the first time the army, navy,

an d air force component commands to the joint combatant commanders. The operations

of the U.S. SIGINT, IMINT, and HUMINT systems and organizations must likewise be

effectively controlled and integrated by a competent, unified, joint tasking organization.

Theproposed legislation would create a joint tasking organization under the direction of a

new office of Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Operations, and would restrict

the Directors of CIA, NSA, and NGA to organizing, training, and equipping HUMINT,

SIGINT, and IMINT resources, paralleling the role of the military chiefs of staff under the

Goldwater-Nichols Act. These agencies' operations would be managed through senior


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operations officers within each agency, who would receive tasking and direction from the

Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Operations. These changes, too, would foster

a culture of "jointness" and greater integration within the intelligence community.

This proposal to create a unified tasking organization and process is fully

consistent with the tasking authority already conferred on the DCI by statute andexecutive order. The proposal does not alter the current relationship between the DCI,

the Secretary of Defense, or other cabinet secretaries. The tasking structure itself should

be thoroughly joint, with personnel drawn from across the intelligence community, and

must include skilled military personnel to ensure professional support to combatant

commanders.

The Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Operations would establish

tasking processes for routine and priority requirements as well as contingency tasking for

crisis support. Analysis and collection operations would routinely be conducted within

the national agencies and departmental intelligence units under the daily direction and

management of each organization's operations director (in the case of NSA, CIA, andNGA) or through the head of the organization (for the other organizations in the

intelligence community). The Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Operations

would also have the authority to establish joint task forces, "communities of interest,"

new community centers, or analytic teams, to address crisis support, hard targets, or any

other intelligence issue that would benefit from a more integrated collection and analysis

structure. As outlined elsewhere in this document, these teams or task forces could be

virtual organizations with electronic connectivity and need not be collocated.

The agency operations officers are to be selected by the DNI based on

nominations from the Directors of the Agencies. Sec. 102 does not attempt to define

precisely the boundary between the joint tasking organization's responsibilities fordirecting the operations of the national intelligence collection and analysis organizations,

on the one hand, and those of the organizations themselves, on the other. It is essential to

preserve and rely upon the expertise, esprit, and detailed knowledge resident in the

individual intelligence agencies and organizations, just as the Goldwater-Nichols Act

reforms preserved the vibrancy of the military services. At the same time, it is equally

important for the DDNI for Operations to truly direct the intelligence enterprise and to

have visibility into the execution of taskings.

Sec. 102 would require that the ADNI/D be a senior military officer from a

combatant command. The only logical choice at present would be an officer from

STRATCOM, to which the most recent Unified Command Plan (UCP Change 2)

assigned the mission of global intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR)

coordination. This officer's primary mission would be to promote and improve

coordination and mutual support between the operations of national intelligence systems

and the joint and tactical ISR capabilities that STRATCOM is now responsible for.

STRATCOM has the responsibility for working with the combatant commanders to

adjudicate requirements for reconnaissance support from so-called "low density-high


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needs to state and local law enforcement, and to those elements of DHS that are not part

of the intelligence community but need intelligence support and in turn can provide

important intelligence information gleaned from their normal operations.

I. Personnel Security

Personnel security practices have changed very little since the advent of the Cold

War, with the system somewhat oblivious of the changing needs of the intelligence

community or of the advance of technology. The security services of the various agencies

share a culture of resistance to change and of risk avoidance. The larger bureaucracies of

which they are part also use security practices as ameans of controlling information and

protecting turf. Together, these forces and interests have stymied past efforts to

modernize and standardize security practices.

The DCI is already responsible for regulating the process for granting clearance

for sensitive compartmented information (SCI). The DCI issues directives (DCIDs)

governing SCI clearances, but the DCIDs are implemented separately by all the majororganizations within th e intelligence community. Each organization — NRO, NSA, NGA,

DIA, all themilitary services, State, DoE, DHS, FBI - writes its own directives

"interpreting" the DCI's Directive, with the predictable results. The DCI has established

a Security Center to assess what can be done to narrow the differences across the

community that limit reciprocity and create delays in personnel transfers. This initiative,

while positive, is based on consensus andpersuasion. Amore decisive process - and

break with the past - is required for the rapid progress our current situation demands.

Responsibility for interpreting DCIDs for SCI security clearances, just as for

protecting sources and methods and determining access to information, should no longer

be left to the individual agencies. Today, more than ever before, we must be able torapidly move personnel from one organization to another, to move information between

individuals and organizations on demand, to create electronic "communities of interest"

and task forces with experts from across the intelligence community at will, and move

contractors from one contract to another without incurring costly and needless delays

associated with the lack of security clearance reciprocity. Once and for all, we must

establish a common clearance process for government and industry personnel for granting

access to sensitive compartmented information.

This legislative proposal would require the DNI to establish a single process and a

single set of standards and criteria for granting access to SCI material, and to ensure that

they are implemented consistently. In addition to abolishing all agency-unique rites of

passage, the DNI must speed up the process and reduce the costs of granting clearances.

The nation cannot afford the current security clearance system that is taking over 400

days on average to issue a clearance to contractor personnel. The current system is

costing the nation billions of unproductive labor dollars. The intelligence community

cannot spend counter-terrorism funds because of the lack of cleared personnel. The

Department of Homeland Security is waiting one to two years to clear personnel for its

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nascent Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection organization. The issue of

who at the state and local level receives clearances has yet to be addressed.

Current policies and perceptions for granting clearances to individuals who have

relationships with foreign nationals must also be reassessed. Each national intelligence

agency has partnerships with foreign intelligence entities under which we provide accessto U.S. collection to leverage the analytic capabilities of that partner. In some cases we

have insight into how clearances are granted in these partner countries, but in others we

really have no idea what level of trust should be accorded the personnel in partner

countries. Yet, there must be a documented "compelling need" to clear a U.S. citizen

who has a relationship with a foreign national, no matter what country the foreign

national conies from. The agencies are reluctant to provide clearances to U.S. citizens

who have family living in foreign countries. Many of these U.S. citizens have native

language skills and a deep cultural understanding that are critical for a more effective

intelligence community. If there are truly insurmountable issues with clearing U.S.

citizens because of their or their family's relatively recent arrival in the United States, we

ought to end our foreign partnerships, and end the practice of relying heavily oninformation from foreign intelligence services.

Much of the labor-intensive and time-consuming field work mandated for

clearances is obsolete today given what can be done electronically and given the mobility

of most Americans. Sec.101 would require the DNI to establish a process that completes

processing and adjudication within 90 days. The Director of National Intelligence must

rationally assess the need for field investigations and the advantages of contract

investigators and adjudicators. The Director of National Intelligence must speed up the

processing of issue-free cases, complete the implementation of the Office of Personnel

Management's e-Clearance initiative, and move to a risk management approach. The

security focus should shift to "keeping individuals clean" (risk management) vicefocusing on individuals' past (risk avoidance).

J. Virtual Reorganization and InformationTechnology

The intelligence community lags far behind industry standards in the application

of information technology to improve the effectiveness of its personnel and organizations.

An end-to-end redesign of systems andprocedures is needed to realize the goal of a

networked community that can find and recognize important data, digest it, and make it

available to consumers when and in the form they need it. Applying modem information

technology and the business practices associated with that technology will do much to

break down the "stovepiped" intelligence agencies, promote information sharing across

organizations, streamline bureaucracies, and speed up the intelligence production process

- all without moving any boxes around on an organizational chart.

Industry has taken advantage of new networking technology to empower its

workforce by ceding initiative to lower levels, promoting peer-to-peer collaboration

across organizational boundaries, and eliminating layers of middle management. These


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are changes that would also benefit the intelligence community. Together with policy

changes on data access, personnel security, and analyst-to-analyst collaboration, a

networked community with modern computer tools could provide higher quality

products, faster, and in greater quantity.

Case officers still file reports as it would have been done a fifty years ago.HUMINT reporting and SIGINT data must instead be "tagged" and stored in properly

structured databases to enable advanced data mining and retrieval, which is key to

connecting fragments of information into a coherent picture. Technology exists also to

enable old databases to be tagged and structured. Today, databases of unevaluated

SIGINT and HUMINT data is not directly available to most analysts and consumers.

Instead, raw information is first evaluated and filtered by reports officers before it is

available for all-source analysis. However competent and well-meaning, this first-tier

filtering inevitably leaves behind information that might bevaluable - indeed critical - to

some analyst or consumer in ways that the reports officer could never foresee or be

expected to appreciate. The left-behind nugget may not even be needed for years, past the

time when the analyst who first screened the information has moved to another job.Analysts must be able to access all potentially relevant databases and must have tools to

enable them to discover and retrieve what they need. This is not possible today and

would not be permitted even if it were possible. This situation must be changed if we are

ever to hope to foil the next September 11th. As noted elsewhere, policy about access to

the basic intelligence databases of CIA, NSA, and NGA must be made by the DNI, not

the agencies that happen to collect the data. Need-to-know considerations must be

balanced by need-to-share imperatives. The need to protect sources and methods must be

balanced against the need for analysts to be able to assess the credibility of sources. The

proposed legislation would require the DNI to correct these problems.

Analysts need modern tools on their desktops to access databases and to "mine"them. They need tools to help them digest the masses of data now available and to

comprehend what it means. This area has been seriously underfunded, but true to form,

the money that is available is managed separately by each agency, resulting in rampant

duplication and little interoperability. The proposed legislation would require the DNI to

establish a single, integrated program to serve all agencies to achieve a critical mass of

investment and to ensure that all-source analysts at different agencies can work together.

A critical need is for analysts and their customers to be able to collaborate

electronically — to share information, and to interact dynamically as a group. Despite

pressure from Congress, the DCI, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for years, it

is still not possible to do this fully within any agency, and the ability to collaborate from

one intelligence agency to the next is even more limited, while there are no capabilities to

collaborate with the homeland security community, combatant commands, and other

consumers. The legislation holds the DNI and Secretary of Defense responsible for

ensuring that electronic collaboration finally becomes a reality -- years and years after the

DCI described the goal as one of his strategic priorities.


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Networking the intelligence community effectively requires large communications

capacity and a management mechanism to design and enforce an architecture and

standards for interoperability. The intelligence community and the Defense Department

each possess huge communications capacity that was not used by the intelligence

agencies for years because of policy disputes. These policy problems are apparently

finally being resolved, but management issues have yet to be decided. The DefenseDepartment's Chief Information Officer has a comprehensive enterprise architecture for

DoD, a vision and plan. The intelligence communityChief Information Officer is

developing an architecture for sharing information within the intelligence community (see

below), but has not designed a comprehensive network architecture for the community.

The intelligence agencies generally do not have solid enterprise architectures of their

own, and there is no community architecture for them to build to.

The Defense Department has developed a true enterprise architecture through the

Global Information Grid (GIG) program. The same cannot be said of the intelligence

agencies, individually or considered as a community. NGA is at least pursuing an

enterprise architecture, however, through the GEOSCOUT program. NSA has beentrying for years to develop an architecture under the Trailblazer program, but its prospects

are uncertain at best. The intelligence agencies do not comply with OMB's mandate to

relate budget requests for information technology to an enterprise architecture—

presumably because they are unable to do so. Instead, the intelligence community puts

forward to OMB the Intelligence Community System for Information Sharing (ICSIS)

program, developed by the community CIO, and claims that ICSIS is an enterprise

architecture for the entire intelligence community; in reality, ICSIS is just a set of

capabilities that would be applied to an architecture. Each of the intelligence agencies

must develop a modern enterprise architecture; each of these individual architectures

must be part of a community-wide architecture; and this community-wide architecture

must work seamlessly with DoD's GIG. If this is not achieved, it will be impossible torealize the DCI's Strategic Intent, the horizontal integration vision, the required level of

information sharing, and many other critical intelligence, military, and homeland security

goals.

The emphasis on creating a network that can disseminate national

intelligence information out to tactical military echelons, state and local law enforcement,

and other widespread homeland security officials, must not overshadow the need for the

network to also be able to report up from those same tactical levels to national-level

analytic organizations. As noted elsewhere in this report, soldiers and tactical HUMINT

personnel on the ground abroad, and local police officers, could well collect information

vital in the war on terrorism. Means must be established to capture tactically and locally

collected informationand make it accessible to intelligence community analysts.

Likewise, the network must be able to deliver to NSA, NGA, CIA, and DIA data

collected by DoD space-, air-, and sea-based platforms, and their tasking must be

transparent to the DDNI/O.

The proposed legislation also would require the President to develop policy and


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guidelines for the development and use of advanced "data mining" tools to be used to

discover and correlate information held in government and private sector databases.

Credible investigations after September 11 th show that it would have been possible to find

Al Mihdhar and Al Hazmi, and discover connections to many if not indeed all of the

other 17 hijackers, after those two terrorists had been "watch listed" in August 2001 if the

intelligence and law enforcement communities had possessed the right tools and if it had

been possible to access all the pertinent databases held by the government and private

sector. Certainly, "connecting the dots" before a future catastrophic terrorist attack could

well depend on correlating fragments of information to be found in the most disparate

places. A persuasive case has been made by experts from many disciplines and across the

political spectrum that it is possible to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens when

developing and using this advanced computer technology.

Today, however, approaching three years after September 1 1 4 , a stalemate exists

in this arena that truly represents the worst of all worlds. The hardline legal view within

the administration is that additional policy and guidelines to regulate government access

to "publicly held" databases are not only unnecessary but would unduly restrict thePresident's authority in a time of war, especially if Congress enacted them into law. hi

defending this view, proponents point out that the Supreme Court has in the past ruled

that citizens have no "expectation of privacy" regarding information held by third parties,

and conclude that the government has the right under the Constitution to conduct data

mining operations at will. Advocates of this position appear to hold sway within the

administration, since there has been no attempt to develop policy and guidelines in this

area

On the other side, opponents of data mining are equally determined to prevent any

use of this technology, under any circumstances. This group, too, for its own reasons also

strongly opposes any attempt to develop policy and guidelines to safeguard privacyduring data mining operations because any step down what they see as a slippery slope

leads inexorably to Big Brother. Thus far, these opponents of data mining have won the

day in public battles over the Total Information Awareness program; both chambers of

Congress voted by very wide margins across the political spectrum to prohibit the

operational use of the program's technology. However, other ambitious data mining

programs exist that either have not come to the attention of opponents or have found

other means to survive.

What we have, then, is the tragic situation where a marriage of strange bedfellows

has stymied the development of sensible government policy and at the same time held

back the development and application of tools that could potentially save the lives of

many American citizens. It is past time that this absurd and dangerous situation be

remedied. The President should establish a credible and transparent policy process that

will persuade the American people -- and their elected representatives -- that data-mining

can and will be conducted in ways that they will find acceptable. If the President,

conversely, believes that no restrictions are called for on data mining operations, he needs

to forthrightly say so and persuade Congress and the American people that their fears are


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misplaced.

4/27/2004 4:46 PM


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