[IP] 'Policy, not technology' creates barriers to info sharing
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From: Shaun Waterman <swaterman@xxxxxxx>
To: Shaun Waterman <swaterman@xxxxxxx>
Subject: [osint] UPI: 'Policy, not technology' creates barriers to info
sharing
'Policy, not technology' creates barriers to info sharing
By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 (UPI) -- The barriers to information sharing
between federal agencies are ones of policy and practice, not
technology, the White House official in charge of overcoming them told
United Press International.
"The reasons why (different government computer systems and databases)
are not interconnected has nothing to do with technology," Karen Evans,
the administrator for e-government and information technology at the
White House's Office of Management and Budget, said in an interview
Friday.
"It is policies and business processes," she said.
The failure of federal agencies, and especially the nation's
intelligence services, to share information was -- according to the
Sept. 11 Commission -- one of the key problems hampering the nation's
fight against terrorism.
"Each agency concentrates on its specialized mission, acquiring its own
information and then sharing it via formal, finished reports," the
commission found in its July final report. "No one component holds all
the relevant information."
Critics caution that you can -- in effect -- have too much of a good
thing, and that the free exchange of information between all the
various parts and levels of government will rob citizens of their
privacy and that government use of private-sector data may violate the
Fourth Amendment.
Nonetheless, the commission called for action from both White House and
Congress to rectify the situation. They recommended setting up a
"trusted information network" -- a decentralized, horizontally
integrated network of systems -- which would make it possible for one
agency's databases to be searched by an employee of another agency.
The same solution was recommended last year by a task force set up by
the Markle Foundation. Zoe Baird, who headed the task force, explained
to UPI that such a totally connected network does not require the
centralization of data.
"You don't need to put all the content on a single network," she said.
"Instead, you use a directory-based system. The directory ... tells you
where to look for what you need." In such a network, she added, the
theoretical capability is there for any authorized user to access
almost any piece of data -- it is the rules that determine who can get
access to what. And that is where things get tricky, according to
Evans.
"We've got the easy job," she said of the Information Systems Council
that President Bush set up last month to start work on the issue.
"Technology is always the easy part. The tough decisions are the ones
about policy."
The executive order that created the council was one of a batch of
directives the president signed on Aug. 27. Most of the attention -- as
it generally seems to be -- fixed on the measures strengthening the
hand of the current director of central intelligence and establishing
the National Counter-Terrorism Center.
But another dealt with watch-listing and screening, a fourth with
interoperable communications for first responders and a fifth with
setting up a civil liberties and privacy watchdog.
And it is the information-sharing directive that may ultimately have
the largest impact. It is certainly the one that has privacy and
civil-liberties advocates -- who generally consider the watchdog to be
toothless -- most concerned.
Evans' council must come up with a plan to create "an interoperable
terrorism information-sharing environment" by the end of the year. It
is chaired by Clay Johnson, the deputy director of the Office of
Management and Budget, and made up of senior officials from a dozen
Cabinet departments and agencies.
Evans is the executive director for the council and put together the
interagency working group of information-technology chiefs that is
doing the day-to-day development work.
"Our job is to take technology off the table as an issue," Evans says.
"The policymakers decide how they want to go forward. We just outline
what kinds of business decisions need to be made for each possible
approach."
But in order to go forward, she points out, it is necessary "to ask the
tough questions: How centralized do we want this system to be? Who
should have what kind of access?"
Answering those questions is the job of a much smaller group of
officials.
The director of central intelligence -- almost certain to be Rep.
Porter Goss, R-Fla., quite shortly -- Attorney General John Ashcroft
and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge are charged with setting
baseline standards for the sharing of data between intelligence
agencies, with other federal agencies, and with state and local law
enforcement; and developing policies and personnel practices that will
get them met.
That includes "requirements, procedures, and guidelines for terrorism
information to be collected within the United States, including, but
not limited to, from publicly available sources, including
non-governmental databases."
That reference has conjured up memories of John Poindexter's ill-fated
universal data-mining operation. Given the unfortunate title of Total
Information Awareness, the project was killed -- or rather, driven into
the classified portions of the defense budget -- by lawmakers alarmed
at its Orwellian implications.
Lee Strickland, formerly a senior information-technology official at
the CIA, believes that TIA's failure was a matter of poor public
relations rather than bad policy. But he nonetheless acknowledges that
the government's access to private-sector data does generate concern
and might raise constitutional issues.
"Private action, like denying you credit, doesn't raise constitutional
issues -- it's a tort at most. But government action does," he says,
arguing it is a Fourth Amendment question.
However, he suggests that what he calls "a growth area in Fourth
Amendment law" -- the "special needs" of the government -- might trump
the expectation of privacy case law considered inherent in that
amendment's restriction on unreasonable search, seizure and trespass by
the state.
If you can catch terrorists -- or even get clues as to who might be a
terrorist -- by trawling through millions of anonymous credit-card
transactions and only de-anonymizing any that are linked in suspicious
patterns, the argument goes, what is unreasonable about letting the
government do so?
The key, says Baird, lies in the regime that grants or denies access to
information. "You have to have a process for making people explain why
they want the information, how it's related to terrorism.
"New checks and balances are needed."
At the moment, the executive order represents a very broad statement of
principles, plus an instruction to Ashcroft, Ridge and (probably) Goss
to devise a regime that will balance Americans' rights to keep data
about themselves out of the hands of the government with the need to
know what people are up to in order to help find terrorists.
Although the executive order tasks officials to "protect the freedom,
information privacy and other legal rights of Americans," it also
instructs them to "give the highest priority to" detecting and
preventing terrorism, sharing information and "the protection of the
ability of agencies to acquire additional such information."
These priorities worry Charlie Mitchell, legislative counsel with the
American Civil Liberties Union.
"As they implement this, no one is paying anything like enough
attention to the civil liberties and privacy implications of this
massive centralization of information and (in the post of the new
national intelligence director) power," he said.
"There was a reason why information wasn't shared. There was a reason
the wall was there," he said, referring to the prohibition on using
information gleaned from intelligence investigations in criminal cases.
"The reason was, to limit the power of the government."
One thing almost everyone agrees on is that the executive order sets
challenging and ambitious deadlines. Ninety days for the guidelines and
policies, 120 for the plan.
"This is a very optimistic schedule, even just to map what's already
there," said Strickland. "People do not know what they have," he added,
citing a Government Accountability Office report on the FBI that found
they had 500 separate data-management systems.
Baird argues that the deadlines can be met, "because they aren't
starting from zero. They're starting from a lot of thinking," from the
Markle task force, the Sept. 11 Commission and others.
Evans maintains that the deadlines demonstrate how serious the
president is about getting these reforms through.
"Yes, they're aggressive timelines. That's because the president is
committed to pushing forward on this."
She says that the prospect that Congress might suddenly blindside her
process with legislation that mandates a different set or different
priorities does not phase her in the least.
"That's what is so great about this area of work.
Information-technology people are used to change, in software for
instance. You just address the changes and deal with them as you go
forward."
--
The above is an example of UPI's continuing coverage of Intelligence
Reform and related issues, published on Sunday Sept. 19. I hope you
find it interesting. You may link to it on the web here:
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040917-054221-6438r
Thank you,
Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
E-mail: swaterman@xxxxxxx
Tel: 202 898 8081
Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International
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