Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security Strategy and Policy:
Planning for and Responding to Threats to the U.S. Homeland

October 28-29, 2004
Ronald Reagan Building
and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Dale Watson
former Executive Assistant Director for Counter-Terrorism
and Counter-Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Introduction By: Dr. Richard H. Shultz

Dale Watson: Thank you, Dr. Shultz. I'm glad to be here, and I know we want to get to some questions, so I’ll keep my remarks brief. It’s a pleasure to be here. Jim and I do some of these things together from time to time, and if you haven’t detected, I do have a Southern accent, but Jim has graciously agreed that any English that you don’t understand, he’ll translate for you.

Since I left the Bureau, Jim talked about going straight over and having a life, so to speak. The job that I had keeps on giving. I was with the 9/11 Commission 12 hours under oath, and since I've left the government, a lot of people in organizations have somehow or another thought that I should be sued personally. I think the lawsuits are up to about 20 now. There is a box in the back of the room if you want to throw some money in for my defense fund. [Laughter]

Here’s what I thought we would do in the few minutes that I have. I think you’ve heard from almost the top all the way down, close to the bottom, about what the problems are. What I really want to address with you is the information sharing piece. I'm going to address that because there’s a lot of discussion about that. That’s the buzzword after 9/11, is we need information sharing, and who has the need to know, and what do you share and how do you do it.

Most of that talk, and even on this panel today, is talking about the federal piece, talking about how do you get a top-secret document from CIA over to the FBI, and how can they get it down to whatever level they want to give it to, or how do you integrate information from the intelligence community among themselves -- CIA, NSA, et cetera.

That’s a great and worthwhile movement that’s going forward and should take a lot of time and attention, and people should focus on that. But I'm here to tell you, if you're talking about actionable intelligence, actionable intelligence, we’ll know when we see it, the big stuff will get out. There’s no question about that. If you have a smoking gun that somebody’s going to do something evil in Detroit, there’s no way that that information is not going to get disseminated and become an actual intelligence piece. It’ll get to NORTHCOM, it’ll get to the right people because of what it is.

So I’ll come back and talk about actionable intelligence and really what that means, but the focus of my talk this morning, basically, is information sharing. Where is that data coming from? Is it all foreign cables coming in from overseas? Is it all classified stuff in the federal government? Is that what’s going to protect us? I'm here to tell you that’s not the case. The case about information sharing and protecting us against the next terrorist act rests with state and local law enforcement and first responders.

There are 600,000 sworn police officers in this country. There are over 18,000 police departments. There are over 3,200 sheriff’s departments in this country. Those are the individuals, as Jim alluded to, the 7-11 employee who tells the beat cop about what’s going on, that’s what I'm talking about with information and information sharing.

Why don’t we have that? Why don’t we have information sharing? Among law enforcement, let’s just take the law enforcement. First of all, you can issue all the PDDs you want, you can mandate whatever position or whatever law you want to pass and say this is really important, we want law enforcement to share information. The reality is, of all those police departments, sheriff’s offices and state police, there’s no federal law anywhere that they have to share one lick of information with anybody.

Think about that for a second. The sheriff of Orange County, Florida, a personal friend, who has Disneyworld, is under no requirement, legal requirement or whatever, to share any information about threats at Disneyworld or anything going on in Orange County. He doesn’t have to do it. Now, he’s a good guy and he wants to do it. But you see the dilemma there, the thought process about sharing information.

I'm here to tell you right now that it’s not a technology issue. And people talk about that all day, well, we need this widget, we need this gadget, we need to process this information, it’s about collecting the data, and how do you get the data in order to have somebody take a look at it and analyze it? The technology’s there. So what is the problem?

The problem is, as I've alluded to, there’s no requirement, there’s no legal requirement, and I don’t think we’ll ever get there to have that legal requirement. The issue is basically a cultural thing. And in order to have information sharing throughout the country, what Mike Noll is talking about, or what Russ is talking about is there must be some incentive for people to do that.

If, for instance, you want to go to St. Louis, and we started a project before 9/11 in St. Louis to share law enforcement information just within that community, if you go there you say there are 30 different police departments and the sheriff’s department in St. Louis City Police. And you say, “Let’s all get together, let’s share information.” Well, that sounds good, but what’s the incentive for the participants? There has to be some incentive. And the incentive is very clear. It makes law enforcement better, and since 9/11, all those departments and all those law enforcement people really want to get into the fight on the war on terrorism.

So you do have an incentive. But comes with that incentive is there has to be a set of rules, a board of governance that decides how you're going to share the information. First of all, what are you going to share, what’s the rules if you violate that trust; so it has to be a local controlled governance that controls that information flow. For example, small chief of police -- I’ll make this up -- in Missouri wants to be able to understand what the city of St. Louis has on criminal records or burglaries or whatever, but yet he’s appointed by the city council or the city mayor. For instance, what if he decides, “I’ll put data in here about my mayor that’s not very favorable to him.” You overcome that by having a board of governance that explains exactly what the penalties are for doing that.

So what you have is a group of people that come together that want to share information back and forth. The technical piece, and I won’t get into that, is what we call a front porch. And if you're really interested in it, take a look at the Gateway Project in St. Louis and there’s a LINX Project in Seattle, and there’s an ARJIS Project in San Diego that talks about that. And what they basically do is they decide what information they want to share, move it electronically to a front porch; it never leaves their department.

So culturally, you have to have some incentive for them to do it, and you have to have rules. The key to success though is they want the federal piece. Local law enforcement want to be able to say that the FBI will share information with them. And that’s a cultural issue that the FBI’s working through, and I think we’re coming to the resolution of that. There’s no reason why the FBI can’t share information with local police officers electronically and being able to analyze that data. A lot of people talk about that -- “Well, we can’t share this and we can’t share that.” I believe you can share a lot of that information, and we were moving in that direction long before 9/11.

In order to do that, you convince the local law enforcement people that it will make them a better law enforcement. It’ll reduce the number of crimes they have, it’ll help them with home invasions and burglaries, it’ll make you safer; and then secondly that they are in the fight against terrorism by doing this. And that’s a key point.

A couple of final points here. I'm also convinced, if you talk about information sharing, of being able to get information to TTIC or to NORTHCOM, or wherever you're talking about getting information, it's the collection of the data, and these systems, whatever they are, if they're five police departments or if DOE comes together with some local vendors or whatever, these systems must be built from the bottom up. People in Washington can’t say, “This is a system that we’re going to use to collect and share law enforcement data throughout the United States”; it won’t happen. It’s almost like the Internet. The Internet developed over time. No one said “This is exactly what the Internet’s going to look like,” and it’s not a technology issue.

So as you move forward, try to keep that in mind. It will make us all safer to work through this process.

If you're talking about actionable intelligence, you're talking about bits of information collected at the lowest level that gets processed, sorted and that’s how you get your actionable intelligence. And most of the discussion today was saying, “I need actionable intelligence.” And most of the focus in thinking about that is “Let’s get this from NSA, let’s get this from friendly foreign services, or let’s get this from wherever it is.” But I'm telling you, the actual intelligence, if we can do it in the future, and Jim pointed this out, it’s very difficult. We would love to have a telephone call from the al-Qaeda organization that they're going to do something bad in Phoenix next week. I don’t think we’ll ever get that. But the idea that we can collect a lot of data around Phoenix and maybe make a pattern and make sense out of that through analysis is the right way to go.

Information sharing is the key to protect all of us, and it must be built from the bottom up. No one system fits all, and it’ll make us all safer. It’s not a technology issue. Thank you. [Applause]

Questions and Answers

PAULETTE MURPHY: I'm Paulette Murphy from SPAWAR System Center, San Diego, Navy. I have a question for Mr. Watson. It seems that if the approach is to be a bottom-up approach, and if there are sufficient incentives there right now, one would think that there would be more things like Links out there and like Argis. It seems to me that there may be a role of the federal government in helping to facilitate that bottoms-up approach.

MIKE REDMOND: Just a general comment. First of all, I'm surprised that the panel hasn’t mentioned anything about making the public aware of information level and how to forward that. Dr. Flynn in the last one said it’s going to take a cultural change for a lot of these things, for the American public to get involved, and also corporations and everything else for homeland defense.

I'm Mike Redmond. I'm a Booz Allen employee, and I work for the Air Force Office of Homeland Defense. Last week I had a retired colonel who came into my office, 22 years intel officer, and he was madly working at his computer and I said, “Norm, what are you doing?” He aid, “Just got off the bus this afternoon coming back from the Pentagon. I'm convinced that one of the guys I've seen on the intel website is a known terrorist,” and he pulled up the website and there he was. He said, “This is the guy who was sitting on the bus across from me.”

He called the FBI. Fortunately we have an OSI agent in the back. He told the OSI guy; right away he got to work, called the FBI, went through three or four phone numbers and was never called back. Called back the next day, there was no record of his call; no one came to see him from the FBI.

That’s the sort of thing that you have millions and millions of eyes and ears in the United States, and yet people in this room, possibly like myself, if I had the same situation, are not really aware how to feed these little bits of information, actionable intelligence up the chain. I know that 9/11, they knew there was a guy down there who didn’t want to know how to fly airplanes, he didn’t want to know how to take them off, he didn’t want to know how to land; he just wanted to know how to fly large airplanes. Somebody knew about that, but it never got into the system.

So that’s my point.

MR. WATSON: I’ll just take the two questions, one from San Diego. I think there is a role for the federal government; it’s called money and coordination of that. I think there should be funding apparatus either through the grant process, or, if you're going to try to coordinate this information sharing from law enforcement, the federal piece-- I know the Navy has done a tremendous job in the two pilot projects they’ve started. They're going to expand to Honolulu and down to Corpus Christi and Jacksonville. They basically fund that. So I think it’s not a total dismissal of the federal piece, because the federal information is what really the local police want to get involved with and share that information. So you’ll probably see more and more of those as they come along.

To the question in the rear from a colleague, I think the American public is better educated after 9/11. Having been involved in the Oklahoma City case, I think if someone today shows up in a rural county in Pennsylvania or in a rural county in Kansas and tries to buy two tons of ammonia nitrate with a rental truck, that the owner’s never seen before and knows that he’s not a farmer or engaged in agriculture, I think that would get reported. Now, whether someone calls back immediately, or if he calls the local police, or if he calls the state police, but that type of information is through an education process of Americans. I think we’re better educated in that, and I think people are more receptive to report suspicious things.

But that leads me to the comment about this red/yellow code system that the US government uses, and I won’t draw that out, but basically I think we probably should take a look at that system, because what are you going to do if you announce that you go from green to yellow to red? I mean, what are you really asking the American public to do? If you have specific threat information through actionable intelligence or you have information you think something bad is going to happen in a mall in Little Rock, the last thing you want to do is put that information out because you want to be able to investigate that and catch the people and wrap up the case, so to speak.

If you have very generic information, of which the politicians have struggled with, because if you are in fact a politician and you say there’s a mall north of Dallas, Texas. It’s reported by a walk-in from Ascension that you can’t repolygraph and you can’t get anymore information out, you're in a dilemma.” Do you put that out? If you put that out, what are you going to do about it? What are you asking people to do about it? Certainly, the businesses at the mall don’t want that put out. Secondly, the bad guys would love to see that put out, because then they know the federal government’s on to them in the mall, “we’ll go somewhere else,” be it Seattle or Portland.

So that system you have to really look at and evaluate, but I certainly believe that there is a distinction between what you tell the public and when you tell them, and you have to balance that with the political risk involved. If one in a million chance something bad was going to happen in the Lackawanna Six up in Buffalo, the decision is made, let’s get rid of these guys and let’s take them off the street, even if we charge them with credit card fraud, or whatever.

I would love to talk to you about Moussaoui. There are a lot of things that have not come out -- that’s a gag order by the federal judge. I will say that it is inaccurate, and the press has picked up on it, that there were statements made that he didn’t want to learn how to take off or land; that’s not totally accurate. So I’ll pass on that, and I think that’s where I’ll stop.