Information Overload?

While the U.S. intelligence community struggles to create inter-agency links and eliminate the barriers that prevent them from communicating and preventing another terrorist attack, some officials have sounded an alarm on a problem few considered: too much unfiltered information.

Linton Wells II, the Defense Department's principal deputy assistant secretary of defense of networks and information integration, said John Negroponte, the head of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, told him agencies were sending out data like "spam."

Intelligence gatherers are tossing unfiltered information "over the transom" to the center in order to cover themselves in case an event does take place, Wells said at a National Defense Industrial Association conference on network-centric operations.

This is creating a "fog of information." Even the predictions of "Australian psychics" were finding their way to the center, Wells said.

Overall, the intelligence community is doing a better job of sharing information although there are still pockets of resistance, Wells said.

Clark Smith, director of the information sharing environment technical group in the office of the director for national intelligence, said the process is more complex than simply distributing memos and reports far and wide.

There is the risk of an "echo effect" where one piece of information on a possible terrorist attack goes out in a memo and it is suddenly repeated in a half-dozen other reports. The readers may believe there is a wealth of confirmations, when in fact, the intelligence is derived from only one source.

The challenge is "to track where the information is coming from, who is deriving it from what, and how the conclusions are being made," Smith said.

If the information derived from an echo effect prompts an orange alert when none is necessary, the nation will unnecessarily spend its resources, he said.

"Information sharing is about pushing data out, but pushing it in ways that the people who need it can digest it, based upon their role and responsibility," Smith said.