The information shortcomings of 9/11: one of the most important lessons of September 11, 2001, may be that informational--not organizational--solutions are necessary as organizations and governments evolve from the Information Age to the Intelligence Age.

On July 22, 2004, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission) released its revealing report on the al Qa'ida assault on the homeland. Among other things, it documents the shortcomings in American law enforcement, intelligence, leadership, and congressional oversight.

According to the commission, the U.S. government did know that such a scenario was possible. It knew of the 1994 hijacking and attempt to crash an Mr France jet into the Eiffel Tower. It knew of Ramzi Yousef's 1995 foiled conspiracy in the Philippines to use multiple U.S. airliners against explicit domestic targets; it applied this threat scenario in the 1996 counterterrorism planning for the Atlanta Olympics. It saw a widely circulated 1999 report from the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) National Intelligence Council that highlighted the potential for terrorists to crash explosives-laden civilian aircraft into critical national targets; and it again applied this threat scenario in 2001 when a no-fly zone was established in Genoa for a G8 meeting of major industrial democracies. Yet, despite these many warnings, over a seven-year period, the U.S. government had not responded with an effective plan that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

With 9/11, the nation experienced a classic failure of knowledge management as described by C.W. Holsapple in Handbook of Knowledge Management--a failure to bring together the collective explicit information in its possession, the tacit knowledge of its officers, and the embedded knowledge (i.e., the core competencies of an organization including its processes and services) that it possessed. As a result, new knowledge was not created through effective information management and analysis processes so that this asymmetric threat could be anticipated and mitigated.

The Commission Recommendations and the Fallacy of Reorganization

The commission identified highly detailed shortcomings and issued 41 recommendations that generally set broad policy objectives but most substantively focused on organizational change within the government. (See "Key 9/11 Commission Recommendations," p. 37.) The most concrete recommendations called for the appointment of a new director of national intelligence (DNI) and the creation of a national counterterrorism center as well as an undetermined number of other independent intelligence centers that would focus on key issues (e.g., proliferation or regional issues) and report to the DNI. Information sharing and analysis received much less attention from the commission, although they have been considered in recent executive orders and proposed legislation. (See "Knowledge Sharing Through Enterprise Architecture," p. 38.)

The commission's focus on reorganization and bureaucratic overhead presents challenges: increased costs, decreased agility and speed in intelligence analysis and operations, and diminished diversity and precision of intelligence judgments that together guarantee the nation's safety. Today, for example, there are many intelligence products from the intelligence community and even National Intelligence Estimates that go through a complex but efficient coordination process to ensure that the views of intelligence experts are heard, noted, and made available to policymakers. As Bruce D. Berkowitz and Allan E. Goodman note in Best Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age, avoiding hierarchical rigidity is optimal because "a flexible, decentralized intelligence community managed through market-like mechanisms is better suited to the new environment."

Richard Betts, director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University and a member of the National Commission on Terrorism, also recognized the limited efficacy of organizational change: "The only thing worse than business as usual would be naive assumptions about what reform can accomplish." Indeed, government officials such as U.S. Comptroller General David Walker have testified before Congress about the need for intelligence to "minimize the number of layers ... emphasize horizontal versus vertical actions" and be organizationally nimble. In the Information Age, clear, short, and direct lines of control appear essential to intelligence gathering and analysis because of the swiftness required to manage knowledge effectively.

Assessing Intelligence Shortcomings

Former Director of the CIA George Tenet said the United States is safer today in certain respects than it was three years ago given that two-thirds of the al-Qa'ida leadership has been taken into custody or eliminated. But according to the 9/11 report, the country remains an insecure, vulnerable environment because of the increasingly virulent threat of terrorism as it becomes institutionalized in independent communities worldwide.

Uncertainty also lingers, given the lack of precision to date in addressing the institutional shortcomings noted by the 9/11 Commission and as evidenced by several competing bills in Congress. Included among them are Pep. Porter Goss' (R-Fla.) legislation, the "Directing Community Integration Act," which would remove domestic restrictions on the CIA; Sen. Pat Roberts' (R-Kan.) bill, the "9/11 National Security Protection Act" which would dismantle the CIA; bipartisan legislation sponsored by Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), the "9/11 Commission Report Implementation Act," which would most directly implement all commission recommendations; and a bill by Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lieberman, which would focus more narrowly on organizational change and limit centralized control of defense and intelligence agencies.

Rather than rushing to organizational solutions, the specificity of the identified shortcomings suggests that the root causes of the information "malfunctions" be addressed with surgical precision and "repair" according to General William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency. More specifically, the root causes of the deficiencies identified by the commission can be categorized into five broad areas that have everything to do with information and little, if anything, to do with organization. These challenges include:

* Revitalizing the intelligence warning process

* Investing in human operations

* Establishing a professional cadre of information analysts throughout the government

* Resolving the dysfunctional information space within agencies * Engineering a new policy on information sharing among agencies

* Correcting a fundamental misunderstanding of intelligence that has emerged

Challenge 1--Revitalize the Intelligence Warning Process

Intelligence as a product takes various forms. For example, current intelligence addresses day-to-day events with a focus on new developments while estimative intelligence addresses the future and informs on the range of possible developments. Warning intelligence is a different product and specific focus--it provides alarms through identifying events that pose a significant security threat to the United States.

Warning of surprise attacks has been a focus of American intelligence since Pearl Harbor with a defined methodology that includes: development of a full range of hypotheses as to potential surprise attack vectors (i.e., who and how); identification of indicators (i.e., key evidence) that would support individual hypotheses; specific assignment of human and technical sources to collect on these indicators; and development of mitigation or defense strategies.

Yet the commission noted the intelligence community did little in this regard prior to 9/11. Concerns after the first Gulf War prompted a study on warning intelligence by then-CIA Director Robert M. Gates, but implementation of its recommendations languished. Later, responsibility for counterterrorism warnings was passed from unit to unit in the intelligence community and no organized, imaginative effort emerged to develop and analyze attack scenarios including those involving aircraft, boat bombs, or other potential terrorist threats. Even a December 4, 1998, directive by then-CIA Director Tenet stating "We are at war" with al-Qa'ida had little, if any, effect. As a result, there was surprise at the highest levels of government, and those agencies that could have mitigated the risk (e.g., the Federal Aviation Administration) were uninformed and unprepared. Revitalizing the warning process with adequate and dedicated staff resources and consistent leadership might mitigate this shortcoming in the future.

Challenge 2--Invest in Human Information Operations 

Tenet said repeatedly before and after the 9/11 attack that the United States must rebuild its clandestine services to meet the threats of the environment. But despite progress, this effort will require at least an additional five years, according to Tenet's testimony before the commission and statements by Rep. Goss at his September 14 nomination for CIA director hearings.

In part, this timeline results from a lack of investment during the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet threat and in part from a need to reengineer human operations for a new target. The funding and political direction are behind this objective and there have been successes against al-Qa'ida targets. But much more will need to be done as the intelligence community rebuilds and refocuses on the new target of terrorism.

Challenge 3--Establish Professional Analysis Throughout Government

Homeland security depends on recognizing the critical informational and process differences between analysis for law enforcement and analysis for strategic or intelligence purposes. The former focuses on the collection of specific information in the context of an actual crime and individualized suspected wrongdoing while the latter addresses the collection of generalized information that may prove relevant to future investigations, often without any evidence of specific wrongdoing. The purpose of intelligence is to collect that totality of information relevant to a mission and to develop knowledge of actions, events, and/or threats that might affect domestic stability or national security.

This dichotomy is important because law enforcement tends to do the first well and the second less well, as exemplified by the infamous Phoenix Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) memo that advised of the "possibility of a coordinated effort by Usama Bin Ladin (sic)" to send students to U.S. flight schools but was ignored. The commission documented this problem in detail.

Specifically, the FBI culture has focused on reacting to crime. Its agents have developed and tightly held information about individual cases and not as part of a strategic intelligence effort. For example, it was not until the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that prevention and intelligence were considered important. However, personnel resources failed to be applied and even a 1998 strategic plan that called for a professional cadre of analysts did not change the status quo. In fact, the commission found that a 1999 internal FBI review revealed that two-thirds of its analysts were unqualified to perform analytical duties and often were used to perform data entry and answer telephones. Although that review made recommendations for improvements, little changed with respect to the importance of the intelligence function or the analytical capability.

These practices confirm that the discipline of professional analysis has not been implemented throughout the intelligence community and may suggest a lack of understanding of the discipline. The roots of professional analysis date to General William Donovan's appointment as coordinator of information and, later, as the director of the Office of Strategic Services by President Roosevelt. Donovan understood that research and analysis were the heart of any intelligence organization and enlisted William Langer, the respected diplomatic historian from Harvard, and others trained in the academic paradigm of research, to create the forerunner of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence. Through their efforts, intelligence analysis is now based on the scientific method.

This means judgments are developed through a rigorous, scientifically based human process of analysis of competing hypotheses. It proceeds from the identification of a full range of hypotheses (i.e., prospective answers to the research question), the evaluation of the evidence and assumptions for consistency or inconsistency with each hypothesis, and the identification of most-likely outcomes. Without this approach, intelligence becomes an exercise in satisficing--selecting the first-identified or even politically favored hypothesis that appears appropriate, according to Richards I. Heuer Jr.'s Psychology of the Intelligence Analysis.

Of course, this process has shortcomings, including having unwarranted confidence in given evidence, failing to re-validate prior judgments, failing to account for the cascading effect of probabilities, and interpreting ambiguous data in ways that avoid past errors. But this process based on the scientific method has proven its value over time.

Progress on establishing a professional analyst cadre is currently taking place. FBI Director Robert Mueller has begun to change the agency's culture and skill base, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the 9/11 Commission. For example, 2003 saw the creation of the new position of assistant director for intelligence as well as efforts to professionalize analysis through the establishment of a College of Analytical Studies at the FBI National Acadamy in Quantico, Virginia. However, the commission observed that significant questions remain about the "qualifications, status, and role of most analysts in the field." Developing a premier analytical capacity is a leadership issue that can and must be addressed by precision management efforts.

Challenge 4--Resolve the Dysfunctional Information Space Within Agencies

Perhaps the information collection and analysis environment at the FBI best illuminates the conundrum facing much of local, state, and national government today--critical demands but a poor information space in which to work because data is not integrated and technology tools are lacking. Quite simply, departments and bureaus have hundreds of isolated systems (i.e., stove-piped or vertical applications) that manage redundant data and do not communicate effectively, if at all, with each other. The consequences are substantial, including high costs, because hardware, software, and information common to all projects are redundantly procured or developed. Inefficiency is also a problem because a stove-piped environment is slow, ineffective, complex, and fragile. But most of all, from a mission perspective, there are inconsistent answers because there is no authoritative data source. Such an environment prevents the right people from having the right information when necessary. This environment continues to exist for many reasons. In part it reflects the nature of information technology development in government where each unit has some resources that permit construction of mission-specific, unique applications. In part it is due to the cost of reengineering that appears to provide little in terms of new mission functionality. And lastly, part of the reason lies in the demands for data protection ranging from national security classification and compartmentalization (i.e., strictly limiting access to pre-selected individuals) to resistance and integration for reasons of bureaucratic power. The result, as documented in testimony to the 9/11 Commission, is that there is no effective mechanism for capturing and sharing institutional knowledge in some agencies, and the complexity in the data architecture means that most, if not all, agencies simply do not know what information they possess.

The solution may be creating internally integrated data repositories. According to the GAO, a comprehensive enterprise architecture that defines the business processes, services, data, and security rules in conformity with the Federal Enterprise Architecture should also be implemented, but this will require both technical and management leadership.

Challenge 5--Empower and Reengineer Sharing Among Agencies

Information sharing between peers (i.e., horizontal) as well as among federal, state, and local homeland security agencies (i.e., vertical) is a problem of legendary proportions and more complex than the security clearance and secure connectivity issues that often get more attention today. In December 2003, the Markle Foundation released its second report on national security in the Information Age, urging that the handling of intelligence be decentralized (i.e., networked and not hierarchical), that this network include federal and local government as well as private industry, that policies be adopted to empower and constrain the government (i.e., balance privacy and security interests), and that prevention be the focus, thus contemplating the need for strategic homeland security intelligence.

Several points follow from the Markle report. First, the problem from an analytical viewpoint has greatly expanded, as has the problem for the individual organizational node on the network--what information is needed and how it can be integrated into a solution. As former Acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard told the commission, the most "difficult thing about information sharing is trying to figure out what information will actually be important to someone else." The second problem is cultural. Sharing is constrained today by the context of classification that developed during the Cold War where the leak of a single bit of information could have catastrophic consequences, where the primary users were the most senior policymakers in the federal government, and where dissemination was limited by a rigid "need to know."

The picture today is vastly different and the mindset must be changed to broad sharing. But the complexity is that there are thousands of nodes of information in the United States and each does not know what it does not know or what it needs to know. Although there are processes in place to allow the dissemination of even sensitive information while protecting valuable sources and methods (e.g., sanitizing or tear-line dissemination that separates source-identification and source-provided information), they are cumbersome, tend to slow the flow of information, and often do not include state and local agencies. One remedy would be to create the less-sensitive dissemination versions up front while another solution would be to designate responsibility for this function both individually and agency-wide. The bottom line is that dysfunction exists in the current information-sharing model among homeland security departments at the state and federal level, indicating a need for reengineering. In his congressional testimony, Comptroller General Walker said the intelligence community must "move from a culture of 'need to know' to 'need to share.'"

Distinguishing Between Intelligence and Policy

The recurring demand for actionable intelligence is consistently heard as both a criticism of intelligence and a justification for policy decisions that may prove questionable. While it is critical for intelligence to make its factual findings and conclusions as quantitatively and qualitatively explicit as possible, consumers must understand what the intelligence process can provide. Quite simply, the inputs (i.e., relevant factual data) may be limited and must be augmented by assumptions, the risk of denial and deception cannot be eliminated completely and, perhaps most importantly, the question or issue posed must be capable of answer.

In the Cold War era, American intelligence focused intensely on a single threat and attempted to answer very specific questions--puzzles that could be solved if the requisite information could be obtained. Today, as reported by the 9/11 Commission, the United States faces the opposite situation--its enemies are individuals and non-governmental groups exploited by virtue of their disconnection with the Information Age and the resulting world economy. In this environment, many intelligence questions cannot be resolved as a matter of logic because they depend on events yet to happen, such as human intentions that will unfold or factors that will converge by chance.

Frank Cilluffo, R.A. Marks, and G.C. Salmoiraghi observed in a Washington Quarterly article, "Analysts are estimators, not clairvoyants. Analysts can explain a trend or understand a motive, but they will not know everything." Therefore, there exists a cloud of mysteries where intelligence collection and analysis methodologies can inform (i.e., enable understanding of the threat and identification of vulnerabilities) but cannot provide an answer where none exists. In essence, the intelligence process, however rigorous, does not remove the responsibility for difficult decision-making from the national leadership--policy decisions are inherently definitive while intelligence judgments are nuanced and offer only probabilities.

Moving Toward the Intelligence Age

However the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission are ultimately implemented, it is critical that the root causes of the United States' intelligence failures are addressed with precision and specificity. Reorganization may well be a feckless response to system failures. Even when required, the challenges associated with government reorganization are enormous and a thoughtful, deliberate reorganization is mandatory.

Rather than facile changes, complex reengineering and problem-solving must be the focus. If the United States is to be successful in its homeland security mission, it will require many more professionally trained analysts throughout the intelligence and law enforcement community as well as the elimination of stove-piped information repositories and effective sharing predicated on well understood data architectures. In addition, the intelligence system that results must continue its independence from political considerations and maintain its competitive nature. The commission's call for imagination will come from an analytical corps that views the totality of the information space through different prisms, with different perspectives, attempting to solve the threat and issues presented.

Such challenges also face most other public and private sector organizations. Indeed, engineering an effective information space and turning information into intelligence has become "the most critical management tool of cutting-edge business leaders" according to author Larry Kahaner. In essence, effective organizations must evolve from the Information Age to the Intelligence Age.

References

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At the Core

This article * examines the information deficiencies of the U.S. government

* discusses the challenges for information management in the U.S. intelligence community

* explores how to improve the information management challenges faced by the United States and lessons to be learned

Key 9/11 Commission Recommendations

I. Develop a global counterterrorism strategy

* Four recommendations to identify sanctuaries and refocus efforts in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia 

II. Prevent continued growth of Islamic terrorism

* Nine recommendations to use communications, collaborative relationships with other countries, and economics to win the battle of ideas in the Middle East

III. Protect against future homeland attacks

* Eight recommendations that target travel, including enhanced use of physical and information-screening systems such as biometrics

* Three recommendations to protect civil liberties

* Four recommendations that improve preparedness, including conducting risk assessments and improving communications interoperability

IV. Reorganize the government

* Five recommendations that would establish a national director of intelligence, specialized intelligence centers, rebuild core capabilities in the CIA, and move paramilitary operations to the Department of Defense

V. Enhance information sharing

* Two recommendations to better balance security and sharing

VI. Improve congressional oversight of intelligence

* Three recommendations that would focus oversight in fewer committees

VII. Refocus the domestic security apparatus

* Three recommendations to enhance the intelligence function and analysis, in particular at the FBI, and to require regular assessments by the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security as to threats and adequacy of defensive plans

Knowledge Sharing Through Enterprise Architecture

President Bush's executive orders of August 27, 2004, and the Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)-Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) legislation "The 9/11 Commission Report Implementation Act of 2004," provide direction toward the goal of effective knowledge sharing that is, of course, predicated on first documenting the data architectures in the 15 intelligence community agencies and then establishing processes to build a knowledge base on terrorism. For example, the executive order establishing the National Counterterrorism Center provides that the center and intelligence agencies shall establish "architectures for the effective access to and integration, dissemination, and use of terrorism information" and that the center shall "serve as the central and shared knowledge bank on known and suspected terrorists and international terror groups."

The McCain-Lieberman legislation furthers this goal of knowledge sharing in even more specific ways and is predicated on the fact that "potentially helpful information" to preventing the tragedy of 9/11 was available. It requires a baseline inventory in directory form of current federal systems and documentation of all terrorism-related information in the hands of the federal government. It further requires a system design for a trusted knowledge management network of terrorism-related information that would permit not only sharing but also collaboration at all government levels.

However, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has consistently observed that without an enterprise architecture to guide information management and technology, an organization cannot improve its data and data systems to facilitate meaningful sharing and interoperability. In addition, the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 requires that federal agencies develop and maintain an information technology (IT) architecture, and the E-Government Act of 2002 further requires the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to oversee the development of enterprise architectures within and across agencies.

As a result, the OMB has created the Federal Enterprise Architecture, defined by four functional layers-business, services, data+information, and technical. Effective inter- and intra-organizational sharing requires that an agency's data be documented in each of these spheres so it can be aligned with corresponding data and activities in other agencies and a knowledge framework can be created.