- A long-awaited report from the bipartisan commission
investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks calls for better information
sharing among government agencies, adoption of biometric technologies and
the completion of a visitor tracking system as soon as possible.
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- The 10-member National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
Upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission, today released
its 585-page final report that probed the federal government's failures
leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Commission members
did not lay specific blame on anyone, but they did say there were several
unexploited opportunities.
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- "Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies did
not manage or share information or effectively follow leads to keep pace
with a very nimble enemy," said Thomas Kean, the commission's chair,
during a press conference today. "Our border, immigration and aviation
security agencies were not integrated into the counter-terrorism effort."
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- The report suggested that more attention should be paid
to enterprise systems. "In interviews around the government, official
after official urged us to call attention to frustrations with the unglamorous
'back office' side of government operations," the report said.
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- Commission members issued a number of recommendations
to improve information sharing, intelligence collection and analysis, use
of biometric passports, and better border and airport screening of passengers.
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- For example, the commission said information should be
shared horizontally, transforming a system from an "old mainframe,
hub-and-spoke concept," where there are standalone databases, to a
decentralized network model, where databases are searchable across agency
lines.
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- The report called for better technology and training
to detect terrorist travel documents and the use of biometric identifiers,
or unique physical characteristics, to authenticate such documents. United
States officials are taking steps already, such as requiring foreign visitors
to have machine-readable, tamper-resistant passports with embedded biometric
identifiers. However, commission officials said Americans should not be
exempt from carrying biometric passports as well.
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- The Homeland Security Department should complete a biometric
entry/exit screening system, called the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status
Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program as soon as possible, according
to the report. There should be improved use of no-fly lists to screen airline
passengers as discussions for revamping the Computer Assisted Passenger
Prescreening System (CAPPS) II continue. Transportation assets also should
be protected.
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- "The most powerful investments may be for improvements
in technologies with applications across the transportation modes, such
as scanning technologies designed to screen containers that can be transported
by plane, ship, truck or rail," the report said. "Though such
technologies are becoming available now, widespread deployment is still
years away."
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- The report also recommended the creation of a new National
Intelligence Director, replacing the Director of Central Intelligence,
to unify the intelligence community. Among the numerous duties, the new
National Intelligence Director would establish information sharing and
information technology policies to maximize data sharing and implement
security policies to protect information.
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- Commission officials called for a National Counterterrorism
Center (NCTC), built on the foundation of the Terrorist Threat Integration
Center (TTIC), the year-old multifederal agency initiative to integrate
and analyze terrorist threat-related information collected domestically
and internationally from 21 different networks.
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- The NCTC would be a center for joint operational planning
and joint intelligence staffed by employees from various agencies. The
report said the intelligence function should build on TTIC and remain distinct
as a national intelligence center within NCTC. A new joint operational
planning function would be added to that, but it would leave the execution
of operations to the individual agencies.
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