15 May 2007
Information Sharing
They say it is going to get hot this afternoon, spiking up to the eighties. I think there is a case for breaking out a poplin suit for the meeting out in Fairfax, or maybe the venerable seersucker. Of course, it could rain. I will have to stay connected to the radio for crucial breaking information.
I have a briefing to give on the background to a business opportunity. I wrote it while I was thinking about something else, something that I can't share at the moment, though you would be interested in the story. I know it fascinates and compels me in a creepy way, but it is a matter still under investigation and likely to continue for a while.
So, sorry about that. It is really too bad. That story has everything in it, and I mean everything, but it is not information that can be shared.
I can tell you all about the Information Sharing Environment. It is an interesting story about how it came about. The problem is as old as radio communications, but in my mind the tipping point was in 1980 during the hostage rescue mission at Desert One during Operation EAGLE CLAW. The wizards at NSA knew the local weather on the ground in Iran but could not tell the Americans flying into the disastrous sandstorm because the information was classified.
That was kept pretty tight, though the facts have been available for years. It actually did not cause much to change on the information front. The comic opera during the invasion of Grenada in 1983 is what blew things wide open.
During Operation URGENT FURY an Army Ranger on the ground discovered that his radios could not tune to the frequencies used by the Navy, and wound up doing command and control on the ground via a payphone and his AT&T calling card.
The situation was so absurd that it became one of the driving factors in passage of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation mandating integration of the armed forces. Since the interoperability problem had been simmering for half a century, I guess it is not unreasonable that they are having problems in the Department of Homeland Security, which is all of four years old.
The easy problem was interoperability; that is, ensuring radios (and computers) could talk to one another. Making people use them was the challenge, and changing the law forced the armed services to confront a long-standing cultural problem.
So over the past two decades the radios were fixed, and joint force operations on the part of the Department of Defense became the norm, rather than the exception. But almost twenty years to the day from the island invasion, the massive flaws in the system were revealed as the airliners flew into the Towers and the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania.
It actually goes back to the lessons that were taught but not learned at Desert One. It was not an NSA problem, not exclusively, nor a CIA problem, though they had some critical information, nor even a Justice problem, though they should have figured it out all by themselves.
The firemen in New York were brave, but ill-served, since they could not talk to the police, who could talk to the hovering helicopters and wisely got their people out of the towers. The people who were coordinating the overall response were located in the Mayor's Emergency Command Center, which was located in 7 World Trade, which collapsed several hours after the twins.
The point to it all is that information was not available to those that needed it, up and down the levels of command and across the agencies supposed to protect us, or respond to disaster.
The legislation overhauling the intelligence community was passed in 2004, and contained direction to provide an “information sharing environment” that would fix the problem. A retired Navy Captain was put in charge of the office, with a deputy and two contractors working for him.
There was no budget, and he was supposed to report to the President on how he intended to link sixteen members of the Intelligence Community in a seamless efficient architecture with DoD, DHS, and 50,000 state, local and tribal entities, sharing vital information while protecting sources and methods of law enforcement and intelligence.
Of course he failed, and of course he was fired. The next one appointed was a former Ambassador, and he was on his way to failing, too, not because he was incompetent, but because the problem, as constituted, was insoluble.
The reason that I wrote my briefing is that there is a request from the government to bid on a contract to work on the problem. My company has an interest in it, and should their response be deemed appropriate, it might even become my problem.
The contract is being offered through the Intelligence Community, and as you can see, it is only partly an intelligence problem. It does not address the fact that most of the things worth blowing up in America are owned by private parties, just like the Trade Center. I am not sure how you connect the dots with them, though I am confident it is not an IC problem.
I'll be curious to see who wins the contract. I am pretty sure that a root canal would be more fun.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com