State intelligence fusion centers, which have received praise and federal funds as a tool for merging terrorism, law enforcement and all-hazard intelligence, are struggling to produce useful information as a result of tangled technology and unclear missions, according to a nationwide study.
The report, titled “Fusion Centers: Issues and Options for Congress” and completed this month by the Congressional Research Service, cited problems with the centers’ lack of connectivity with existing law enforcement databases and poor compliance with federally backed technical data-sharing standards. Federal agencies have contributed to the problems by spewing overlapping data at the centers via uncoordinated and insecure networks that are hard to use, the auditors said.
Thomas McNamara, program manager of the Information Sharing Environment at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, responded to the criticism by stating in a public meeting today that the CRS report had been misinterpreted. Part of McNamara’s response involved a restatement of the fact that fusion centers differ in the type of information they handle, a topic the CRS report clarifies in a discussion of congressional efforts to forge a national fusion center strategy.
The CRS report cites state officials’ complaints about the high costs of preparing facilities to meet federal standards for handling highly classified information.
The state officials reportedly said that different federal agencies require divergent technologies to protect the workstations that handle their classified information. The lack of reciprocity and coordination among federal agencies in the area of technical requirements for secure facilities forces costs upward, according to state officials cited in the CRS report.
Fusion center officials cited costs of $75,000 to $100,000 to provide the secure space needed to protect each classified workstation that federal agencies provide and said state governments aren't reimbursed for those expenses.
Even if the technical means of information sharing worked, the rules for shifting data across systems hinder the process, state officials told the congressional investigators. The officials cited more than 100 categories of sensitive but unclassified information.
The federal government plans to reduce that plethora of classification categories to three under a project known as the Controlled Unclassified Initiative, but those changes have not received final approval, the report said.
The state centers’ technology woes are reinforced by the fact that many states lack systems to pool data from relevant databases and networks within their jurisdictions. “Such systems are expensive and potentially problematic in getting all agencies with homeland security-related missions to adopt a particular system,” the report stated.
The auditors cited one fusion center that had access to only 30 percent of the law enforcement data available in the state. Officials at that center said their connectivity compared well to that of comparable centers.
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
