Lawmakers are cautiously optimistic that the Homeland Security Department and other federal agencies are on the way to sharing better, more relevant and clearer threat information with state and local law enforcement officials.
Through the Interagency Threat Assessment and Coordination Group (ITACG), agencies will work with state and local officials to develop a common vocabulary and a standard process for what types of information need to flow to and from state fusion centers.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Homeland Security Committee’s Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment Subcommittee, and other members of Congress met today in Washington with ITACG members, including federal, state and local law enforcement officers. She said she is hopeful information-sharing barriers will begin to come down.
“The reason we wanted this is not a question of horizontal information sharing, the National Counterterrorism Center is doing reasonably well at that,” Harman said. “We need better vertical information sharing.”
She added that the best way to do that was to have a state and local perspective at the center.
“It is absolutely critical for information at the national level to be communicated to state and local [officials] in useful form,” Harman said. ITACG “needs to help create a language that is not presently in threat reporting so at the local level they can make judgments of how serious the threats are.”
ITACG includes four local law enforcement officers, who are members of the group for one year; four federal members; and two federal contractors.
Harman and others have been calling for state and local participation at the federal level when analyzing possible threats, but DHS and other agencies have resisted, she said.
So lawmakers added this requirement to the Implementing the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act, signed into law in August. It took another month until DHS agreed to participate through a memorandum of agreement, which it signed Sept. 30, to begin implementing the coordination group.
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