The government is at the “end of the beginning” of its efforts to successfully share homeland security and intelligence information, with significant cultural and administrative challenges still ahead, the country’s information sharing chief has said.
Ambassador Thomas McNamara, program manager for the director of national intelligence’s Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE), had borrowed the famous Winston Churchill quote to describe the state of information sharing across the federal government.
“Sharing has got to become the rule, not the exception,” McNamara added during the keynote address at an AFCEA International conference today in Washington. “What we’ve got to do is vastly expand what we have already accomplished.”
McNamara told the crowd of mostly Defense Department employees and industry consultants that if the government failed to keep pace with the information age and improve its information sharing, it would be a disaster.
Through the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, Congress directed President Bush to select a program manager to oversee the governmentwide ISE. The PM-ISE is responsible for getting authorities to do something that observers say did not happen well enough before the 2001 terrorist attacks—share information.
McNamara said that the need-to-know culture is at the heart of the problem. Getting middle managers engaged and passionate about improving information sharing is critical to tackling the problem, he added, also citing budgetary constraints as another problem.
“The private sector is decades ahead of the federal government in information management,” said McNamara, who was appointed to head the office in March 2006. “We don’t have to first change the culture and then find the technology that will assist us—the technology is there waiting.”
He pointed to the establishment and growth of state and local fusion centers, which states and local governments started after the terrorist attacks, as an example of progress. The centers now increasingly benefit from federal guidance, participation and funding. He also cited the 2004 establishment of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which he characterized as a national fusion center, as an example of an enhanced information-sharing environment in which state, local and federal authorities work together. Uniform standards, such as the suspicious-activity reporting standards that PM-ISE published in January, are also central to improving information flows across all levels of government, he added.
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