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(U) A Lesson in Sharing at the FBI (part 1)
FROM:
Intelligence Analysis Intern
Run Date: 10/12/2004
(U//FOUO) SID today asked IA interns who have done tours at other Intelligence Community
agencies to tell us what they've learned.
, currently doing a tour at the FBI,
provided the following observations...
(U//FOUO) My tour with the FBI has been split into two very different assignments. I spent the
first three months with Customer Account Management (S112) as a representative to the FBI's
Washington Field Office (WFO). During the second half of my tour I have been a forwarddeployed SIGDEV analyst from the Counterterrorism product line, detailed to the
Communications Analysis Unit (CAU) at FBI headquarters. Each of these positions has allowed
me to gain a big-picture understanding of the link (and, since 9/11, sometimes the blurry line)
between foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement. I was also able to experience firsthand the successes brought about by this relationship as well as the challenges inherent in it.
(U//FOUO) As we have all heard many times during the 9/11 Commission hearings, the FBI has
traditionally been and continues to be very good at investigating incidents after they have
occurred. However, their current challenge in the post-9/11 world is to improve their ability to
perform predictive and preventative analysis. They have made great strides toward this end by
devoting more resources to hiring and retaining qualified analysts and improving information
exchange with Intelligence Community partners. But, at least in my experience, there is more
that can be done. I think this point is illustrated well in the following example:
(C) I had been at WFO for about a month when I met an agent who had just returned from a 90day tour in Iraq where he was responsible for investigating attacks on coalition forces. He began
to list the names of several detainees he had interviewed during the course of his duties, and
explained that he often had little or no background information about these individuals before
going to speak to them. He was sometimes even forced to recommend that they be released
because he had no means of vetting their story. I remembered one of the names from my own
tour in Iraq one year earlier, and decided to do a brief search of NSA databases and Intelink
resources. I discovered that the individual I remembered was indeed the same person who had
been interviewed by the FBI.
(C) NSA's counterterrorism product line had issued dozens of product reports about him and his
extremist associates during the combat operations phase of OIF. All of these reports were
addressed to both FBI HQ and FBI WFO, but this valuable information never made it to the case
agent who was cleared to see it and could actually act on it. This experience was eye-opening for
me and further underscored the importance of being able to freely share information between
agencies. 9/11 has forced policy changes that are helping to make that happen at an
unprecedented rate. But it seems to me that education and infrastructure still remain as the two
main roadblocks to this effort. I will attempt to briefly address each of these in a little more
detail in part 2 of this article.
"(U//FOUO) SIDtoday articles may not be republished or reposted outside NSANet
without the consent of S0121 (DL sid_comms)."
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DERIVED FROM: NSA/CSSM 1-52, DATED 08 JAN 2007 DECLASSIFY ON: 20320108