[House Hearing, 109 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
BUILDING THE INFORMATION ANALYSIS
CAPABILITY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF
HOMELAND SECURITY
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, INFORMATION
SHARING, AND TERRORISM RISK ASSESSMENT
of the
COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
FEBRUARY 16, 2005
__________
Serial No. 109-2
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Homeland Security
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] TONGRESS.#13
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/
house
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY
Christopher Cox, California, Chairman
Don Young, Alaska Bennie G. Thompson, Mississippi
Lamar S. Smith, Texas Loretta Sanchez, California
Curt Weldon, Pennsylvania, Vice Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts
Chairman Norman D. Dicks, Washington
Christopher Shays, Connecticut Jane Harman, California
Peter T. King, New York Peter A. DeFazio, Oregon
John Linder, Georgia Nita M. Lowey, New York
Mark E. Souder, Indiana Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of
Tom Davis, Virginia Columbia
Daniel E. Lungren, California Zoe Lofgren, California
Jim Gibbons, Nevada Sheila Jackson-Lee, Texas
Rob Simmons, Connecticut Bill Pascrell, Jr., New Jersey
Mike Rogers, Alabama Donna M. Christensen, U.S. Virgin
Stevan Pearce, New Mexico Islands
Katherine Harris, Florida Bob Etheridge, North Carolina
Bobby Jindal, Louisiana James R. Langevin, Rhode Island
Dave G. Reichert, Washington Kendrick B. Meek, Florida
Michael McCaul, Texas
Charlie Dent, Pennsylvania
______
Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk
Assessment
ROB SIMMONS, Connecticut, Chairman
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania ZOE LOFGREN, California
PETER T. KING, New York LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana JANE HARMAN, California
DANIEL E. LUNGREN, California NITA M. LOWEY, New York
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada SHEILA JACKSON-LEE, Texas
STEVAN PEARCE, New Mexico BOB ETHERIDGE, North Carolina
BOBBY JINDAL, Louisiana JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island
DAVE G. REICHERT, Washington KENDRICK B. MEEK, Florida
CHARLIE DENT, Pennsylvania BENNIE G. THOMPSON, Mississippi
CHRISTOPHER COX, California (Ex (Ex Officio)
Officio)
(II)
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
STATEMENTS
The Honorable Rob Simmons, a Representative in Congress From the
State of Connecticut, and Chairman, Subcommittee on
Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk
Assessment..................................................... 1
The Honorable Zoe Lofgren, a Representative in Congress From the
State of California, and Ranking Member, Subcommittee on
Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk
Assessment..................................................... 2
The Honorable Christopher Cox, a Representative in Congress From
the State of California, and Chairman, Committee on Homeland
Security....................................................... 4
The Honorable Bennie G. Thompson, a Representative in Congress
From the State of Mississippi, and Ranking Member, Committee on
Homeland Committee............................................. 5
The Honorable Charlie Dent, a Representative in Congress From the
State of Pennsylvania.......................................... 19
The Honorable Bob Etheridge, a Representative in Congress From
the State of North Carolina.................................... 17
The Honorable Peter T. King, a Representative in Congress From
the State of New York.......................................... 16
The Honorable James R. Langevin, a Representative in Congress
From the State of Rhode Island................................. 20
The Honorable Sheila Jackson-Lee, a Representative in Congress
From the State of Texas........................................ 25
The Honorable Daniel E. Lungren, a Representative in Congress
From the State of California................................... 22
WITNESS
Lieutenant General Pat Hughes, (Retired), Acting Under Secretary,
Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection, Department
of Homeland Security
Oral Statement................................................. 6
Prepared Statement............................................. 7
APPENDIX
Material Submitted for the Record
Questions and Responses submitted by the Honorable Bennie
Thompson....................................................... 31
BUILDING THE INFORMATION ANALYSIS
CAPABILITY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
----------
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2005
U.S. House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information
Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment,
Committee on Homeland Security,
Washington, DC
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:06 p.m., in
Room 1334, Longworth House Office Building, Hon. Rob Simmons
[chairman of the subcommittee] presiding.
Present: Representatives Simmons, King, Lungren, Pearce,
Dent, Cox, Lofgren, Etheridge, Langevin, Thompson, and Jackson-
Lee.
Mr. Simmons. [Presiding.] The Subcommittee on Intelligence,
Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment will come to
order.
The subcommittee is meeting today to hear testimony on how
the fiscal year 2006 Department of Homeland Security budget
request helps further the information sharing and analysis
capabilities of the Department of Homeland Security. I am told
that we only have this room until 4:00 p.m., 1600 hours, today,
so I will be short in my comments, and then we will try to
extend to all members the opportunity to ask questions, but
also remind them that the room will be made available to
another group at 4 p.m.
I would like to recognize myself for an opening statement.
As we begin this first hearing of the Committee on Homeland
Security, Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and
Terrorism Risk Assessment, I would like to start by thanking
the Chairman, Chairman Cox, for his leadership in helping to
establish the full committee as a standing committee of
Congress. I look forward very much to working with my
colleague, Representative Lofgren from California, as the
Ranking Member of the subcommittee, and also the Ranking Member
of the full committee, Representative Thompson, who is with us
here today.
I represent the Second District of Connecticut. On
September 11, we lost 12 friends and neighbors. On September
11, we all failed in our constitutional responsibility to
provide for the common defense. This subcommittee has a vital
role to build our capabilities in intelligence, information
sharing and risk assessment to help prevent another terrorist
attack.
I would also like to make a second point. I believe in
bipartisanship when it comes to national security and homeland
security. When I joined the U.S. Army almost 40 years ago, I
put these dog tags around my neck. I wore them until I retired
from the U.S. Army Reserve in the year 2003. These dog tags
have my name on them, my serial number, my blood type and my
religion, but there is no mention of party affiliation. During
my years of public service, I have tried to be bipartisan. I
look forward to conducting the work of this subcommittee in a
bipartisan fashion.
Information analysis and warning is perhaps the most
important capability of the Department of Homeland Security.
Intelligence must drive our protection decisions, resource
allocations, and homeland security priorities. Since its
inception in March 2003, the Department of Homeland Security
has worked to construct a robust analytical capability and has
dedicated itself to fulfilling the broad statutory functions
outlined in the Homeland Security Act. The committee is
encouraged by the progress to date, but there is a lot more
work to do, and the responsibility for that work falls on us.
General Hughes, you have some challenges and opportunities
ahead of you. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention
Act of 2004 created a Director of National Intelligence and a
National Counterterrorism Center. This new reality will require
the office of Information Analysis of DHS to adjust to a new
operating environment. IA must take this opportunity to
continue to build on its initial progress and construct a fully
functioning and operational Intelligence Community component,
while ensuring that DHS maintains the vital link to its state
and local partners, and also ensuring that as we work to
protect the freedom and security of our homeland, we also
continue to protect and preserve our civil liberties.
The partnerships that you have engaged in have led to
central communications links between the federal government and
state, local, tribal and private sector officials. These links
help to ensure that the men and women on the frontlines in the
fight to protect our homeland have the essential information
they need to help prevent another terrorist attack. I hope your
testimony today will address how these links and partnerships
are being strengthened and refined to help keep America safe.
I welcome you, General Hughes, to the subcommittee today. I
also want to thank you, as somebody who has also worn the
uniform for, in my case, 37 years, 7 months, and 24 days, but
who is counting. When you are having a good time, you do not
count it all up. But I want to thank you for your very
distinguished service to our country. I look forward to hearing
your testimony.
I would like now to recognizing the Ranking Minority Member
of the subcommittee for any statement that she may wish to
make.
Ms. Lofgren. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for calling
this hearing to discuss the proposed fiscal year 2006 budget,
building the information analysis capability of the Department
of Homeland Security.
Mr. Chairman, I look forward to working with you. I hope to
be able to have a good, productive and professional
relationship on this subcommittee, as I enjoyed in the last
Congress with Chairman Thornberry. That was a very rewarding
experience for me, and I think for Chairman Thornberry.
We worked together as a team. We developed our hearings
together. We decided our witnesses together. We wrote bills
together. In the end of the Congress, we issued not a majority
report and a minority report, but we issued one report from our
committee. I hope that we will have that same level of success
in standing up for our country and making sure that we are
facing.
General Hughes, I welcome you and I look forward to hearing
your testimony, as we work with you as we seek to empower the
critical exchange of information within the Department of
Homeland Security. You have a difficult task, and I hope that
the subcommittee will be able to help you as you work to
enhance the department's capability to collect, aggregate,
analyze and share information.
I understand your office is responsible for four specific
tasks: analyzing and mapping terrorism threat intelligence to
vulnerabilities in the nation's critical infrastructure;
sharing information with state and local governments and at
times with the private sector on the public information
concerning terrorist threats; meeting operational efforts
regarding the homeland security advisory system; and providing
intelligence analysis to senior DHS officials.
As you may know, I served for 14 years on the Board of
Supervisors for in Santa Clara County, so I have a very keen
interest in how information is shared with local governments so
that they can take appropriate action. I am also very
interested in how we have assessed what is vulnerable so that
we can effectively map the threats that we discover.
Finally, I do not want to be a nag, but I am going to raise
it anyhow. This is your first meeting before us and so I am
going to cut a little slack to the department, but there is a
Committee Rule, rule 11(j), that requires witnesses to have
their statements to the committee in advance of the actual
hearing. It is 48 hours that testimony is to be submitted, and
we received your testimony just 4 hours ago.
So this is not a senseless rule. I like to read the
testimony before I come to a hearing and have the staff analyze
it, and receiving it 4 hours in advance of a hearing just does
not permit that. If we are going to do our job well, you need
to help us by complying with that rule. So I hope I will never
have to refer to that rule again, and I look forward to your
testimony.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Simmons. Thank you. That is a good and a useful comment
to make.
I would now like to recognize the Chairman of the full
committee, the gentleman from California, Mr. Cox, who I just
mentioned a few minutes ago has played an historic role, a
truly historic role, in bringing about a full Committee on
Homeland Security.
I believe the reorganization of our government over the
last several years is the largest reorganization we have
encountered since World War II, with the National Security Act
of 1947 and the creation of the Department of Defense. With
that massive reorganization goes a requirement to oversee the
Department of Homeland Security.
Chairman Cox has been a critical component in making sure
that the Congress lives up to its obligations in these
difficult, historic times.
Mr. Chairman?
Mr. Cox. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to begin by welcoming Chairman Simmons to this
subcommittee. We are picking up the work that was carried on in
the Select Committee on Homeland Security during the last
Congress. I do not think there is any question that by
background, Congressman Simmons is well suited to chair this
subcommittee. I do not think there is any question either that
Zoe Lofgren of California is very able and equipped to serve as
our Ranking Member on this subcommittee.
General Hughes, as you know, we have been on this
committee, at least as it was constituted in the last Congress,
aggressive supporters of your responsibilities in the
Department of Homeland Security. Since the last Congress, we
have enacted legislation creating a national Intelligence
Director and creating the NCTC that will have profound impacts
on the Information Analysis responsibility within the
Department of Homeland Security.
I note that this is not a packed hearing room and it is in
some senses ironic because I do not believe we will ever focus
on anything that is more central to the government's
responsibility in protecting Americans from terrorism than what
we are going to be talking about today. So to those of you are
here, you are involved in a very important undertaking on
behalf of our country.
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 gave the department a new
overriding counterterrorist mission that had not previously
been the job of any part of the federal government. It sought
to enable to department's success in this new mission through a
Directorate of Information Analysis and Infrastructure
Protection. The information analysis portion of that
directorate is the intelligence piece overview with prevention,
particularly when it comes to the eventual threat of terrorists
armed with nuclear weapons, not dirty bombs, but real nuclear
weapons, or terrorists armed with bio-weapons, particularly
bio-engineered weapons that are designed to be resistant to
antidotes and vaccines that we might have stockpiled. There can
be no overstating the importance of prevention. That is what
this is all about.
During the Cold War, I think we understood that dealing
with the response and recovery from a nuclear exchange was not
plan A, plan B, or plan C. We were very much focused on
avoiding that nuclear exchange. Likewise, the prospect that
terrorists might apply weapons of mass destruction now or in
the future has to cause us to focus enormous attention on
prevention. That is what we hope, notwithstanding the passage
of the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Implementation Act, we
can continue to do under the legal mandate of the Homeland
Security Act.
The memorandum of understanding on information sharing of
March 2003 was a truly unprecedented undertaking between the
Attorney General, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the
Secretary of Homeland Security. Its purpose is to move
information along and through these three communities free of
the longstanding constraints that existed prior. There are some
signs that are less encouraging or convey a mixed message about
our potential to achieve what we envisioned when we wrote the
Homeland Security Act and in passing the law in 2002, and when
this memorandum was agreed to in 2003.
I hope today, General Hughes, that we have the opportunity
to understand from you exactly where we are headed and whether
we have the resources to get there.
I thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Simmons. I thank you for your comments.
Now, the Chair would like to recognize the Ranking Member
of the full committee, Mr. Thompson from Mississippi.
Mr. Thompson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am appreciative of
you calling this hearing at this time. Even though we cannot
discuss the numbers for this department in open session, I
think there are some issues that we need to get on the table
real quick for the sake of the public.
I guess about 2 months ago, Ms. Lofgren and I had an
opportunity to look at the vulnerabilities of our
infrastructure by state. We were somewhat dismayed, Mr.
Chairman, at how inconsistent that list was by state, and we
are really concerned that somehow we have to have some
standardization associated with that infrastructure list. As I
understand it, there are some 85,000 vulnerabilities identified
from miniature golf courses to shopping centers and what have
you. But I am concerned about it, and I want to make sure that
we address it this year so that we all, as members of this
committee, can feel comfortable that those critical
infrastructures in our districts clearly are being identified
so that they can be protected.
In addition to that, I am concerned about this information
sharing across the board, whether or not we have satisfactorily
changed the culture of the department so that they are actually
talking to each other. We hear comments all along about
departments being territorial with their information, and if we
are indeed protecting the homeland. We ought to make sure that
all those agencies involved in protecting us are communicating
with each other. So I look forward to this hearing and many
more around this subject. Obviously, I look forward to your
testimony, General Hughes.
Thank you very much.
Mr. Simmons. I thank the gentleman for his comments. As
somebody who worked for the CIA for 10 years, and then finally
in military intelligence for over 30 years, sharing information
is a hugely important issue. Security is important, but a
perfectly secure piece of information which is not disseminated
is of no use. So what we have to do is come up with a balancing
act. We have to balance the needs for security with the needs
for sharing so that we can better protect the American
homeland. So that is a very good point.
General Hughes, thank you again for coming before the
subcommittee today. I will apologize to you in advance. I will
have to vacate myself from the chair in a few moments to meet
with the Secretary of the Navy in a prior commitment. I trust
that our distinguished full committee Chairman will be able to
carry on in my absence. I will be back as soon as possible.
Thank you for being here today, and we look forward to hearing
your testimony.
STATEMENT OF LIEUTENANT GENERAL PATRICK HUGHES (RETIRED),
ACTING UNDER SECRETARY FOR INFORMATION ANALYSIS, AND
INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION, AND ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR
INFORMATION ANALYSIS
Lieutenant General Hughes. Thank you very much. I am glad
to be here today, too. I may have been the victim of a
biological attack before coming here. I am a little ill.
Mr. Simmons. Spread it around.
Lieutenant General Hughes. I am trying not to. I hope you
will forgive me if I have to cough or blow my nose or
something. My apologies.
I liked your opening comments very much. I, too, have worn
a set of dog tags around for a long time, and have the same
frame of reference. I note that this is quite different,
however. I did not realize, I don't think, before I came to the
Department of Homeland Security how different it is to come
into my office in the morning and find myself examining a map
of the United States and operating in the construct of our
national values and civil liberties and rights of American
citizens, as compared to the military application of force in
an overseas environment. It is quite interesting to me, and has
caused me to have to shift to some degree my mind set.
I think I would like to apologize to the Congresswoman for
the delay in our testimony getting here. I would merely say we
did submit it on time, but the clearance process did not
respond. We will do our best, though, and your point is not
only well taken, but understood. So thank you very much.
I believe from your comments and Ms. Lofgren's comments and
others that I have to clear the air here. Otherwise, I will
proceed in this hearing under false pretenses. My last day on
this job will be March 15. You are speaking to someone who will
not be carrying out for the most part many of the hopes and
dreams that you have as a federal official, but in my future I
will continue to support the Department of Homeland Security,
and I will do everything I can to support the government in the
future. I would just like you to know that, because it sounded
like in your comments you did not know that, and you expected
me to be continuing in this job. I hope that is not too much of
a surprise to you.
Mr. Simmons. Well, you are on the hot seat right now, so
let's just keep you there until you disappear.
Lieutenant General Hughes. That is fine. I am not trying to
avoid anything. I merely want you to know my tenure here is
relatively short. I would be glad to answer questions about
that, if you would like me to include any ideas I might have
about my replacement.
The last comment I would like to make to you all is that I
have lived through the last year and a few months with you. I
have come before you on a few previous occasions formally and
several times informally. I have appreciated every opportunity
I have had to talk with you and interact with you. I can look
you directly in the eye and tell you that we have made
progress. We have made a lot of progress. In some cases, it is
not smooth or very attractive, but it is real. We are
continuing that progress. The dedication and devotion of the
people who are carrying out the work of the Department of
Homeland Security, if you have that in your mind, you can never
be in doubt.
We do require guidance and direction and we do require
measuring and rating at times, and we do require a steward and
admonition and wisdom from others. But the heart, the spirit,
the devotion and the dedication to duty is present in all of
those who serve in this department.
Thank you very much. I will be happy to answer questions
you ask.
[The statement of Lieutenant General Hughes follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF PATRICK M. HUGHES
Good morning Chairman Simmons, Congresswoman Lofgren and
distinguished Members of the Committee. It is a pleasure to appear
before you today to discuss the Information Analysis (IA) capability of
the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This time of year marks the
two-year anniversary of the actual ``stand up'' of the Department. We
have really been able to support the intelligence and information needs
of the Department for about 13 months. As we transition much of the
senior leadership of the Department and as we anticipate the arrival of
our new Secretary, we clearly intend to work to improve our
capabilities, but it is important to acknowledge the tremendous efforts
of the many individuals who have worked tirelessly to bring together a
functional and effective intelligence support organization. I want to
specifically mention the extraordinary men and women of the Information
Analysis and Information Protection Directorate (IAIP) with whom I am
so proud to have served. These superb professionals, laboring often in
the background, are focused on the business of the Department and the
Nation because they are 100 percent committed to our mission and our
Nation's security. Judging from the feedback I have personally
received, and according to my professional judgment, we--they--are
making a difference with our effort to provide accurate, timely,
actionable, and cogent information to the customers we serve.
It is also important to recognize the impressive strides made in
the area of information sharing, collaboration and cooperation at the
Federal level. We have worked hard to develop more robust and
deliberate interaction with our Federal partners, particularly with the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Our joint efforts with the National
Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), our relationships with DOD and the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other key departments, such as
Justice, State, and Energy, have greatly advanced our collective
capabilities and relationships. Our current information sharing and
collaboration environment within the government is far superior to that
which existed before the establishment of DHS and has notably improved
during the past year. We look forward to the advent of the Director of
National Intelligence and continuing progress throughout the
intelligence community.
Our efforts to build a DHS intelligence capability are oriented
around three overarching imperatives. These are: building and expanding
capacity within the Department; furthering our coordination and liaison
efforts with all of our stakeholders, domestic and foreign, government
and non-government; and, creating and distributing the work products
that will ensure we all have the right information, at the right time,
in the right way. . . to protect and preserve. In short, we are doing
our job supporting the Department of Homeland Security and in my view
doing it well.
As we evaluate and assess the roles and mission of the Office of
Information Analysis (IA), I believe we must acknowledge IA's role
within the broader construct of DHS. IA should be considered the Office
of Intelligence for the Department. This essential function will
include building out the intelligence infrastructure for DHS
Headquarters and ensuring the establishment of common Intelligence
Community (IC) standards that apply to the ``intelligence elements'' of
the ``components'' of DHS. The 9/11 Commission Report specifically
cited the continuing need to assimilate and analyze information from
DHS' own components. IA needs to better integrate, coordinate,
correlate and fuse these activities and the intelligence information
they produce, in partnership with all component intelligence elements.
IA, acting as the Departmental intelligence office, is developing a
plan for the integration and collective application of all DHS
component intelligence organizations in a way that will achieve greater
synergy in this mission area. IA is and will continue to develop as the
Departmental intelligence support element, while continuing to pursue
its statutory obligations under the Homeland Security Act. As you know,
IA is a part of the Intelligence Community and its funding is provided
by the Intelligence Authorization Act, the specifics of which are
classified. While I cannot go into classified specifics in this open
forum, I am more than ready to discuss IA's budget with you in an
appropriately classified session at your convenience.
We have a dynamic vision of how intelligence and information will
be analyzed, how the analytic elements of the Department will be
managed to achieve optimum benefit, and how to develop a budgetary
strategy that will unify the programs related to intelligence
activities and information analysis across DHS. A major collaborative
study is currently under way within the DHS to establish the baseline
for this effort. In addition, we seek to reshape the Department's
efforts consistent with the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism
Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA) and the new authorities of the Director
of National Intelligence (DNI).
No less important is the need for adequate facilities, analysts,
and program resources to assure that the complex and difficult process
for obtaining and analyzing intelligence is managed, operated and
sustained. It is not sufficient to simply create authorization for
fully funded U.S. Government employees without also providing the
resources to properly house these intelligence professionals in
facilities that are designed and constructed to facilitate the receipt,
handling, analysis, and storage of highly classified material in order
to protect and preserve our security. To that end, the 2006 budget
request includes $38 million to allow IAIP to fit out facilities that
meet security and information technology requirements and allow IAIP to
access and analyze intelligence, collaborate with our partners and
execute the mission we have been given. IAIP came into the Department
with no legacy facilities and no predetermined permanent housing. We
now have a plan to occupy both swing and permanent facilities that fit
our needs, and this funding request will enable us to complete that
plan.
As we work toward building IA's capability, we have framed our
thinking around a new paradigm that seeks to encompass ``all
information necessary to protect and preserve the homeland.'' Within
that environment are subsets of information such as defense or military
information, intelligence information, law enforcement information,
homeland security information, and critical infrastructure information
as well as public and private sector information. All of these types of
information make up the vast array of intelligence that DHS needs to do
its job.
DHS is a fully vested member of the IC and the Office of the
Assistant Secretary for Information Analysis represents the Department
in all IC venues, ensuring that DHS interests and requirements are
fully represented and considered among the community. IA analysts have
access to the most sensitive national intelligence regarding
international and domestic terrorist threats, and the interaction with
their peers throughout the IC continues to develop and improve. Much of
the information we receive comes to us from IA analysts' connections to
the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications Systems (JWICS), NCTC
Online, the IA Automated Message Handling System (AMHS), the Homeland
Security Information Network (HSIN), the Open Source Information System
(OSIS), and a variety of other formal and informal (i.e., analyst-to-
analyst) mechanisms. These information streams from external sources
are augmented by our own internal reporting from DHS components. We are
increasingly well informed, but not yet satisfied with this endeavor.
The range of intelligence and information coordinated by IA from
the IC, and our state, local, tribal, municipal and private sector
partners; as well as from all DHS entities with intelligence and
operational capabilities, is both impressive and daunting. These
entities--and their products--continue to be an important part of how
IA does its work.
IA's relationship with our colleagues in the Infrastructure
Protection (IP) Directorate is critical to our success. Jointly we are
able to deliver threat-informed vulnerability analysis and data-
supported risk assessments regarding our critical infrastructure to our
constituents and customers--notably the private sector, which owns the
vast majority of our nation's critical infrastructure.
IA is an integral part of the Homeland Security Operations Center
(HSOC) effort to monitor and communicate on all matters of homeland
security interest 24x7. Intelligence from DHS components that IA
correlates and analyzes provides invaluable perspectives and insight
for the entire Federal government. From a citizen providing a Patriot
Report on suspicious activity, to Border and Transportation Security
(BTS) reports regarding individuals of interest trying to enter the
United States illegally, or US Coast Guard reports regarding suspicious
activity near critical infrastructure. Such information is provided to
IA through the same methods the larger IC uses: the physical presence
of DHS component and IC element liaison officers within both IA and the
Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC), strong linkage between the
HSOC and our constituents, and communication between analysts and
leadership. In fact, the presence of representatives of 30 separate
Federal and local representatives within the HSOC provides a
perspective and collaboration capability that is virtually unique.
Additionally, coordination within DHS is aided by regular meetings of
the intelligence chiefs of each entity, led by the Assistant Secretary
for Information Analysis.
It is not sufficient to just produce information. In order to be
effective, information must be shared. DHS has developed this
capability and in cooperation with our Federal partners and is
coordinating information sharing among previously unconnected systems.
For example, DHS has collaborated with the Justice Department on the
DOJ Law Enforcement Sharing Plan. Further, the Homeland Security
Information Network (HSIN) is a ``system of systems'' that provides
discrete communities of interest for Law Enforcement, Counter
Terrorism, Analysts, Emergency Management, and Critical Infrastructure
groups to collaborate and share critical information in real time. In
addition, the DHS network provides the ability to pull together
participants from all of these communities, into a shared space to
collaborate, during any period when the threat creates the need.
Further, as a direct result of the Department's Information Sharing and
Collaboration (ISC) initiative to cooperate and work jointly with other
Federal partners, DHS and DOJ/FBI have established the first ever
capability to share information between our respective communications
and automation networks. Specifically, we were able to connect the
Homeland Security Information Network with the Regional Information
Sharing Systems (RISS) and Law Enforcement Online (LEO). More needs to
be achieved but we are on the right track
Already, the DHS ISC Program has engaged other Federal, State,
local, and Tribal, information sharing programs in an effort to create
synergy by fostering mutual awareness of their key programs and
capabilities, and creating a forum to garner feedback on policies and
procedures under development at the Federal level. Additionally, this
effort has resulted in the first ever capability to share information
among the State, local, and tribal information sharing systems.
IAIP's fiscal year 2006 budget request includes $7,482,000 for ISC.
The Department is budgeting an additional $5,000,000 from the Chief
Information Officer and $4,000,000 from the Working Capital Fund to
bring the total funding for ISC in fiscal year 2006 to $16,482,000.
In addition to receiving information from these entities, IA is
routinely sharing information and collaborating at all levels--from the
Federal Government and the IC to State and local officials. DHS
component organizations also serve as a conduit through which
information and warnings can pass to government at all levels. Thus,
IA's continuous information sharing and collaboration with the HSOC,
BTS, USCG, and other DHS entities, provides valuable information to all
of the men and women responsible for protecting the homeland.
It is IA's specific focus on the protection of the American
homeland against terrorist attack that is unique among its IC partners.
This focus provides invaluable information and assistance not only to
State, territorial, tribal, local, and private sector officials that
receive accumulated threat information, but also to DHS components that
use the information, trends, and indicators to inform and prepare
operators and decision makers on the front line. The relationship IA
has with the HSOC, BTS, and other DHS entities translates into
continuous information sharing and collaboration that provides a unique
threat picture and actionable information to those who are vital to
protecting the homeland.
The Department of Homeland Security is a prime example of how
changes have been made within the Intelligence Community, the
counterterrorism community, the law enforcement community and the
response community to work more cohesively as well as more
collaboratively, and to assure information is shared as fully and
completely as possible. This represents a dramatic change from
conditions as they existed before September 11th, 2001 and an very
impressive change from even one year ago. DHS plays a central role in
the counter-terrorism and homeland security effort as we continue the
work of communicating intelligence and information to our partners in
the federal government as well as with the State, territorial, tribal,
local, major city and private sector officials charged with protecting
the people and infrastructure of the United States.
We are proud of our work and our place in the larger national
defensive network and we look forward to a safe and secure future for
our nation. Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, this concludes
my prepared statement. I would be happy to answer any questions you may
have at this time.
Mr. Simmons. I thank you for your testimony. What we will
do is I will ask a question and then I will go to my left and
right by order of appearance at the time of the gavel and
thereafter, after of course our Chairman and Ranking Member
have had their opportunities.
I commanded a military intelligence unit in the mid-1990s
that created a handbook for open source intelligence that was
eventually adopted by the U.S. Army as doctrine. I have had a
personal interest in open source intelligence ever since. I
have traveled to Special Operations Command in my capacity as a
member of the Armed Services Committee. I have gone to open
source conferences. I have met with officials from around the
world who have an interest in this capability.
It seems to me that open source acquisition or open source
intelligence, that is intelligence that is created from the
collection and analysis of open sources of information, lends
itself particularly to the intelligence challenges of the
Department of Homeland Security for two reasons. One, in some
respects the information that we are relying on or looking for
may come from that small municipal county sheriff's department,
for all we know. It needs to be transmitted quickly, and it
does not need to be classified in and of itself. Two, products
that are derived from open source acquisition and analysis
often do not have to have the same level of classification as
those that are collected through other venues, so it is more
readily available to share with the American people.
Cost is also a factor. Where are we in the development of
this capability in support of the mission of the Department of
Homeland Security, and where would you like to see us go?
Lieutenant General Hughes. We have explored a number of
avenues with regard to open source information. I have been a
proponent of it for a long period of time. I have to tell you
that I have discovered along the pathway that I have taken,
anyway, that there are some problems with it. A lot of
information from open sources, much of it is erroneous, wrong.
When we use it exclusively without cross-checking it with
something else, we have found, I have found, it has been my
experience, that it usually gets us in trouble.
So I think while I think there is great power in this
source of information, I also think we need to tread carefully
in using it, and understand the context in which it can be
used. We have on our computers now in the IA element the OSIS.
It stands for the Open Source Intelligence System that the
intelligence community is the proponent for and now provides
numerous search engines, databases, media files, download
capabilities of all kinds, including photographs, pictures of
the ambient culture and environment around the world. We have
all that at our fingertips right now. We have had guest
speakers on this topic we have tried to inculcate in the
homeland security intelligence analysis the power of, the idea
of open source intelligence.
I do not know whether you are familiar with a gentleman
named Robert Steele.
Mr. Simmons. I am intimately familiar.
Lieutenant General Hughes. Okay.
Mr. Simmons. I think you know what that means.
[Laughter.]
Lieutenant General Hughes. Yes, I do. I do. Robert Steele,
for all of his many interesting characteristics, has been
something of a pioneer in this field. We have had him come and
talk to us. It was a very interesting talk and very
deliberative and engendered a lot of discussion. I think that
with Robert Steele's views as something on the far end of the
utility spectrum, you may think of never using open source
information as the other end of that spectrum. We are trying to
find utility and balance along that spectrum.
Once again, I think it has great potential and we are very
knowledgeable about it and using it.
Mr. Simmons. Thank you for that response.
I would like to recognize the gentlewoman from California,
Ms. Lofgren.
Ms. Lofgren. Thank you very much.
I am concerned about the number of contractors that are in
the department, instead of full-time employees, not just in IA,
but throughout the department. One question I have, without
getting into the numbers, which we cannot, is whether you are
confident that we have sufficient budget authority to actually
have staff, as opposed to contractors, in the upcoming fiscal
year.
Lieutenant General Hughes. Yes, ma'am. I believe that the
budget authority is not in question here. Finding the expertise
is a problem. And accompanying this, to the best of my ability
to characterize the truth here, it is true that the contractors
have offered us and we have taken advantage of their offer,
some very fine people with some tremendous technical expertise
that we were not able to acquire in any other way.
Back to the fiscal realities of this, those people are
costing us more money than a federal employee would. However,
you cannot get them. We have not been able to get them by
hiring them off the street. They are a limited supply and high
demand.
Ms. Lofgren. I know we cannot go into the numbers in this
open session, but I would be interested in a secure setting to
take a look at where that balance is so we can get a handle. I
know in some of the other aspects of DHS, I have a better
handle on the contractor-to-employee ratio and how it is
working. I would like to do that if I could arrange that with
you.
Lieutenant General Hughes. I would be happy to do it. In
lieu of reading, which might take a longer time, I can get an
information paper back to you that has the details at either
the unclassified level or at the level of classification that
we have.
Ms. Lofgren. Why don't you do that, and then if I have
further questions, we can follow up further.
Lieutenant General Hughes. I am happy to do so.
Ms. Lofgren. I appreciate that.
In thinking about the task that you face, is it fair to say
that the largest part of the IA job is to map the intelligence
collected by other agencies to the critical infrastructure
information maintained by IP? If that is the case, I am
wondering what influence you have, if any, on the state of the
critical infrastructure listing and analysis, and how much that
is impairing your task?
Lieutenant General Hughes. First, the answer to the first
part of your question, is that our primary or most critical
function, my answer to that, I am sorry to say, is no. Our
primary task and our most critical function has become, and I
think it is logical for this to happen, departmental support
across the board, working as an all-source intelligence
producer for the department. That is really our work in its
primary form.
The most important part of that work is to continue that
interface between IA, the intelligence part, and IT that does
the risk analysis and vulnerability assessment, but I will have
to tell you that it is a little bit hard for all of us to
understand, the risk analysis and vulnerability assessments are
not done strictly on the basis of threat. They are done with
civil characteristics in mind. One of them is apparent
vulnerability to possible attack using means of attack. Another
idea that is applied here is whether or not a particular kind
of infrastructure has proven to be attackable if gaps are not
closed and if vulnerabilities are not reduced.
Another idea behind it is the value of the infrastructure,
whether it has ever been attacked or not. That is kind of a
strategic assessment. As an example, I think Mr. Thompson
mentioned miniature golf courses or something like that.
Obviously, when you are using good common sense, not high-
faluting intelligence, and you are weighting the importance of
a miniature golf course against a nuclear storage site,
hopefully most people would choose the nuclear storage site.
That does not mean, however, that something in between those
two extremes does not need some kind of protection.
Ms. Lofgren. I know my time is up, but the concern I had
with the latter question is that in fact the miniature golf
site is on the list and the nuclear power plant is not. So if
part of your job is to map the threats to the listing of the
critical infrastructure, and the critical infrastructure is
just random, how do you do that job?
Lieutenant General Hughes. That should not be the case. I
am not familiar with the specific part of the list that you are
telling me the nuclear power plan is not on there, but let's
suppose that that is accurate. That is a mistake and we need to
fix that.
Ms. Lofgren. Okay. Thank you.
Lieutenant General Hughes. You are welcome.
Mr. Cox. [Presiding.] General, I would like to go into some
of the numbers in this open session, and I do not see any
reason that we cannot discuss the programmatic figures here. My
understanding with staff is that these are all open. I would
like to talk about threat determination and assessment,
evaluation and studies, the homeland security operations
center, and the new account for information sharing and
collaboration.
I wonder if, just to set the stage for discussion of this,
if you could describe for the subcommittee what each of these
programs is in chief focused upon, starting with TDA.
Lieutenant General Hughes. I hope I can do this right, but
it is not a classification issue. It is a knowledge issue, so I
am going to have to refer to a book. The first one you wanted
to talk about, sir, was?
Mr. Cox. Threat determination and assessment. Do you know
what I can do also, I mean, we are sort of constrained to go
through this program by program in order to talk about it in
this open session, but I would like to get into what is the nub
of your work. The figures that I have before me include the
programs for threat determination and assessment, evaluation
and studies, homeland security operations center, and
information sharing and collaboration. I wonder if you could
begin with whichever of these is closest to the core function
of IA to do all source intelligence fusions?
Lieutenant General Hughes. Obviously, threat determination
and analysis is a primary factor. I am not sure exactly what
you want to know, but if you want to know if our budget is
adequate, the answer I believe is yes.
Mr. Cox. To the extent that threat determination and
assessment is central to your mission, it would disturb me,
then, that we are cutting its budget.
Lieutenant General Hughes. I do not know if you should be
disturbed about that, sir. We are not cutting it too much. The
issue here is the threat determination, after you initially
make it on a piece of fixed infrastructure, does not really
need too much work after that if nothing changes. So once you
lay down a baseline, you may not need quite the same level of
effort that you did in the past. You do not have to re-do that
baseline.
Mr. Cox. Over time, we have been working with the
department and with you directly to make sure that you acquire
the number and quality of analysts necessary to perform IA's
function. To what extent do these programmatic figures for TDA,
for evaluation and studies, for the operations center and for
information sharing and collaboration reflect the number of
analysts that you have at your disposal?
Lieutenant General Hughes. In the case of the operations
center, there is no parallel at all. The operations center
generally has people in it who are doing what I would refer to
as information transfer. They are getting information in from
any source at all. They do not analyze the information. They
put it in the right bins. They alert people to the fact of the
information. They pass it to others. They do any analytic
endeavor.
Mr. Cox. I note that the operations center is getting a big
plus-up of, it looks to eyeball it, of about 40 percent.
Likewise, evaluation and studies is getting a healthy increase.
The threat determination and assessment account, on the other
hand, is being reduced, and the explanation that has been
provided to committee staff is that it is due in large part to
a decrease in purchasing from government accounts and a
decrease in advisory services needed for this account.
To be perfectly honest with you, I do not have any idea
what that means. So I do not know whether or not I need to be
concerned. I know what our chief programmatic concerns are, and
that is that we continue to help you build a core of talented
analysts who can carry the full statutory mission forward of
all source intelligence analysis, and make sure that even post-
9/11 Act, that the Homeland Security Department is a major
participant in the intelligence community at the NCTC.
Lieutenant General Hughes. I think your concern is well
founded. If I could try it from a macro level, our overall
budget I think is about 2 percent reduced, but money has been
shifted around inside the structure of the IAIP to meet needs
that we believe are present. Part of the plus-up in the HSOC is
to handle COOP requirements and to meet the needs of the
information flow that we anticipate is going to come into the
department from greater feeding of information. This is raw
information from the state and local sectors. In other words,
we think after fielding homeland security information network,
and that is JRIES with a new name on it, and after upgrading it
to the secret level, we will be getting a lot more raw
information.
Handling that, processing it, is part of the plus-up that
you see there. The idea of whether or not I can characterize
what this set of words or phrases means exactly is kind of a
mystery to me, too. In fact, I do not know if I could explain
it. But I think the idea here is to get the information into
not only the operational channel, but the intelligence channel
for analysis concurrently. Lots of information that comes,
especially the state and local and private sector, does not
require much analysis in its initial form. It is a spot report,
a patriot report, a person's call-in of suspicious activity.
That may indeed be a piece of information that has to be
put into the analytic environment, but standing alone it can
also be passed to operators and actors for their initial
appraisal of the information. To use the phrase, the phrase has
become so unpopular, to connect the dots, the connection of the
dots still goes on, but it kind of rests in the background for
some of this information. The foreground is the initial use of
the information in an operational setting, but we have shifted
money around to do that.
Mr. Cox. My time has expired.
The gentleman from Mississippi, the Ranking Member of the
full committee, Mr. Thompson.
Mr. Thompson. Thank you, Mr. Cox.
General Hughes, can you provide this committee with a
breakdown of those contractor services that we are paying for
over and above normal personnel costs, as information that you
get back to us? You do not have to comment on it. Just provide
to us.
Lieutenant General Hughes. Yes, sir.
Mr. Thompson. To your knowledge, are you aware of any
problems with any of those contracting services as of this
date?
Lieutenant General Hughes. I am aware of some problems.
Mr. Thompson. You are?
Lieutenant General Hughes. Yes.
Mr. Thompson. Can you also provide this committee with a
listing of those problems?
Lieutenant General Hughes. I will.
Mr. Thompson. Thank you.
With respect to the mapping the threat to vulnerabilities,
what is your opinion of those vulnerabilities that have been
identified, just in general? Do you think in your opinion those
vulnerabilities meet the test of mapping? Do you think it is 50
percent complete? Just give me your honest opinion of it.
Lieutenant General Hughes. My honest opinion is that we are
far from finished. Indeed, we are now using a term called
``complex urban environment.'' We are treating the major cities
especially, but also the industrial outliers and some other
parts of the United States that have a concentration of
activity that is of interest to us, and we believe it might be
of interest to the terrorists, as an organism, so that if you
kick the shin of a large complex city, the city may also get a
headache at the same time as the shin hurt, because the thing
is so interconnected. It is very much like an animal or a
human. The nervous system of the city may indeed be affected by
a kinetic blow. That is an important concept. I know it sounds
a little ethereal, perhaps, but it is not. It is a fact.
So probably the most common example of this is the
electricity. You turn off the electricity, you turn off a lot
of capability. If you turn the electricity off for a short
period of time, you can live with it, not a problem. If you
turn it off hard for a long period of time, we would have
difficulty performing some of the functions we now take for
granted.
So that is an example. The electricity itself is what you
have to attack in order to do that, or the control mechanisms
associated with it. That fact, that idea that a hospital, as an
example, when it runs out of fuel and its alternate power
source does not operate anymore, and the electricity is still
off, means that that is a vulnerability you have to assess
carefully.
If you did not assess it properly and have enough vision to
see that after 3 days you were going to run out of fuel, there
may not be a way to get more fuel because the pumps at the fuel
station do not work because the electricity is off.
Mr. Thompson. Okay.
Lieutenant General Hughes. More than you wanted to know
about it.
Mr. Thompson. Well, I just want to know if we identified
the hospital as a potential target.
Lieutenant General Hughes. Absolutely.
Mr. Thompson. Yes, okay. With respect to your present
position, have you any access to all intelligence available?
Lieutenant General Hughes. Yes, I have, but I have to tell
you that not everyone who works for me has.
Mr. Thompson. What was the problem with others not having
access to that information?
Lieutenant General Hughes. There is in the intelligence
committee, it remains to this day, a culture in which a known
person with a certain track record, having been polygraphed and
background investigations done repeatedly over time, and a
certain amount of dependability built into that background, and
perhaps maybe you could even call it familiarization, the old-
boy network, that culture has something to do with what level
of trust and confidence others are willing to place in you.
Mr. Thompson. Mr. Chairman, if I could. So if Congress
passes an Act mandating agencies to share information, do I
understand you to say that that is still subject to whether or
not certain individuals want to share that information with
other agencies?
Lieutenant General Hughes. I probably would not put it
quite like that. It is subject to the rules governing the
information itself and who has access to it for what reasons.
Mr. Thompson. Mr. Chairman, I guess my point is, if we pass
an Act saying that these agencies have to share this
information between them, I am now hearing that there is some
other standard out there somewhere that prevents that
information being shared.
Lieutenant General Hughes. Let me just tell you, if I may
respond to this, this always has been in the intelligence
business in the government, something called the ``need to
know.'' The ``need to know'' rule still applies, and for the
most sensitive kinds of intelligence, about very specific
activities, the ``need to know'' rule still is at work.
My personal view, by the way, is it should be. You should
not tell everyone every single thing every single day. You
should make sure that the key persons who are involved in this
work know the essential issues each and every day, and I
believe that has been done in my case.
Mr. Thompson. Well, I think we will probably have some more
opportunities for discussion. Thank you.
Mr. King. [Presiding.] All right, Mr. Thompson.
General Hughes, let me thank you for your service, and I
certainly wish you well after March 15.
In a way, I will be following up on Congressman Thompson's
question, or maybe expanding it a bit. Obviously, information
analysis is a work in progress. You have described it that way
yourself.
How has the passage of the Intelligence Reform Act impacted
on that, either positively or adversely? Do you feel that the
sharing is working the way it should? Is it better than it was
before? Do you feel constricted? Again, how does it impact on
the Department of Homeland Security?
Lieutenant General Hughes. The first part of the answer is
it is a lot better than it was.
Mr. King. Because of the legislation being passed, or just
because of the evolving of time?
Lieutenant General Hughes. To be very frank, sir, I have
not personally seen or observed any change since the act was
passed that could be attributed directly to the act. Any of the
changes that have occurred were ongoing prior to the act being
passed. The act is going to take some time to reach fruition,
to have impact.
I think it is a very good act. I fully support it. I think
the advent of a Director of national Intelligence is an
important piece of that act and will cause the sharing
function, the interoperability and commonality among the
information systems to occur so that sharing can be better
facilitated, and numerous other functions that we all think are
laudatory. That will happen. It is ongoing, and much of it was
ongoing before the act was passed. That is just a fact.
Over time, since September 11, I have seen a marked
improvement. Indeed, in the past year, as I stated in my
written testimony, there has been a distinct qualitative and
quantitative improvement in the information that is being
shared in the intelligence community. By the way,
parenthetically, in what can be distinguished from the
intelligence community, is the law enforcement community, which
as we all know is the nexus that makes Americans nervous, but
it is a nexus that has to occur in the battle against terrorism
and the battle against destabilizing forces inside our culture.
So that is working. We have a much better information
relationship than we ever did with the FBI. Actually, it is
improving right along. Every few days, we make some kind of
improvement.
Is it perfect? Is it everything we could wish for? No. But
the improvement is so dramatic that I am loath to criticize it
in any way. I am happy to characterize it as something that we
ought to keep going.
Mr. King. I have to ask you, is there anyone that you are
willing to criticize? Are there any elements within the
intelligence community, the law enforcement agencies, who you
feel are not cooperating with the spirit of the post-9/11 world
that we live in?
Lieutenant General Hughes. I am not willing to criticize
them.
Mr. King. Could you question them? Could you enlighten us
as to perhaps areas we should be looking at, where there is not
full cooperation being given?
Lieutenant General Hughes. I think you ought to do what you
are doing now, which is continuing to press the entire
intelligence community and the culture to the degree they
possibly can to have broad and full information sharing. Just
continue the pressure. It is working. I, for one, ascribe that
success not to the practitioners of intelligence, but to you,
the Congress. You have brought pressure to bear, and I thank
you for it.
Mr. King. If we were in closed session, could you direct us
as to where we should apply more pressure, you know, in one
place rather than another?
Lieutenant General Hughes. No. I do not think so. I think I
have given you an honest answer today.
Mr. King. Okay. Also in your opening statement when you
mentioned the fact that you would be leaving on March 15, you
sort of enticed us with a statement that if we have any
questions to ask you about suggestions that you might want to
make, we should ask them.
Let me ask you: Do you have any suggestions as to the
future, regarding the department or regarding your specific
position?
Lieutenant General Hughes. I hope we can continue this
work, strengthen it. We need the support of Congress and
obviously we need the support of this committee and the
subcommittees of the committee that are named after the work of
securing the homeland. You need to be first for effectiveness,
change, progress in the future here on the Hill. You also need
to be our advocate to some degree.
I certainly make a plea for that to continue. My view is
that we did not have the same kind of supporting mechanism in
Congress when we first started out at the so-called ``legacy''
or older agencies and departments did have. We are slowly
building that. I see the permanence of this committee finally
recognized, I think a year late at least, as a manifestation of
that. I cannot see how you could view it any differently.
Mr. King. Thank you, General.
The gentleman from North Carolina, Mr. Etheridge.
Mr. Etheridge. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me join my
colleagues and thank you for holding this hearing.
General Hughes, thank you for being here. We are going to
miss you.
Lieutenant General Hughes. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Etheridge. I wish you all the best.
My State of North Carolina is a participant in the regional
information sharing system or the RISS program. My question is,
what is the status of linking the homeland security information
network to RISS? How do you propose that we avoid duplication
and confusion when we try to make these linkages so they will
work best for the American people?
Lieutenant General Hughes. RISS and LEO, the law
enforcement side of that, can link now to JRIES. The names kind
of run together here, but the homeland security information
network is being empowered right now by the JRIES system which
was an old Department of Defense system. That system was
brought over to the Department of Homeland Security and put in
place. Most people who have looked at it think it is an
effective and efficient system. RISS and LEO both were able to
link to it. It is not really hard to do.
However, I believe that what we should have is a narrowing
down of these systems and maybe even one system with one name,
which can then be managed technically by one organizational
entity. That is what I would like to see. That has proven to be
an unpopular idea because of the investment that has been made
in each of these separate systems. There are others besides
RISS and LEO and JRIES out there.
So I think another year or so of maturity and perhaps field
evaluation may show, I am hoping it will show, that the power
of combining these systems should be facilitated as rapidly as
possible.
Mr. Etheridge. General, let me follow that up, because it
seems to me if we can get to that, and the sooner the better,
because we save not only time, but we will save money. My
personal view it would be a lot more effective for the American
people and for those who use it. Would you agree or disagree
with that statement?
Lieutenant General Hughes. I completely agree.
Mr. Etheridge. Is there some way, then, that this committee
can help facilitate that movement and the maturity of that
system?
Lieutenant General Hughes. I think you can. I would like to
invite you to have the proponents of the homeland security
information network come here before this committee and give
you their views and RISS and LEO also and others. I think that
would be an excellent thing for you to do.
Mr. Etheridge. Thank you, sir. I will encourage the
leadership to take a look at that at some point. I think that
is real cost savings, and would be very effective for the
American people.
I understand that DHS is attempting to provide useful
intelligence to state and local first responders. How does IA
handle the raw data and reports that you get from state and
local officials coming in from the local?
For example, what is the procedure for a police officer to
report a suspicious activity that they may find, or any law
enforcement officer, that ultimately could be used that may
very well forestall a major problem that Homeland Security is
responsible for?
Lieutenant General Hughes. Right now, a police officer or a
police organization will make a report through law enforcement
channels to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and either
concurrently or separately to the Department of Homeland
Security. These reports can be made verbally by telephone, or
in some cases by the RISS network or the LEO network or some
other way, a lot of which are terminated at the Homeland
Security operations center.
So the FBI gets them and we get them, generally speaking.
There are cases where we have heard about, where reports do not
come concurrently to one or the other. Usually, the report
usually goes to the FBI first, and does not come to the
Department of Homeland Security as a matter of routine. We are
pressing to fix that by, first, advertising our role in the law
enforcement community and asking them to follow this procedure.
I might add that we have begun in the past year, and we now
have something over 300 reports that are jointly filed with the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Those reports carry a message
with them in the body of the report that says if you have any
further information, or if you have any indication of activity
associated with this report or in any other way, please report
it to your local joint terrorism task force and the homeland
security operations center.
Mr. Etheridge. Thank you, General. I see my time has
expired.
It seems like this is another area that we could press a
little more on, because if the FBI is not sending that
information over, and it is not being shared, that is not what
we had in mind when we set up Homeland Security.
Lieutenant General Hughes. The FBI, I need to add this, I
hope I did not characterize this wrongly, the FBI is not a
problem in this regard. The FBI, at least as far as I know, is
not preventing information from coming to the Department of
Homeland Security. The local police, the law enforcement
authorities out in the states and localities, sometimes do not
report that information concurrently. But when the FBI gets it,
in most cases they pass it to us, and we do the same.
Mr. Etheridge. Thank you for that clarification.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. King. The gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Dent.
Mr. Dent. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General thank you for your service.
My question deals with the credibility of threats.
Obviously, the 9/11 report talked a lot about the need to know
versus need to share, and how do you strike that proper
balance. When information, before it is going to be shared,
obviously you have to determine whether it is credible. What is
the process for determining the credibility of these types of
threats before you can disseminate that information out in a
timely manner to the people who need to know?
Lieutenant General Hughes. That is a wonderful question
because we live each and every day, and it is what I would
refer to as Hobson choice.
Mr. Dent. A what?
Lieutenant General Hughes. A Hobson choice--a ``damned if
you do, damned if you don't'' kind of choice. If we send
information that we get out rapidly without taking some time
with it, it is apt to be wrong. But if we take some time to
clarify it, too much time, it loses its importance and its
value over time. We never know. We cannot know whether it is
accurate or not immediately.
So our choice has been to report it as rapidly as we can,
knowing that that is going to lead to much information going
out in the field which is wrong. We know that, but we are
hoping that all the professionals that receive this information
will somehow understand that and be able to live with it.
Mr. Dent. Just to follow up, we spend a lot of time around
here trying to determine answers to questions, and thank you
for your service.
Lieutenant General Hughes. Thank you very much.
Mr. King. The gentleman from Rhode Island is recognized,
Mr. Langevin.
Mr. Langevin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General I want to thank you for being here and for your
testimony. Thank you for your service to the country,
particularly in your latest role at the Department of Homeland
Security. You have made a great contribution.
Lieutenant General Hughes. Thank you.
Mr. Langevin. If I could just begin with IA's role in the
intelligence community. The Senate report on the intelligence
leading up to Iraq brought to light a tendency toward group-
think. The information basically stressed the worst-case
scenario, and a failure to question assumptions, if you will.
The question I have is, has IA institutionalized measures
to ensure that a similar type of intelligence failure does not
occur here, and if so, what measures are in place and are they
effective?
Second, there is a truism in the intelligence business that
to get included in the right meetings, that you have to be able
to bring something to the table. So what products or expertise
does IA currently bring to the rest of the intelligence
community such that it is seen as a valuable contributor to the
intelligence process?
Lieutenant General Hughes. Thank you very much.
In the first case, we think there is a problem consistently
over time in the intelligence building, and you have to guard
against it at all times. One of the things that it is up to
leaders to do is to develop an environment in which any
question could be asked, any premise can be challenged, any
idea can be called to account. We just have to do that. We have
to tell people the truth as directly and as clearly as
possible.
I would place the burden for avoiding group-think not on a
process or procedure, but on leaders, specifically the leaders
in the intelligence community, not merely at the highest level,
and I would certainly hold them accountable, but also down to
the mid-grade, middle-management level. They have to let
analysts reign in their intellectual space and be able to think
beyond some kind of artificial limit, to be able to deal in
concepts in their own context without some kind of constraint
or restriction.
If we do not have that kind of environment in the
intelligence community, then group-think will absolutely occur,
you can depend upon it. I had a friend when I was in the
military, an Israeli intelligence general. He happened to be a
lieutenant colonel at the time of the 1973 invasion by the
Egyptians across the Suez Canal. A captain came to him and
said, those Egyptians are testing us each and every time we
carry out war games, and we are not doing anything about it.
The lieutenant colonel said, they are just war games. The
captain said, they are not just war games; they are practicing.
One of these days, they are going to continue. You know the
rest of the story.
The lieutenant colonel later regretted his failure in this
function, and the picture of the dead from the front there was
an intelligence analyst with chains and a big heavy locks
around his head. That is the issue. We just have to somehow
generate an environment that never allows that to happen in the
United States.
Mr. Langevin. General, if I could be clear in the
understanding that you in particular in your department have
things in place to make sure that consciously you have made
sure that group-think is not going to be a problem?
Lieutenant General Hughes. I have done the best I could to
generate an environment in which any idea is welcome, any
thought is fine. At some point, however, decision-makers have
to make decisions. If your decisions over time prove to be
flawed or faulty, then you obviously have a problem.
The second part of your question, would you repeat it?
Mr. Langevin. I want to know if it is true that in the
intelligence business, to get included at the right meetings,
you have to bring something to the table. So I wanted to ask
what IA currently brings to the rest of the intelligence
community such that you are seen as a valuable contributor to
the intelligence process.
Lieutenant General Hughes. I think that is right, that you
do have to contribute. I think we are beginning to contribute
something that is somewhat unique. I refer to it as domestic
information. In the situation here in the United States, we are
in partnership with the FBI that involves the concept of law
enforcement information and intelligence all together to inform
decision-makers and responsible parties about the context in
which things are happening, and about potential events. This is
not spying on the American people in any way, but it is
understanding that there are persons inside our society and
coming towards us who would do us great harm. We have to know
where those people are, who they are, what their capabilities
are, and what the potentialities are.
The Department of Homeland Security represents unique
capabilities in that regard. We are the people who inhabit and
control the borders. We are the people who inhabit and control
the borders. We are the people who take care of the brown water
on the shores of our nation. We are the people who sense the
environment to protect important persons from harm. We are the
people who administer the safety of our transportation system.
No one else does these things. I believe we are being
recognized as bringing unique and very valuable, not only
information, but skills and capabilities to the table. I will
have to tell you that I still detect some resistance, among
others, to mention of those ideas in the context of the
Department of Homeland Security.
There is still sort of a default mechanism out there that
when you talk about transportation security, and you might say
TSA. If you talk about the Coast Guard, you talk about the
Coast Guard. But over time, some development of the concept of
an umbrella organization is gaining strength and will come to
fruition. That would be the development of a very valuable
concept for the Department of Homeland Security, which can
achieve intra-component synergy among all of these
capabilities.
The simple answer is, yes, we bring something to the table,
now and more in the future.
Mr. Langevin. I see my time has expired. Thank you for your
answer to the questions, and again thank you for your service.
Lieutenant General Hughes. Thank you.
Mr. Simmons. [Presiding.] I thank the gentleman for his
questions. If he refers to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence
Committee report of last year, the first eight conclusions deal
with issues of group-think, and a contributing factor to group-
think is a lack of information.
The gentleman from California is recognized, Mr. Lungren.
Mr. Lungren. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you for your testimony, General, and thank you, more
importantly, for your lifetime of service. We all appreciate
that.
Could you give us an idea of where you think your
department's information analysis capability is right now? That
is, if you have to say that complete success would be a 10, and
we know we could never get to a 10; maybe 9 is what we can
achieve because we are always changing for that last one. As
you leave, where do you think it is?
Lieutenant General Hughes. Five to six.
Mr. Lungren. If it were five to six, for us to get up to
nine, what are the very specific two or three priorities that
you would have the department emphasize with your successor?
Lieutenant General Hughes. The kind of experienced,
analytic workforce, public employees that we can depend upon
over time, that will stay in this occupational field and
continue to do this work for a long period of time. This is not
conventional or routine intelligence work. It is different.
Second, improvement on facilities. The facilities are
inadequate to the task. We need support in that area.
Three, you need a full understanding of the remainder of
the intelligence community about what it is that we are doing,
why we are doing it, and how we are doing it. I think that is
the third item on the list for a reason. That is the lowest
priority. The first two are vital.
I would mention that we need more time. Everyone keeps
saying, and I heard the Chairman mention a ``two-year period.''
It is true that we have been in existence for over two years,
but I can tell you that we were not functional when I arrived
on 17 November, 2003, in the intelligence business. We had 27
people; we could not do the job. Time period has to be measured
in capability and effectiveness. We were not effective. We are
not completely efficient and we are not as good as we should
be. The progress is real. We just need some more time.
We also need more people of the right kind, government
employees, better facilities and structures, and we need
understanding and support.
Mr. Lungren. General, when I was Attorney General of
California, one of my responsibilities was the head of WSIN,
the Western States Information Network, one of the RISSes
around the country. Are we utilizing the RISSes around the
country effectively in information gathering and sharing?
Lieutenant General Hughes. Probably not as effectively as
we should. That is a process that we began this past summer by
having people from all of the states come here to Washington.
We began to inform them about the methods of information
sharing at that time. We have a plan in place to have that same
kind of gathering again this summer, and we are sending out
mobile training teams who help people understand how things can
be improved in that regard.
Mr. Lungren. Let me ask the question this way: Are we
utilizing the RISSes as a platform to provide information to
you? Or are you duplicating or replicating that?
Lieutenant General Hughes. We are using the RISS, the law
enforcement network, and others to the degree that we can. It
is a cooperative effort.
Mr. Lungren. Okay. Sure. I know you are loath to criticize
anybody, and I will not ask you to do that here, but I will
just give you some insights I have received from some law
enforcement people on the ground or in middle-management
positions. They still find a reluctance to share information
from the feds on down, specifically with the FBI. I would
normally say, ``Well, you are always having grousing like
that,'' but when I was Attorney General, frankly, I can tell
you it was very serendipitous as to whether or not we got a
spirit of cooperation from the feds, whose need to know seemed
to be the feds need to know, but you do not need to know.
Much information in the domestic arena, frankly, can be
gathered as well and sometimes even better by the many more law
enforcement officers we have at the local and state level than
we do not the federal level. They are much closer to the
street. They have more contacts. They may not have all the
contacts in the specific terrorist organizations, but they have
contacts with a lot of people that may come into contact with
them. It is debilitating for them to be viewed as second-class
citizens, and to have the feds say, we have the view, we have
the mileage, we have the right to know, and you do not.
I see it expressed in this way. That is, with the color
code system we have and the alerts that they receive, they told
me that oftentimes they would receive these alerts without
really underlying information. So they were told generally
speaking the threat assessment was higher, but they did not
have real information therefore to respond to that. That, to
me, suggests an underlying lack of trust of local and state
government that still pervades the federal establishment. Can
you tell me whether you have seen that, number one; and number
two, if you have, what steps in particular has your department
taken to try and break that down?
Lieutenant General Hughes. First, everything you said I
have heard. We may know the same people.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Lungren. We will not put that on the record.
Lieutenant General Hughes. I have to tell you that I think
it is absolutely accurate. The phenomenon of the arrogance of
the federal establishment in relationship to the state and
localities with regard to information is well known.
Mr. Lungren. Well, members of Congress excepted, of course.
[Laughter.]
Lieutenant General Hughes. Sir, you can believe whatever
you want. I have heard a lot about this.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Lungren. Better watch it, General. Be careful there.
Lieutenant General Hughes. I have to tell you that I think
it is an accurate portrayal. The local effort feels like they
are second-class citizens because of the attitude that is
conveyed to them by some federal officials.
I do not think that is across the board. I think it is
somewhat circumstantial, but nevertheless, it is a fact.
What we have done is, first, we are sending out a lot more
information; that is simply a fact. We can prove that by simply
showing you the documents we now send routinely to the states
and localities. We did assemble them here, and we are going to
assemble then here again this year. It is a participative
effort. Admittedly, it was not much of a dialogue. That is too
bad, but in the first instance we had a lot of things to put
out to them. And they actually thought it was very worthwhile.
This summer, we have meetings here in Washington again over
a three-to four-day period. We hope to make it more of a
dialogue and we will hear from that more.
By the way, we have this in August, so if there is any
possible way we could get a Congressman or a Senator to come
and meet before that group and give your views, we would really
appreciate it, because this kind of interaction is vital.
We have also established, and we are establishing over
time, relationships with people. Some of these relationships
are very circumstantial and short-lived. I did not meet the
sheriff of Las Vegas, even though I had telephone conversations
with him and talked to him on a couple of occasions. I never
met with this gentleman personally face to face until a few
days ago. Indeed, when I met with him, he had his share of
complaints.
But he is the guy in charge of Las Vegas. What do I know
about Las Vegas? Nothing. I am completely dependent on him to
know primarily what is going on in Las Vegas.
However, he recognizes, I think as most localities do, that
occasionally, especially in the world of terrorism, big
problems can come toward specific towns and cities that the
town and city do not know about. That is a fact. It is the
nature of the larger world of intelligence and
counterterrorism. They do not come and rest and stay in exactly
the target place, so that everybody and their brother gets to
know them. They project themselves into these environments and,
usually relatively rapidly in the target area, take action.
So we are trying to get a mutual understanding of the
phenomenon. We do at the national level, at the federal level,
have something to contribute, and we should contribute that by
passing it to the states and local authorities, and we are
trying hard to do that. We have made improvements, and if they
were sitting here in this room, I think they would say that. I
think they would say, yes, things are better than they used to
be.
Mr. Lungren. Thank you, General. Mr. Chairman, could we ask
the staff to work with the General's staff for us to be able to
see when threat assessments are made, the level of information
that is given to local jurisdictions, so that we might be able
to see what we are really talking about, because I have had
these complaints from law enforcement saying they have
inadequate information once a threat level is given to them.
Maybe we just need to look at it ourselves.
Mr. Simmons. I would be happy to do that. I began my
political career as a police commissioner, and in the post-9/11
environment, the new model is not local, state, federal each
doing its own thing. The new model is communication between all
levels. I know the Ranking Member has expressed to me her
frustration over the same type of issue. My guess is that this
is an important consideration for this subcommittee, and we
will certainly look into it.
Lieutenant General Hughes. If you do not mind, I must give
you just another piece of information.
Mr. Simmons. I do not want to deny you, but the
distinguished lady from Texas, her questions, I know she has
been here for a while, so make it brief, General.
Lieutenant General Hughes. Okay, I will make it brief. The
question you posed to me was in the context of the homeland
security alert system, the changing of the colors. It is true
that in the initial application of the changing of the colors,
not much information was given. It is increasingly true, has
been over time, since the Christmas 2003 and January, February,
and March 2004 period, we have given more information. I will
make sure you have the context of the question, there. But I
think it is a very good thing to ask, to have us give you a
better characterization of how much information we are giving
out.
Mr. Simmons. The distinguished lady from Texas, Ms.
Jackson-Lee.
Ms. Jackson-Lee. I thank the Chairman and the Ranking
Member.
General let me thank you for your service, and try to go
quickly through my questions because of the time.
I believe that one of the aspects of the IAIP's most
important issues is the analyzing and integrating terrorist
threat information and making sure that amongst any other
agency that we relate to the homeland, I think of the FBI and
the CIA as having their own constituency bases, even though we
are trying to work very hard at the integration of those
agencies, really in terms of fighting terrorism, the Department
of Homeland Security signified to America that we are focused
on their needs and providing them with the intelligence they
need to understand the terrorist threat and to fight terrorism.
As I look at the budget, and I know that this is
particularly related to the intelligence needs, I think a point
worth noting is that the President's budget indicates that
government-wide spending for homeland security increases really
overall by $1 billion. To put this in perspective, we all know
that we are spending about $1 billion a week in Iraq and
probably other added dollars in Afghanistan. In particular, I
believe that there is an intent to hire an additional 73 more
employees, and also to seek ways of improving our ability to
analyze and integrate terrorist threat information, map threats
against our vulnerabilities and implement actions to protect
American lives.
I know that we are going to lose your talent in March, and
again let me thank you for your service, but how are we going
to do that when we are looking at a potential cut of $20
million? Might I add to that question a statement that you made
in your speech when you were able to say that we were able to
connect the homeland security information network with the
regional information sharing system, and I think the previous
question raised that question. You yourself said that one needs
to be achieved, but we are on the right track. If you could
expand on what you gave to Congressman Lungren, and talk
specifically about the ability to hire employees and try to
improve what we are trying to with this budget cuts.
Lieutenant General Hughes. If I understand the question
right, ma'am, the budget cut is not an assured thing. The
Department of Homeland Security expects plus-up in our overall
budget as you described, and we do not expect for the budget to
be cut back. That is our hope.
Ms. Jackson-Lee. But if it is cut back, then you will have
difficulty fulfilling your mission. Is that correct?
Lieutenant General Hughes. That is true. That is correct. I
would certainly hope that that does not happen.
With regard to the idea of whether or not we can do the job
and how well we can do it, the connectivity that we have out
there with the RISS system and the LEO system and others, this
is an evolutionary thing. We just discovered not long ago a
system that is run by the Federal Protective Service, which is
part of the Department of Homeland Security, which is a portal
into law enforcement information the Federal Protective Service
holds. That is within our own department and we did not know it
existed until not long ago.
So we are learning. We are developing over time. A lot of
these things, even though they may seem self-evident, they are
not. We have had to ferret them out. I think we are continuing
to make good progress.
The answer I would give to you and to the person who asked
the earlier question is, connectivity is almost everything. If
we do not have that, and I think the Chairman is familiar,
information not shared is worthless. That is it. That gets to
the central idea here. We can get the information. The next
imperative is to share it. That is what we are all about. So we
have been trying to build and make this interconnected network
a system of systems, whatever names you want to apply to it. We
want to make sure it is interoperable, that it has enough
elements of commonality so that we can pass information
horizontally and vertically throughout the system. That is what
we would like to do.
Ms. Jackson-Lee. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the General's
views, and Ranking Member, sort of focusing on our questions,
but let me just say that this exercise poses a very difficult
challenge, because it is very difficult when you have
overlapping committees of jurisdiction such as the Budget
Committee. Your expertise and the Ranking Member's expertise on
some of the aspects of this, still the time is not long enough
to sort of probe General Hughes and the knowledge that he has.
Two points I think are key to this, and I would start out
by saying that homeland security connotes security of the
homeland. People think of the FBI and CIA, so you have a great
responsibility. I think that this one sentence that he has, the
pages are not numbered, but when he talks of RISS and the law
enforcement online, one needs to be achieved, I think in our
work we need to focus in on whether we have appropriate
resources to make sure that the communication is going on in
the homeland with law enforcement.
Another point is, and I think it is very important, is this
right-to-know rule. We look forward to your expertise, but I
wonder whether or not this committee will have oversight to be
able to refine that in this new post-9/11 era. For example, and
I will close on this note, General Hughes, there is something
called OTMs at the border, the southern border, other than
Mexican nationals coming across. That has taken a new life,
that there are potential individuals coming across that border
that may do us harm. The border patrol agents then become a
greater force with respect to their need to know, and they need
to know classified information or information at a very high
level. I am not comfortable that even in this budget oversight
we have focused on it.
General Hughes, I thank you for the one very great point
that you said, if we cut the budget and do not provide you with
the resources, you are not going to be able to do the job. I
think that is our responsibility.
I yield back, and I thank the Chairman for the additional
time on the clock. Thank you.
Mr. Simmons. I thank you for your comments. I think we are
all aware that this is the first hearing of the permanent
subcommittee. It is historic in that regard. The opportunities
for us are pretty dramatic, but the challenges are also great.
It is an area where we have to work together and share together
to be successful. I thank you for your comments. I think they
are right on the dime.
We will keep the record open for 10 days for any additional
written comments that anyone may wish to submit. I have a few
remarks to make as closing remarks, but I would like to
recognize my Ranking Member, if she has remarks she would like
to make.
Ms. Lofgren. This is just the beginning, obviously, and
General, we do appreciate your being here today, even though we
will not be seeing much of you for long. I think certain
questions have become more ripe in our minds as we listened to
you. The connectivity of the system obviously is important,
whether it is the Internet or whether it is intelligence.
Therefore, we are dependent on agencies both within DHS, but
also without. So we certainly cannot do it today, I am thinking
about the FBI system that we had great promise for, but did not
produce, and how that is going to impact DHS.
I have spent 10 years on the Judiciary Committee paying
attention to immigration, and I am very well aware of the
deficiencies in the technology and that aspect, and the impact
it has on the ability to gather information that then could be
shared. So I am hopeful that as we move forward in this year
that we will be able to look at those as they connect and maybe
get some improvements that will make us all safer.
I did want to just follow up very briefly in writing, but
comment that I am concerned about the ``need to know''
information issue. Certainly, the Congress cannot micromanage
an intelligence agency. It would not be proper, but I am
concerned that if that is an ad hoc decision being made in the
agency, then we have maybe failed to actually have the policy,
the ``who voted for'' implemented. I think we have to explore
that further, Mr. Chairman.
Finally, my colleague from California mentioned the
frustration that local agencies have. I think that has improved
somewhat with Director Mueller and the FBI task force. At least
the feedback I am getting from law enforcement is much
different than I used to. But what I am hearing form local law
enforcement is that they never hear from DHS. It is invisible
to them. So I think we need to sort through and be parochial.
There are more people living in Los Angeles County than there
are in over 20 states, and how we are dealing with the gigantic
nation-state of California and whether that system is going to
work for that state or not, and how we might format it so we
really do have a system that is slick and works and protects
us.
I thank the Chairman for recognizing me.
Mr. Simmons. Thank you.
Just very briefly, back in 1981, I became the staff
director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, working for
Senator Barry Goldwater as the Chairman and Senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan as the Vice Chairman. Try that one on for
size, staff. The Chairman is Senator Goldwater. Well, you are
too young to even remember who he is; and the Vice Chairman was
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a good Republican and a good Democrat.
One from the west and one from the east; one conservative and
one liberal. I sat and worked with them for 4 years as they
initiated what I consider to be professional congressional
oversight of the intelligence community.
I learned about the value of bipartisanship, and I learned
about the value of listening to others when it comes to the
intelligence business. I learned that you can put those
differences aside if you are focusing on a common goal, which
in that case was to build the intelligence community to
preserve and protect our values and our people and our country.
Regrettably, on 9/11 we failed in that regard. So the
mantle has been passed to another generation of members of
Congress and another generation of members of the staff, to do
what we can do to preserve and protect our homeland, while at
the same time preserving and protecting our civil liberties.
That is an awesome challenge. In those days 25 years ago, we
did not have a hearing room or spaces that were ours. We
occupied the auditorium in the Dirksen Building. Today, we do
not have a hearing room, I do not believe. We are looking for
one, although this is much better than the auditorium of the
Dirksen Building, I can assure you.
But we should not let these little logistical challenges
get in the way of the important work of this subcommittee and
of course the important work of the full committee.
I will leave you with a final thought. For the 4 years that
I have been a member of Congress, I have never changed the
license plate on my car. I know some immediately go out with a
screw driver and put on that lovely congressional plate. But
the plate that I have on my car has the simple phrase ``kung
ho,'' which conveys enthusiasm and excitement, but as we all
know comes from the Chinese word ``kung ho,'' which means
``work together.''
I look forward to working together with the staff, with the
members of this subcommittee, with the Administration and
others, to pursue the important agenda that we have before us.
Thank you all for being here today.
And thank you, General, for your participation.
[Whereupon, at 3:37 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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--________
Material Submitted for the Record
Questions and Responses Submitted for the Record by the Hon. Bennie
Thompson for Acting Assistant Secretary for Information Analysis Karen
Morr on behalf of DHS
Question: 1. General Hughes, one theme the Department has repeated
in describing the President's Fiscal Year 2006 budget is consolidation.
I think we all recognize that the current organizational structure at
DHS isn't necessarily the best one, and that moving offices or
functions can improve performance or reduce cost.
Some agencies, including the office that distributes billions of
dollars to first responders, rely on IA for threat information.
However, some parts of DHS have their own intelligence departments--
including the Coast Guard and Secret Service as part of the
Intelligence Community, but also TSA, the Federal Air Marshals, CBP,
and ICE. Thankfully, many of these programs are unclassified, so we can
talk about their budgets in public. TSA, for example, is requesting $21
million and 99 FTEs for Fiscal Year 2006.
Question: 1. Given the trend within DHS for consolidation, for
example the transfer of research and development activities to the
Science and Technology Directorate, should IA have more control over
all the intelligence operations in DHS?
Intelligence is integral to the successful operations of the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In our efforts to build a strong
Department from its original 22 agencies, it is critical to coordinate
DHS intelligence functions. The ability of the Department to conduct
its mission is enhanced when components have synchronized intelligence
activities. The Office of Information Analysis, in concert with the DHS
components that have intelligence activities, is conducting a study
with the intent of developing a plan to integrate key aspects of these
activities. That study is reviewing several elements of the
intelligence program, including mission areas and supporting functions.
The results of this study will be presented to the senior leadership
this spring. IAIP will continue to work to ensure the Department's
intelligence activities are coordinated.
Question: 2. With the first deadline on the ``Information Sharing
Environment,'' as mandated by the recently enacted Intelligence Reform
and Terrorism Prevention Act, occurring in less than two months, do you
know what will be the role of DHS in operating or setting the rules for
the ``environment''
The first deadline related to the terrorism information sharing
environment (ISE) was met. The President designated John Russack as the
Program Manager responsible for planning for, overseeing the
implementation of, and managing the ISE pursuant to section 1016 of
P.L. 108-458. Per our statutory authorities and responsibilities, DHS
has a critical role in the development of all aspects of the ISE,
including the establishment of the business rules for the ISE. DHS has
been actively engaged in the work to date toward developing the ISE and
will continue to have an active role in relation to this Department,
our stakeholders, and the community at large.
In particular, DHS has a unique role, as defined under the Homeland
Security Act, for sharing homeland security information with state,
local, and tribal governments as well as the private sector in relation
to critical infrastructure. Specifically, Executive Order 13311
delegates to the DHS Secretary the responsibilities for procedures for
prescribing and implementing information sharing as defined in Section
892 of the Homeland Security Act (P.L. 107-296). Improving information
sharing has been and continues to be a top strategic priority for DHS.
The Information Sharing and Collaboration Office (ISCO) was established
in DHS to provide focus and coordination for these statutory and
Presidential mandates.
DHS is currently a key link among State, tribal, and local
government, as well as the private sector critical infrastructure
entities. The Department is already operating in critical information
spheres (defense, intelligence, homeland security, law enforcement,
private sector) and is providing strategic guidance to oversee the
development of their intersection and collaboration to produce all
information necessary to govern and protect and will coordinate these
activities with the Program Manager.
Question: 3. After the 2004 elections, then-Secretary Ridge said
that there had been a decrease in chatter and that the threat of
terrorist attack was lower than it had been in some time. Is that still
the case, and if so, how do you account for that?
Beginning in Summer 2004, we began to see a decrease in incoming
credible and/or specific information mentioning direct threats to the
United States. The reasons for the quantitative and qualitative
decrease--which lasted through late February 2005--remain unclear.
Since then, we have tracked a number of threat streams deemed credible
and/or specific to Homeland-related interests, however we do not know
if this is related to the natural cycle of the intelligence collection
process or other factors more related to actual terrorist operational
planning.
Despite this relative increase in credible and/or specific
reporting since late February, we continue to lack information
indicating an imminent threat to the United States, as well as the
timing, targets, or methodology of any potential operation. While the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the rest of the Intelligence
Community are still analyzing each particular threat stream, as well as
those streams collectively, they do reinforce our perception regarding
al-Qaida's ongoing strategic intent to conduct another dramatic attack
in the United States. This intent and possible planning is reflected in
all-source intelligence reporting, vice a single collection discipline.
We note that the reporting level from vague, low-credibility, or
undetermined sources (call-ins, write-ins, walk-ins, media
pronouncements, etc.) regarding possible attacks on the Homeland
remains relatively constant and numerically more significant than
reports from ``credible'' sources.
Question: 4. What changes are being considered for the Homeland
Security Advisory System, and will the system continue to be used in
its current structure?
The Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS) has evolved throughout
the history of DHS and currently includes the flexibility to assign
threat levels for the entire nation, or a particular geographic area or
infrastructure sector, depending on the credibility and specificity of
available threat information. The HSAS is a collaborative process which
takes into account current threat information and incorporates the
perspectives of other federal entities (both within and outside of
DHS); state, local, and tribal partners; and private sector
stakeholders. DHS learns new lessons and continues to improve the
system each time HSAS level changes are considered.