TSA tackles info-sharing
From a CQ story today:
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is launching an intelligence-sharing program to help state and local transportation officials anticipate the latest threats and stop terrorist attacks, TSA chief Edmund S. “Kip†Hawley said in a speech Wednesday.
The agency is developing a system — the “TSA Information Sharing Environment†— to quickly organize and share real-time intelligence on terrorist threats with state and local transportation authorities, Hawley said.
“We are positioning to begin sharing information much more effectively with others,†he told an audience of security technology executives at a Washington conference hosted by the Japan International Transport Institute. “The system will put TSA in a much better position to respond early to terror threats.â€
This kind of information-sharing should be happening, and it’s a good thing that Hawley is paying attention to this issue. But shouldn’t this be part of a DHS-wide initiative? Isn’t that the reason why Sec. Chertoff created a Chief Intelligence Officer position as part of the second-stage review (2SR), and said the following at his speech announcing 2SR:
Right now, there are more than 10 separate components or offices of the Department of Homeland Security, which are intelligence generators, and all of us in the Department are consumers and users of intelligence information. We need to have a common picture across this Department, of the intelligence that we generate and the intelligence that we require. We need to fuse that information and combine it with information from other members of the intelligence community, as well as information from our state and local and international partners.
Hopefully this latest announcement doesn’t indicate that the Department is retreating back toward the stovepiping of intelligence at DHS.