France & U.S. Sharing Errors

When David Gauthier-Villars, in his 22 March story about Charlie Hebdo's newsroom killings [France Identifies Security Gaps, but Fixing Them Proves Challenging, The Wall Street Journal ] describes the problems the French Intelligence Services were having with information sharing, it sounded familiar.  He says the French services were "functioning in silos, often suffering from shortsightedness and straining to screen through a welter of information....".  It sounded very much like the 9-11 Commission Report describing how we managed to see that certain persons might be training to fly airplanes, and putting that scenario together with other information that would have said what they might be up to.  Except that that information never did come together, or get shared with the people who could do something about it.

" Although he had been convicted in 2013 as part of the high-profile terror case, Mr. Coulibaly featured in police files as a garden-variety criminal, officials said. Even more worrying, they said, his entry was of a type that should have normally been purged from the police database.

Because it had mistakenly been kept active, a police patrol did log last summer that Mr. Coulibaly was bonding with a convicted terrorist. But the intelligence sat in his file."  

This is the kind of thing that benefits from hindsight.  The 9-11 Commission put it this way:  "National Intelligence is still organized around the collection disciplines of the home agencies, not the joint mission.  The importance of integrated, all-source analysis cannot be overstated.  Without it, it is not possible to 'connect the dots'.  No one component holds all the relevant information."  If we look at that same issue now, things are not a great deal different than they were then, for the French or the U.S.  The most famous comment made by the 9-11 Commission was the connect the dots analysis, yet it is far from a solved problem.  

The Journal says, "In September 2011, the French counterterrorism agency—at the time known as the DCRI—received a tip from the U.S.: Someone behind a screen at a small computer shop in the Paris suburb of Gennevilliers had been exchanging messages with someone in Yemen.

A quick search yielded a potential suspect: Chérif Kouachi, who had been convicted of being part of a terror group in 2008, and was living in a one-room apartment two buildings away from the shop, MVI Services.

Another unnerving piece of intelligence in the U.S. report: Said Kouachi and a French former inmate, Salim Benghalem, had traveled to Oman in summer 2011 and had almost certainly crossed into Yemen."  

Somebody was certainly sharing information with France. Intelligence services do this well, usually in spite of procedures that make it more difficult if they are followed.   There are a lot of equities in sharing that have to be considered, and bureaucrats will find all of them.  The 9-11 Commission addressed this from a different perspective, saying the ability to define, share and correlate information should come from standards and training, directed from the top down and says unequivocally, "too many agencies now have the authority to say no to change."  They pointed out the need for IT to be standardized for maximum sharing between agencies.  That is a 100 year project that has yet to get started.  

"French investigators now believe Chérif Kouachi, whose own Algerian and French passports had been confiscated during his parole, used his brother’s ID to travel to the Middle East in 2011, from July 25 to August 15, " says the Journal article.  We would like to believe that the Customs and Border patrol could coordinate every traveller to his actual identity and feed information about that travel to the Intelligence agencies, but we have seen people on the "no fly" list actually fly and it is only discovered after the fact.  I'm not sure we would allow a person in prison, or on parole, to travel that way, but someone should find out if we are actually doing anything to check.  

Everyone in the world is trying to figure out how a person gets from somewhere to Syria to fight for ISIS, yet it isn't too hard to figure out - after the fact.  What we need are better ways of finding out before they get to where they are going.  The libertarians are doing backflips over this kind of surveillance because people are allowed to go to Syria, and come back.  What they can't do is go to Syria, or any other country, to fight for ISIS and come back.  That is harder to prove, and even harder still to discover.  I like what some countries are doing with people they find going to Syria to join the cause.  They take away their citizenship.  They can go, but they can't come back.  Why can't we do that?

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