Remarks by the Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff 2006 Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice and SEARCH Symposium on Justice and Public Safety Information Sharing

Release Date: 03/14/06 00:00:00

Washington, D.C.
Bureau of Justice Assistance
U.S. Department of Justice and Search Symposium on Justice and Public Safety Information Sharing
March 14, 2006

SECRETARY CHERTOFF:  Thanks very much, for a walk down memory lane for me.  Thinking back to being a prosecutor, I don’t know how many of you saw "The Sopranos" on Sunday night.  That was like going back through the photo album, because when I started out in law enforcement, I did organized crime cases.

And, of course, the way we proceeded against traditional organized crime is actually a great lesson in what happens when we work together and we communicate together.  

When I joined the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan under Rudy Giuliani in 1983, organized crime really dominated -- not only the City of New York, but many of the major cities in the east and Chicago.  And they had a grip on the construction industry, the trucking industry, labor unions, a whole host of vital economic organs in our country.

And there was a real sense, I think, that we were nibbling around the edges.  We had started to make some really big cases, but it looked like a really intractable, difficult problem that couldn't be solved.  

And in fact, it was cooperation and collaboration, information sharing that was a major part of what allowed us to turn that around and really strike devastating blows against organized crime.

We did it because, first of all, we brought federal, state and local law enforcement together to do joint operations and joint investigations.  

I remember I did -- when I tried the Commission case against the bosses of the five Mafia families, we had a team not only of FBI agents, but we had New York Police detectives, very experienced police detectives, New York State organizers, all of whom had their different sets of wiretaps and electronic surveillance.

We fused all of that together.  We had an intelligence-driven operation where we knew who the principal targets were and who we had to take down, and the outcome of that was everybody got convicted.  It was a major blow at the organizing and ruling body of La Cosa Nostra.  

I think that is a great lesson to me, historically, about the importance of having joint activity fused information and intelligence-driven activities, whether they be law enforcement activities or response activities.

So I'm really delighted to come here to talk to you a little bit about what we are doing and what we want to continue to do with respect to information and intelligence sharing and fusion.

The fact of the matter is, more and more what you come to realize in our line of work in law enforcement and emergency responses, it is at the end of the day mostly about information.  Where the problem is, what the nature of the problem is, what kind of capabilities are available to address the problem, and how quickly we are able to get those capabilities to the source of the problem.  

All of those require us to understand what the situation on the ground is, and to have what we call a common operating picture.  

So I thought what I would spend a little bit of time today talking to you about is how we use and share information and intelligence at DHS to achieve our all-hazards mission, and to support our state and local partners and the law enforcement community in what they do.

One way to look at intelligence, of course, is as the radar of the 21st century.  

What do I mean by that?  In the 20th century, World War II, the Cold War, we were mainly concerned about enemy aircraft or enemy vessels coming in and attacking with bombs or other kinds of weapons.  And the way you detected them and intercepted them was by using radar.  That was our early warning system.

That doesn't work in a terrorist environment, because terrorists are going to bring bombs and weapons, and not by flying bombers or coming in in Naval vessels, but by sneaking in, under cover of our ordinary civilian life.  We are not going to have the kind of radar that worked in World War II or the Cold War.  

The kind of radar we are going to have is intelligence.  Properly used and properly shared, intelligence gives us the ability to anticipate what the enemy is going to do.  And if we anticipate it, we can intercept it.  It also means we can protect ourselves with less inconvenience to our ordinary day to day activities, our freedoms, our prosperity.  

So, intelligence is a tool that not only pays off in terms of better security, but actually enhances our civil liberties and our economic prosperity.  

So, how do you make intelligence work?  We have to have effective collection.  You have to have effective analysis, and you have effective sharing.  Because only that really reaps the full fruits of our intelligence apparatus at every level of government and law enforcement.  And a critical element of that is always making sure that we fuse intelligence, or, in the vernacular, connect the dots.

One of the first things I saw when I came into the Department of Homeland Security was the need to make sure we actually fused our own dots in our own agency.  You know, people think of DHS large as an analytic intelligence operator, taking intelligence gathered from satellites or spies overseas or things of that sort, and fusing it and analyzing it and applying it to our various activities in prevention, protection and response.

But we actually generate a lot of intelligence.  Intelligence, as you know, if not only about spies and satellites.  Intelligence is about the thousands and thousands of routine, everyday observations and activities.  Surveillances, interactions -- each of which may be taken in isolation as not a particularly meaningful piece of information, but when fused together, gives us a sense of the patterns and the flow that really is at the core of what intelligence analysis is really about.

We have many interactions every day, every hour, at the border, on airplanes, with the Coast Guard.  And what we need to do is to vacuum all those up and get them fused and analyzed so we can not only take appropriate action ourselves, but so we can share it with our state and local partners.  

In order to do that, I was very fortunate in being able to recruit an almost legendary official from the Central Intelligence Agency, Charlie Allen, who is really one of the best in the business.  He was in charge of collection requirements at the CIA.  He's basically seen almost every element of our intelligence analytic function.  And the idea was to bring him in, and, for the first time, create a Chief Intelligence Officer, for DHS.  

Charlie has been able to start the process now of really fusing our intelligence collections across the board. And more than that, he has been able to start to reach out to you, and state and local officers all over the country to find out what you, as intelligence customers need, build the kind of two-way relationships that we need in order to get the maximum effect from our intelligence collection, and really build an architecture of intelligence, which is going to serve all of us, in terms of our law enforcement responsibilities.

One of the key tools that we are looking to exploit here is intelligence fusion centers.  Your ability to fuse your own intelligence, which then gives us a one-stop shop for purposes of our exchanging what we have for what you have.

Because, again, the name of the game is, there is much collection activity out there, even at the squad car level, that we need to make sure we are constantly pulling it together in a way that allows us to exchange that information.

So we are very interested now in pursuing this issue of fusion centers with you.  DHS is already deploying personnel to major urban areas in New York and Los Angeles, so we actually embed people in the operations and fusion centers in those cities.  

We have also brought state and local law enforcement into our own Homeland Security Operations Centers to embed them with us, so that we can further enhance that ability to actually understand what we are doing and make sure the information flow continues to operate freely.

The fact of the matter is the more of us that can get in the same room and look at the same information, the better we are going to be.

But, of course, we can't bring everybody in physically in the HSOC, nor do we have enough people to put everybody outside in the country to populate all the individual fusion centers.  So what we have to do is exploit modern communications technology and create a virtual network, that creates the ability for all of us to operate as if we were in the same room, with a common operating picture.

And that is what we are trying to do with our Homeland Security Information Network, which is our main infrastructure sharing web portal.  This network allows real-time information sharing among federal, state and local officials, and with the critical infrastructure operators in the private sector.

HSIN now includes 50 states, five territories, 53 major urban areas, local officials and officials from Britain, Canada and Australia.  It connects Homeland Security advisors, governor's offices, and emergency management agencies all across the country.  

There are now tens of thousands of users with access to a host of information, real-time thread information about counterterrorism and intelligence-focused activities; law enforcement data and analysis; critical infrastructure information, including private sector participation; cyber security incident reporting; and, through our now secret pathway, HSIN-Secret, which allows the sharing of secret information in an environment in which those who are properly cleared and look across the whole range of classified information that is relevant to their jobs.  

We are going to strengthen the secret element of HSIN through HSDN, which is yet another pathway for data exchange, both unclassified and classified.  

Now, of course, DHS was born out of the concern about terrorism, the threat of 9/11.  But we do a lot more than just terrorism-fighting, although terrorism-fighting is still at the very top of our list of priorities.

We screen millions of people and tons of goods crossing our borders every day.  And we have the critical responsibility on the part of the federal government for addressing illegal migration, even if it's not terrorism-related.  Even if it's just economic-related.  

And, here again, our ability to manage this very, very difficult problem of illegal migration is entirely dependent on information, although information of a somewhat different kind than we employ in the terrorism area.  Biometrics under U.S. Visit, fingerprints, the ability to capture real identities of people who come into the country and leave the country, is critical, not only in screening out potential terrorist threats, but finding criminals, who we need to apprehend for whom there are outstanding warrants, keeping people who are child molesters out of the country, giving us the ability to track threats of all kinds, so that we can better protect citizens in this country.

We also use name record information for screening, keeping bad people off airplanes on our no-fly lists.  Or selecting people for further questioning if there is a reason to be concerned about them.

Tracking down gang members.  We just announced last week that over 2300 gang members were apprehended as part of our Operation Community Shield.  Again, the ability to make these cases, and to really fight against these networks of criminals and terrorists is dramatically enhanced and empowered by our ability to operate as a network of law enforcement officials.  

The analyzing and the sharing of this kind of information, therefore, serves not only our terrorism mission, but our general law enforcement mission.  And for that reason, as well, we want to continue to share that culture of intelligence exchange and analytic fusion, which is at the key of all of what we need to do.

Let me give you a concrete example of some of what we are trying to do, in terms of not only information sharing, but using information-sharing to drive joint operations and enhance and multiply the impact of the resources we bring to deal with a very difficult problem.  

When we look at the issue of the border, and the literally hundreds of thousands of people that we apprehend coming across every year, and those who we don't apprehend, you realize that there is no way a single agency can deal with this problem.

And the only way to properly manage the problem and address it is to bring a lot of different agencies together and to give them a common operating picture, and then to allocate their roles and responsibilities and drive their planning with a single uniform picture of what the mission is, and what the metrics are to accomplish that mission.

Only with that kind of information-sharing as a backbone to operational planning and execution can we really effectively deploy a lot of different resources at every level, in order to make sure that we are getting the maximum bang for the buck in dealing with these enforcement challenges.

So what we have done, for the first time, is use information-sharing to bring Customs and Border Protection, Immigration Customs Enforcement, DEA, ATF, FBI and the U.S. attorneys, all together to build a comprehensive plan to attack crime and violence at the border and to really undermine and defeat these smuggling organizations that bring human beings and drugs and other contraband into the United States.

We have created new border enforcement security task forces to conduct joint planning and operation to strike at these criminal organizations using all the tools to be intelligence-drive.  

Not merely to pick off the individual coyote or the individual smuggler, but to ask ourselves, what are the strategic targets we have to strike at in order to undermine these criminal organizations.  The money, the criminal infrastructure that allows them to get phony documents and to transport what they want to smuggle in, the leadership, which provides the brains and the vision for the criminal organizations.  

In other words, what I am saying is, we are applying now to these criminal drug gangs and smuggling organizations the same strategic information-sharing and planning we used to strike at organized crime and Legal analysis Cosa Nostra 20-30 years ago when I was a prosecutor. It worked then, and it can work now.

And, again, the key is going to be that sharing of information and that shared vision of planning.

Now, of course, intelligence and information means we need to talk to each other.  And so brings me to the topic of communication.  Emergency communication.  And that has been on the agenda for a considerable period of time.  

Let's be very clear about this.  If people can't talk to each other, then the best intent in the world to share information is going to be frustrated.  

And we saw that, for example, in Hurricane Katrina, when we not only had a problem with interoperability, we had a problem with operability.  All of the wireless was down, all the normal communication was shut out.  Satellite phones, although they were a partial solution, were inadequate.  

And the inability to talk, and the inability to get situational awareness added hours of delay to making very important decisions.  We are taking concrete steps as we speak to remedy this situation.

First of all, we are completing the process of integrating our operations centers.  That means not only finishing building the pipes that connect the operations centers, but making sure that we are a part of a single culture of information-sharing at the headquarters level.  We are putting together reconnaissance teams equipped with modern self-sustained communications packages, that can go into areas that are either suffering severe weather, or otherwise compromised in terms of security and safety and have teams that can be self-sufficient, can be eyes on the ground and can give real-time information about what is going on, without going through a lot of different barriers or having to work around a complicated circuit.  

Our ability to do this and our ability to bring additional real communication assets to state and local responders in an emergency will be a critical part of creating the network and the physical architecture which allows information-sharing that is important -- as important in emergency response as it is with respect to law enforcement prevention and protection.

Finally, the last piece of building this total system of information and intelligence-sharing, is to link it to planning and preparedness.  

For that reason, last year I announced -- in October we put it into effect -- the creation of new Preparedness Directorate, led by a very experienced emergency manager and homeland security advisor, from Virginia, George Foresman.  George served as Homeland Security advisor in senior capacities, both for Governor Gilmore and for Governor Warner in Virginia for a number of years.  And he brings a state and local perspective to the need to build preparedness and to link that preparedness in with federal planning and federal capabilities.  

I want to be very clear.  The federal government does not want to, and will not be able to, and therefore will never try to, supplant state and local law enforcement and responders in dealing with emergencies.  Our system isn't built to have the federal government be a Bigfoot.  State and local responders better understand their communities and local geography than we do.

On the other hand, we have certain unique capabilities and resources that can be brought to bear when state and local law enforcement and responses are overwhelmed.  And we do need to be in a position to do that and do it quickly.  

So if the only way to preserve your leadership role in law enforcement and response, and our ability to bring enhanced special capabilities is to make sure we are always walking together in the process of planning.  So that we know what you need and you know what we have, and we can execute, bringing the capabilities and the requirements together as efficiently as possible.  

And that is my mandate to George.  It's my mandate to all the people working in preparedness, to continue to work with you to make sure we are building the network, the capabilities and the understanding that is necessary to operate as closely as possible, as a seamless team in dealing with the challenges we face.  

The fact of the matter is, in all the years I have been involved in dealing with law enforcement, going back to the early 1980s, I can't remember a time that was more challenging than the time we face now.  

We face a war with terror, unlike any we have ever had to contend with.  While we have dealt with traditional organized criminal gangs, we have new organized criminal gangs.  We have very serious stress with illegal migration at the border.  We are still plagued by a serious problem, and we sometimes wind up, on top of all this, with some over the top natural catastrophes, which create their own law enforcement and security problems.

But the fact of the matter is, I know from experience, we can deal with these challenges.  We can deal with them if we work together, if we share infrastructure, if we fuse intelligence, and if we execute in a coordinated plan.

I am delighted to see you all here today, working together to try to build this and enhance this kind of information-sharing and fusion.  I look forward to working with you in this common effort.  I can tell you my team is committed to doing that, and I think together we will continue to build on the promise of so many past great accomplishments in facing the challenges of this next new century.

Thank you very much.

###

This page was last modified on 03/14/06 00:00:00