Okay I just have to make one comment - be sure to read the VERY LAST sentense that this blog has copied from the FBI website (scrolle down).

Catherine

__________________________

For those of us in law enforcement, September 11 was one of those milestones. It changed all of us personally. It changed America. And it changed the way we go about protecting America.

If you Google the phrase “before September 11,” almost half a million results pop up. Thousands upon thousands of them center on the intelligence failures that contributed, in part, to the hijackers’ success.

The bottom line is that before September 11, we didn’t have the technology, the partnerships, or the information sharing we needed to prevent the attack. After September 11, our challenge was to improve all three.

Before September 11, we didn’t have the comprehensive intelligence capability we needed to prevent the attack—from collection, to analysis, to sharing, to action. After September 11, our challenge was to strengthen each element.

Before September 11, all of us were collecting the dots, and all of us were connecting the dots—but we were all doing it individually. After September 11, our challenge was approach intelligence as a team.

We have all risen to the challenge. Speaking just from the FBI’s perspective, I can say we are much more connected to our state and local partners today than we were before September 11. We built new databases—and we also increased connectivity to them. We formed new task forces—and worked to integrate our partners so they could fully participate on them.

But the most important change we made is one that all of us in law enforcement had to make—and that is changing our understanding of what intelligence is.

A question I frequently hear is, “What exactly constitutes intelligence? How can you define it?” Simply put, it is information: vital information about those who want to harm us. But as you know, nothing is ever that simple. There is a world of difference between information and knowledge.

The problem we face is not a lack of information, but rather a flood of it. It’s like trying to sip water from a firehose. Our job is to wade through a river of unrelated and often indecipherable data, and to determine what is important, and who needs to know it.

But how do we turn all that raw information into valuable knowledge? How do we turn a name, a phone number, or an ATM receipt into a comprehensive understanding of our threat environment? How do we transform it into actionable intelligence that helps us prevent a terrorist attack?

That’s where the fusion centers come in.

Inside fusion centers, information collected by a police officer on a beat can be merged with information from an ongoing FBI investigation several states away. For example, many of you have heard the Chesapeake Bay Bridge story. Back in 2004, local law enforcement officers in Maryland stopped a car after a woman was observed videotaping the structure of the bridge. Red flags went up when the officers ran the driver’s name through NCIC. They then called the fusion center, in this case, the Terrorist Screening Center. It turned out that the driver of the car was wanted in connection with a Chicago investigation involving Hamas.

Now, we won’t have a story like that every day. But fusion centers do much more than just provide timely intelligence. They allow us to see both the macro and the microview of our threat environment. We can’t win a battle without understanding our adversary, and knowing every inch of the battlefield.

via Federal Bureau of Investigation - Major Executive Speeches.