Fix the plumbing to connect the dots.....

President Obama said about the intelligence failures surrounding the underwear bomber incident, “There are no silver bullets.” And he’s right: there is no single magic step we can take to catch every terrorist. That does not mean, however, that we can’t improve intelligence sharing significantly, and immediately.

A pundit on NPR asked recently why in this age of information a bank can let the credit card company know immediately if he’s missed his monthly payment –yet our counter-terrorism systems still fail to alert airport officials about a potentially dangerous terrorist bomber?

A cynic might answer, because credit card systems were not built on government contracts. But the real problem lies deeper.

Richard Clarke, the security advisor to both the Clinton and Bush administrations who famously predicted an Al Qaeda attack before 9/11, said during a recent TV interview that he was “shocked” the U.S. intelligence community still doesn’t have software that can connect the dots in simple cases like one-way cash ticket/no luggage/worried father/known connections to terrorism. Clarke made the same point at a Portland town hall meeting in 2002, attended by over 600 people. Information sharing is a key line defense against terrorism, he said then, and we’ve got to get it right. Eight years and tens of billions of dollars later, he’s still saying the same thing.

After working on this issue professionally as a software architect in and around government information sharing programs for most of these same eight years, here’s what I’ve learned: Below the interagency cultural and turf issues – and there are many—our intelligence community has a serious plumbing problem. Its information pipes are old, disconnected and full of, well, let’s call it solid waste. And all we seem to be doing is building more of the same old, dysfunctional pipes.

What we need is a whole new model—one which “virtualizes” all the old plumbing, and essentially routes around it. Without getting too technical, the key to doing this is to launch new “green field” systems that are fast, nimble, highly connected and focused on interoperable data models, instead of siloed databases and applications.

Technically speaking, the systemic failure to connect dots into meaningful, actionable threat pictures is a data interoperability problem—a problem that governments have faced, and solved, before. In World War 1, there was no ammunition interoperability among the French, English and US forces –each army had its own unique guns and bullets. In an integrated field of battle, this led to many problems. These same armies eventually standardized on a 7.62mm caliber bullet, which meant that the guns of all the allied armies could start using the same ammo. Huge economies of scale and tactical efficiencies resulted.

Today, each intelligence agency in our government has its own, non-standard “data bullets.” No wonder they are still quite capable of shooting blanks, even in relatively obvious cases. The lack of standardization is keeping intelligence collection dots separated—and all the rest of us are paying with dollars and lives at risk.

A small group inside of the government called the National Information Exchange Model (www.NIEM.gov) is working from the bottom up to develop new kind of data interoperability, and make it viable across not just intelligence agencies, but across all levels and branches of government. But NIEM is small, underfunded effort relative to the size of the problem.

In the past “decade of disasters,” as it’s been dubbed , billions have been spent on government systems that either haven’t worked or have been incompatible with others. We’ve witnessed this problem first hand on 9/11, during the Katrina Hurricane, and recently with both the Fort Hood shooter and underwear bomber. We have also seen over and over that one law enforcement agency doesn’t have information about a killer on parole from another jurisdiction – the recent Seattle shootings were a tragic example. How many more debacles and disasters is it going to take?

In an age when teens from around the world can find each other in real time to play the same obscure video game, the fact we don’t have more interconnected intelligence systems is a national scandal. We need to automate our information collection, analyzing and processing systems with the relentlessness of a WalMart – driving toward a standardized, comprehensible system that can work in both classified arenas, between first resonders and in the public domain.

New systems with standardized, fully interoperable data models are needed instantly—and must become widely available, not just buried in beltway bunkers. Certainly, secret intelligent systems are needed. But these must also interoperate with open systems (with appropriate cyber protections) to deliver critical information to front line personnel who don’t have security clearances, but who are tasked with acting, and interfacing to the public.

There is also every reason to engage the public in this effort using the tools that they are using every day – cell phones, cameras, email, Twitter, Facebook and other real time communication tools. How many passengers on the Christmas Eve flight might have noticed the purported terrorist behaving strangely, and reported their suspicions had there been a way? After the fact reports tell us he was extremely nervous and had a “thousand yard stare.”

Protecting the public is the public’s business, and we should engage everyone who can make a difference. The cost of many new innovative “open source” intelligence services is probably less than a few new body scanners—but the payoffs of any aroused watchful public could be immense.