Please find below an example of UPI's continuing coverage of the FBI and federal law enforcement. I hope you find it interesting. You may link to it on the web here:
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20050725-115357-5141r If you have any comments or questions about this piece, need any more information about UPI products and services, or want to stop receiving these alerts, please get in touch. Thank you, Shaun Waterman UPI Homeland and National Security Editor E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: 202 898 8081 Issue brief: The FBI's internal security By Shaun Waterman UPI Homeland and National Security Editor WASHINGTON, July 25 (UPI) -- When FBI Director Robert Mueller appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, there is one issue some congressional staffers are working hard to make sure he is asked about: the bureau's internal security. A new report from the Justice Department's Inspector General Glen Fine is expected to examine claims about breakdowns in the vetting process for some employees. And a recent report on the bureau-run Terrorist Screening Center revealed that there had been some seepage of classified data to unsecured systems or people without proper clearances. At the same time the bureau faces enormous pressure to recruit people from non-traditional backgrounds (classically the FBI recruited cops and accountants), especially those with the language skills needed in the bureau's work against Middle Eastern and Central-South Asian terrorists. The man responsible to Mueller for squaring this circle is Charles Phalen: a 24-year veteran intelligence official, who joined the federal service in 1981, and spent the 1990's in a series of senior internal security posts at the CIA and the National Reconnaissance Office. Phalen recently gave United Press International a wide-ranging interview about his work. As on recruitment, the FBI faces countervailing pressures on the question of information sharing. The bureau leadership is committed to working closely with state and local officials through its Joint Terrorism Task Forces. But it also has to confront genuine counter-intelligence concerns about the possible penetration of such partners. "The FBI is faced with a broader set of decision points (on information sharing) than the intelligence community," Phalen said, because even the unclassified data the bureau has is of use to a potential adversary. "You don't want to get hung up on the idea that this is just an issue of national security information," he said, "There's a market out there for almost everything we know." The FBI commitment to information sharing means it needs systems that operate precisely on the interface between the classified and unclassified -- like the cleared FBI analyst at the Terrorist Screening Center, with access to classified terror watchlist data, talking to an uncleared cop at a traffic stop. Phalen acknowledges that when people are working in that way, slippage will occur. "That happens occasionally," he said of accidental security breaches like those identified in the inspector general's report on the terrorist screening center. Such breaches are an issue, he says, but that's where training comes in. "One of the keys to this thing is clear guidelines to let people know when they're crossing that threshold." "These sorts of mistakes are more manageable and correctable than someone out to destroy us." Nonetheless, Phalen says the bureau faces big challenges on information sharing issues because of the way its classified systems -- in common with almost everyone else's -- are currently structured. "Our databases contain materials at different levels of classification. You have to have what's called 'system-high' access -- you have to be cleared for the highest level information on the system" to get access, he told UPI. The desired end state -- Phalen calls it the "Holy Grail of information sharing" -- is the so-called Multi-Security Level solution: an integrated complex of linked databases in which information is tagged so that, in the words of one contractor, "the data knows who is allowed to see it." Any analyst-user can log on to the system and manipulate all the data that they have permission to access in any way they want. If their analysis reveals relationships to data they are not entitled to see, the system can even tell them that, so that a more highly privileged user can be found to check the results. "It is doable," Phalen said, "but it is very complex." On the recruitment issue, Phalen faces the dual challenge of convincing a sometime skeptical intelligence community that the FBI's clearance process is up to snuff, while simultaneously ensuring that the bureau can recruit the agents and contractors with non-traditional backgrounds it needs. Phalen says the bureau has used polygraphs in its applicant background checks since 1994, but it was a one off test for first time applicants. The Webster Commission recommended "expanding its use in the staff reinvestigation program and for others who have routine access to FBI national security information," Phalen said. The background check process has been reviewed, he told UPI, and some changes are planned in the way the bureau looks into the histories of its prospective staff. "We're reconfiguring to make it more manageable," Phalen said of the process. "There are too many hand-offs, too many do loops... We need to get more of the information we need for the whole process up front." Phalen told UPI the bureau has made great strides in one of its major recruiting challenges: background checks for people born or with families abroad. "There's an urban legend that if you've lived overseas we won't hire you," he said. "It's a myth." He declined to comment in detail on the changes that had made progress possible, but former FBI officials told UPI some time ago that the bureau was making much more extensive use of foreign intelligence services to background-check applicants born or with family abroad. Without being complacent, Phalen demonstrated a clear awareness of a hierarchy of threats. For instance, he pretty much dismissed the possibility of successful intrusions into FBI classified systems. The bureau's secure computer networks, he told UPI, are "very difficult to break into from the outside," but, he added, the insider threat was real. A legendary counter-intelligence veteran once told UPI that the FBI's problem was that "no one came to work every day to look for spies inside the bureau." Phalen might be that guy. In security, he said, "the most important thing is the people... We have barriers to keep unauthorized people out of our facilities and off our networks but every day we ask thousands of people to walk through our doors and work in our facilities." That is why the clearance process, and ongoing efforts ensuring the integrity of bureau staff is key. "If we fail at that, the rest almost doesn't matter," he said. The bureau's security office, which Phalen now heads, was established as the result of what he calls the "seminal event" -- the discovery that Robert Hansen had been spying for the Russians for so many years. The inquiries into that case revealed "an important structural defect" -- the various security functions of the bureau were spread around "five or six different places," Phalen said. But the office is separate from the bureau's broader counter-intelligence work. Every agency in the intelligence community has a dedicated security element -- in some agencies it is part of, in others separate from, the counter-intelligence function. "It depends on what the (counter-intelligence) job is within each agency. At the National Security Agency, for example, the counter-intelligence function is largely internal and it is incorporated into a single security and counter-intelligence element of the agency," Phalen explains. But the FBI's counter-intelligence operation "is generally outwardly focused," because of its national-level counter-intelligence mission, so the bureau sees a more inward-focused security office "as a separate role from general (counter-intelligence)," according to Phalen. The office has been running for a little over three years, and has about 1,000 staff. It employs about 1,500 contractors, mainly as investigators doing background checks. Phalen knows his job is something of a hot seat. "There's been no shortage of oversight," he said, listing a slew of recent investigations and reports into the FBI's internal security. "We've had a lot of good advice," he said, adding that a "continuing theme" of the investigators had been to tell the FBI it was "going in the right direction." Phalen agrees with them. "We've made some great strides in responding to the challenges that the Hansen case laid at our door," he said. "We're far better off now." Copyright (c) 2001-2005 United Press International [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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