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Washington Post Staff Writer Karen DeYoung tomorrow reports:
Despite more than four years of legislation, executive orders and presidential directives, the Bush administration has yet to comprehensively improve sharing of counterterrorism information among dozens of federal agencies -- and between them and thousands of nonfederal partners.... according to a 34-page report issued late Monday by the Government Accountability Office.
More after the jump...
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DeYoung notes that about a year ago, Bush appointed John Russack as a "program manager" for creating an "Information Sharing Environment" to drive the sharing of counter-terrorism intelligence. However, this past January, Russack "resigned after complaining of inadequate staffing and budget."
DeYoung writes that the GAO report
was particularly critical of the lack of standards for "sensitive but unclassified homeland security information" that is subject to limited distribution and not to be made public. A wide range of federal agencies including the departments of Defense, Justice, Treasury and Homeland Security reported using 56 different designations to identify such information...
State and local first responders told GAO investigators that the multiplicity of designations and lack of common federal standards "not only causes confusion but leads to an alternating feast or famine of information" that either left them in the dark or overwhelmed them with identical information from multiple federal sources.