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THE NEED TO KNOW: INFORMATION SHARING

LESSONS FOR DISASTER RESPONSE

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON

GOVERNMENT REFORM

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

MARCH 30, 2006

Serial No. 109–143

Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/index.html

http://www.house.gov/reform

(II)

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM

TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut

DAN BURTON, Indiana

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

CHRIS CANNON, Utah

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee

CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan

MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio

DARRELL E. ISSA, California

JON C. PORTER, Nevada

KENNY MARCHANT, Texas

LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia

PATRICK T. MCHENRY, North Carolina

CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania

VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina

JEAN SCHMIDT, Ohio

——— ———

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

TOM LANTOS, California

MAJOR R. OWENS, New York

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri

DIANE E. WATSON, California

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts

CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland

LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California

C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

———

BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

(Independent)

DAVID MARIN, Staff Director

TERESA AUSTIN, Chief Clerk

PHIL BARNETT, Minority Chief of Staff/Chief Counsel

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on March 30, 2006 ............................................................................ 1

Statement of:

Brennan, John, president and chief executive officer, the Analysis Corp.,

McLean, VA; Donald F. Kettl, director, FELS Institute of Government,

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Brian A. Jackson, physical scientist, RAND Corp.; and Lieutenant Steve Lambert, Virginia

Fusion Center, Virginia State Police ........................................................... 69

Brennan, John ........................................................................................... 69

Jackson, Brian A. ...................................................................................... 89

Kettl, Donald F. ......................................................................................... 75

Lambert, Steve .......................................................................................... 101

Wells, Linton, II, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Networks and

Information Integration, U.S. Department of Defense; Peter F. Verga,

Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Homeland Defense, U.S. Department of Defense; and Vance Hitch, Chief Information Officer, U.S.

Department of Justice .................................................................................. 21

Hitch, Vance .............................................................................................. 51

Verga, Peter F. .......................................................................................... 37

Wells, Linton, II ........................................................................................ 21

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Brennan, John, president and chief executive officer, the Analysis Corp.,

McLean, VA, prepared statement of ............................................................ 72

Cummings, Hon. Elijah E., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Maryland, prepared statement of ............................................................ 16

Davis, Chairman Tom, a Representative in Congress from the State of

Virginia, prepared statement of ................................................................... 4

Hitch, Vance, Chief Information Officer, U.S. Department of Justice, prepared statement of ........................................................................................ 54

Jackson, Brian A., physical scientist, RAND Corp., prepared statement

of ..................................................................................................................... 91

Kettl, Donald F., director, FELS Institute of Government, University

of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, prepared statement of ....................... 77

Lambert, Lieutenant Steve, Virginia Fusion Center, Virginia State Police,

prepared statement of ................................................................................... 103

Verga, Peter F., Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Homeland Defense, U.S. Department of Defense, prepared statement of ...................... 39

Waxman, Hon. Henry A., a Representative in Congress from the State

of California, prepared statement of ........................................................... 11

Wells, Linton, II, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Networks and

Information Integration, U.S. Department of Defense, prepared statement of ........................................................................................................... 00

(1)

THE NEED TO KNOW: INFORMATION SHARING

LESSONS FOR DISASTER RESPONSE

THURSDAY, MARCH 30, 2006

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM, Washington, DC.

The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:13 a.m., in room

2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Tom Davis (chairman

of the committee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Tom Davis, Platts, Miller, Marchant,

Dent, Schmidt, Waxman, Cummings, and Van Hollen.

Staff present: David Marin, staff director; Steve Castor, counsel;

Chas Phillips, policy counsel; Rob White, press secretary; Victoria

Proctor, senior professional staff member; Teresa Austin, chief

clerk; Sarah D’Orsie, deputy clerk; Phil Barnett, minority staff director/chief counsel; Michael McCarthy, minority counsel; Earley

Green, minority chief clerk; and Jean Gosa, minority assistant

clerk.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. The committee will come to order. Good

morning. Welcome. A quorum being present, the committee will

come to order. I would like to welcome everybody to today’s hearing

on information sharing and the situational awareness during the

management of an emergency. The purpose of this hearing is to reignite public discussion and debate on barriers to information sharing among agencies and highlight practices and procedures that

could be effective in encouraging and enhancing information sharing among diverse entities.

The Government needs to be able to identify threats of all types

and meet or defeat them. Our success depends on collecting, analyzing, and appropriately sharing information found in data bases,

transactions, and other sources. Both the 9/11 Commission report

and the Select Katrina Committee report made it clear there is a

lack of effective information sharing and analysis among the relevant public and private sector entities.

We are still an analog Government in a digital age. We are woefully incapable of storing, moving, and accessing information, especially in times of crisis. Many of the problems in these times can

be categorized as ‘‘information gaps’’—or at least problems with information-related implications, or failures to act decisively because

information was sketchy at best.

Unfortunately, no Government does these things well, especially

big governments. The Federal Government is the largest purchaser

of information technology in the world, by far, and one would think

that we could share information by now.

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The 9/11 Commission found ‘‘the most important failure was one

of imagination.’’ Katrina was primarily a failure of initiative. But

there is, of course, a nexus between the two. Both imagination and

initiative—in other words, leadership—require good information.

And a coordinated process for sharing it. And a willingness to use

information—however imperfect or incomplete—to fuel action.

With Katrina, the reasons reliable information did not reach

more people more quickly were many, for example: the lack of communication and situational awareness paralyzed command and

control; DHS and the States had difficulty coordinating with each

other, which slowed the response; DOD lacked an information sharing protocol that would have enhanced joint situational awareness

and communication between all military components.

Information sharing and situational awareness will always be

predicated to an effective disaster response. With approximately 60

days remaining before the start of hurricane season on June 1st,

this hearing will examine how the lessons learned regarding information sharing in the context of law enforcement,

counterterrorism, and defense can be applied to disaster response.

Information sharing is the backbone of successful emergency

preparation and response efforts. Historically, however, the Federal

Government has been so compartmentalized, information sharing

has been a pipe dream. The Federal Government is faced with the

difficult task of transforming from a ‘‘need-to-know’’ information

sharing environment to a ‘‘need-to-share.’’ In addition, the bureaucratic stovepipe arrangement in Federal agencies restricts the Government’s flexibility to analyze information quickly, assess the

need for services, and respond effectively in emergency situations.

Governmentwide information policy authority rests with the

White House, in the Office of Management and Budget. I think the

White House, through OMB, has a critical role in establishing and

implementing policies and procedures for Federal information sharing. Whether we are discussing disaster management,

counterterrorism, or law enforcement, overarching guidance and

oversight to help Federal agencies establish a structure for

partnering with one another and local and State organizations.

Given the lessons learned from Katrina, emergency managers

and officials are obligated to the American people to produce a

more nimble, effective, and robust response to predictable natural

disasters. How can we avoid the inadequate information sharing

and murky situational awareness that characterized the Government response to Katrina? Are impediments to more effective information sharing primarily technological, structural, cultural, or bureaucratic in nature?

The committee’s hearing will include a review of the issues

raised by the Select Committee Report. This hearing is not intended to review the facts surrounding Hurricane Katrina, but will

use the disaster to highlight instances where collaboration and information sharing among agencies is lacking. In addition, the committee will explore the barriers to effective information sharing,

learn what entities—including State, local, defense, intelligence,

homeland security, and industry—are particularly adept at information sharing, and examine the models, policies, and methods

which have proven successful. Finally, the committee is interested

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in learning about whether there is a need for additional legislation,

guidance, procedures, or resources to facilitate the information

sharing priorities outlined by the witnesses.

The committee views this hearing as a new beginning on the

road to improving information sharing among Government agencies

and between the public and private sectors. To this end, private

sector stakeholders and other key agency personnel, including representatives from the Department of Homeland Security and the

Office of the Director of National Intelligence, will be asked to testify at future hearings.

[The prepared statement of Chairman Tom Davis follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. I would now recognize the distinguished

ranking member, Mr. Waxman, for his opening statement.

Mr. WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing

to examine issues raised by the failed response to Hurricane

Katrina. The report of the Select Committee on Hurricane Katrina

identified widespread and serious problems with our Nation’s disaster preparedness and response. The Government Reform Committee must take the next steps in finding solutions to these problems so that the Government can better help our citizens through

the next disaster.

This hearing on how to improve information sharing during a

disaster is a good first step for our committee to take. I hope we

can continue to work together on oversight of the Department of

Homeland Security and other Federal agencies to make sure that

better communications procedures and technology are put into

place.

Right now, across the river in Alexandria, admitted al Qaeda

member Zacarias Moussaoui is on trial, facing the death penalty

for his role in the September 11th attacks. As we all now know,

Mr. Moussaoui was in custody weeks before September 11th. His

attendance at flight school raised alarms among some experienced

law enforcement and intelligence professionals about a possible hijacking plot. But as the 9/11 Commission documented, the Government never pulled together the various threads of information that

could have detected the September 11th plot. Better information

sharing was one of the key recommendations that the 9/11 Commission made.

Hurricane Katrina showed us that serious flaws remain in the

Government’s crisis prevention and response communications capabilities.

The Katrina investigation revealed that President Bush, Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff, and other top officials were unaware of the magnitude of the disaster facing New Orleans until

Tuesday, August 30th, a day after the levees broke. They were unaware of this even though the first reports of levee breaches came

as early as 8 a.m. on Monday, and the levee breaches were confirmed by late afternoon that day.

In fact, as late as 2 weeks after landfall, President Bush continued to insist that the levees had not breached until Tuesday and

that there was a sense of relaxation at the White House on Monday

night and Tuesday morning because he and other top officials believed that New Orleans had ‘‘dodged a bullet.’’

This was an inexcusable failure of the most senior officials in our

Government to comprehend and act on urgent warnings and vital

information.

The second problem causing a lack of information was technological. Katrina was such a powerful storm that it knocked out

phone lines and radio towers throughout a three-State region, leaving local officials unable to communicate their needs to State and

Federal officials who had the resources to help. Some of this was

unavoidable. Any large enough disaster is bound to damage or destroy telecommunications infrastructure. But there are options, like

a satellite phone, that could provide redundancy and allow commuVerDate 11-MAY-2000 11:16 Jun 29, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00013 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\27721.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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nications when the regular system is down. Yet these were not in

place.

I understand that we invited officials from the Department of

Homeland Security to testify today, but they declined the invitation. DHS clearly has a primary responsibility for information sharing during disasters, and I hope that we will have another hearing

where we can hear from representatives of the Department of

Homeland Security.

I want to give my thanks to all the witnesses who did appear

today before us, and I am looking forward to their testimony.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Henry A. Waxman follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

Any other Members wish to make statements?

[No response.]

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Members will have 7 days to submit opening statements for the record.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Elijah E. Cummings follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. We will now recognize our first panel: Mr.

Peter Verga, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense

for Homeland Defense, U.S. Department of Defense; Dr. Linton

Wells, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Networks and Information Integration, U.S. Department of Defense;

and Mr. Vance Hitch, the CIO of the Department of Justice.

It is our policy that we swear you in before your testimony, so

if you would just rise and raise your right hands.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Mr. Verga, Dr. Wells, who wants to go first? OK. Dr. Wells, we

will start with you and then go to Mr. Verga and then, Mr. Hitch,

you will be cleanup. Thank you very much.

STATEMENTS OF LINTON WELLS II, PRINCIPAL DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY, NETWORKS AND INFORMATION INTEGRATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE; PETER F. VERGA,

PRINCIPAL DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR HOMELAND DEFENSE, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE; AND

VANCE HITCH, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

STATEMENT OF LINTON WELLS

Dr. WELLS. Thank you, Chairman Davis, Ranking Member Waxman, and distinguished members of the committee, for inviting me

here today to discuss this important topic. I would like to introduce

Ms. Deb Filippi, the DOD Chief Information Officer’s Information

Sharing Executive. She is charged with strengthening our information sharing.

While the Department of Defense Chief Information Officer is responsible for information sharing within DOD and with our partners, since the specific focus of this hearing is on following up on

the report on Hurricane Katrina, I would like to pass the microphone to Mr. Verga. I would like, however, to note that everything

that we have learned about information sharing from humanitarian assistance in tsunami and Katrina, to stabilization and reconstruction operations in Afghanistan and Iraq teaches us that

successful information sharing and collaboration is much more

than just technology. It involves policies and procedures, social networks, organizational training, and as the chairman has noted,

leadership. All of these must be co-evolved with the capabilities in

order to achieve successful outcomes.

I have submitted written testimony. I would like it entered for

the record. I look forward to working with the Congress and industry on this important topic. I am ready to answer your questions.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Wells follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Mr. Verga.

STATEMENT OF PETER F. VERGA

Mr. VERGA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate the opportunity, along with the distinguished members of the committee,

to come here to address today the Department of Defense information sharing lessons learned from disaster response.

Whether on the battlefield or in a disaster area, having the right

information at the right time in order to take the right action can

mean the difference between life or death, success or failure. DOD

has a great deal of experience in the development and implementation of the essential policies, procedures, and technologies to enable

effective information sharing and shared situational awareness.

That shared situational awareness—a common perception and

understanding of the operational environment and its implications—is a core capability recognized in DOD’s Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support, which was published in June 2005.

The Quadrennial Defense Review, just recently completed, also

recognizes the importance of shared situational awareness and

calls for an information sharing strategy to guide operations with

Federal, State, local, and coalition partners. The strategy for

Homeland Defense and Civil Support supports this task and promotes the integration and sharing of applicable DOD capabilities,

equipment, and technologies with Federal, State, local, and tribal

authorities, and with the private sector.

While we are always striving to do better, DOD’s approach to

and capabilities for information sharing and shared situational

awareness have proven effective over time. This performance is

largely due to several organizational and cultural conditions within

the Department.

First, DOD is a strategy-driven organization that plans for contingencies. Even as we marshal our currently available capabilities

and resources to address a current situation, we are constantly

planning and preparing for a full range of future contingencies.

As part of this planning culture, DOD expects and plans for complexity. We plan, for example, to deploy to and operate in regions

where the supporting infrastructure, like roads, bridges, or communications, does not exist or has either been destroyed or seriously

damaged.

Second, DOD has a highly disciplined yet flexible, multi-year focused budget and resourcing process that develops the capabilities

necessary to deal with current and future contingencies.

And, third, as a military organization, DOD exercises unity of

command over Federal military forces, DOD civilian personnel, and

contractors at the strategic, operational, and tactical command

echelons. This unity of command ensures both a unity of effort and

an economy of force, that is, the right capabilities and forces in the

right numbers.

Within the Department, DOD’s command and control structure

facilitates effective information flow between command echelons,

whether the contingency is at home or abroad. When at home, a

joint task force is established to command and control the Federal

military forces, guided by the Commander of U.S. Northern ComVerDate 11-MAY-2000 11:16 Jun 29, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00041 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\27721.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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mand in the joint operations area of a disaster. The NORTHCOM

Commander in turn is responsible for ensuring that the joint task

force receives the information it needs and provides information reported by the joint task force to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs

of Staff and the Secretary of Defense.

Outside of DOD, several venues exist for information sharing between civilian and military and Federal, State, tribal, private sector, and nongovernmental organizations.

First, at the Federal headquarters level, incident information

sharing, operational planning, and deployment of Federal resources

are monitored by the Homeland Security Operations Center of the

Department of Homeland Security, where DOD maintains a 24-

hour-a-day/7-day-a-week presence. The HSOC, as it is known, facilitates interagency information sharing activities to enable the assessment, prevention, or resolution of a potential incident.

Second, strategic-level interagency incident management is facilitated by the Interagency Incident Management Group, which also

serves as an advisory body to the Secretary of Homeland Security.

When activated, the Department of Defense provides a senior-level

representative to that IIMG.

Third, closer to the area of an incident, a Joint Field Office is established to provide a focal point for incident oversight and coordination of response and recovery actions. When established, the Department of Defense posts liaisons within the Joint Field Office

known as Defense Coordinating Officers.

And, fourth, States usually maintain an Emergency Operations

Center at which operational information sharing and resource coordination and support of on-scene efforts during a domestic incident activities normally take place during an incident and, when

required, the Department will also deploy those Defense Coordinating Officers there.

Additionally, every combatant commander operates a Joint Interagency Coordination Group, which is a multi-functional, advisory

element that represents the Federal civilian departments and

agencies and facilitates information sharing. It provides regular,

timely, and collaborative day-to-day working relationships between

civilian and military operational planners.

Mr. Chairman, again, thank you very much for the opportunity

to appear before you today. Thank you very much for the resources

provided by the Congress and the American people to enable the

Department of Defense to organize, train, and equip to meet the

full range of DOD’s missions, and I look forward to any questions

that you may have.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Verga follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

Mr. Hitch, thanks for being with us.

STATEMENT OF VANCE HITCH

Mr. HITCH. Good morning and thank you, Mr. Chairman and

members of the committee, for the invitation to speak to you today.

I am the Chief Information Officer of the Department of Justice,

and next month will mark my 4-year anniversary with the Department. Today I will testify about our approach to information sharing.

The Department of Justice is committed to helping improve the

ability of law enforcement and homeland security first responders

to share national security information. This may include classified

intelligence reports, criminal history records, or traffic stops. The

key to all of this, though, is the data, helping over 180,000 law enforcement personnel follow standards so that they can safely and

securely share photos, field reports, and evidence with a fellow officer.

First, I will focus on our umbrella program, the Law Enforcement Information Sharing Program. This program includes both internal DOJ sharing, such as between the Drug Enforcement Agency and ATF, and the Federal sharing with State and local law enforcement agencies and officers across the country.

The LEISP strategy is the result of a collaborative process including senior leadership from DOJ component agencies and representatives from across the national law enforcement community.

LEISP is a program, not an information system. It addresses barriers to information sharing and creates a forum for collaboration

on how existing and planned systems will be conducted and coordinated in a unified manner for information sharing purposes. LEISP

delineates guiding principles, a policy framework, and functional

requirements that are necessary to facilitate multi-jurisdictional

law enforcement information sharing. LEISP establishes the Department’s commitment to move from a culture of ‘‘need to know’’

toward a culture of ‘‘need to share’’ in which information is shared

as a matter of standard operating procedure.

With our partners at DHS and the Department of Defense, we

are making great strides in sharing fingerprints across boundaries.

What we refer to as the Interoperability program is showing great

returns as fingerprints captured in theater in Iraq are being sent

to the FBI in West Virginia for comparison and coordination. DHS,

under the US-VISIT program, has access to this data, and all three

agencies are working on new standards to make this sharing even

more timely and efficient.

As this committee is analyzing post-Katrina issues, I thought it

was appropriate to mention two of the successes we had in the time

immediately following the hurricane. As the Marshals Service

moved prisoners from the New Orleans area, they faced the challenge of coordinating buses and new prison space. To complicate

matters, the prisoners switched arm bands in hopes of confusing

their guards. The Marshals used online photos and other descriptive data, such as scars, marks, and tattoos, from the joint automated booking system to ensure that valid identities were maintained. Another success story was the development and implemenVerDate 11-MAY-2000 11:16 Jun 29, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00055 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\27721.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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tation of the National Sex Offender Public Registry through the

support of the Bureau of Justice Assistance. This Web site was invaluable to law enforcement as it helped cities like Houston and

Baton Rouge identify known offenders who had evacuated to their

city. While this Web site was limited to one type of criminal, we

see this as a model for other systems under development.

Now I would like to address a key question. What are some of

the keys to success that we have found in planning and developing

systems that share information within the law enforcement community?

The first is shared management. It is needed to create a federation of trust within the information sharing community. For example, the Attorney General’s Global Information Sharing Initiative

has brought together national leaders and law enforcement to help

us develop our LEISP strategy and programs. Likewise, the Criminal Justice Information System Advisory Policy Board [APB], provides ongoing governance and working groups to help us as we

build and operate information sharing systems, including criminal

histories, incident reporting, uniform crime reporting, and fingerprints. Both the Global group and the CJIS APB are comprised of

numerous State and local stakeholders.

The second key to success is the development of standards, which

is an area where the Federal Government is expected to provide

leadership. Two examples are the Global Justice XML Data Model

and the National Information Exchange Model. Groups such as

Global are important for setting, communicating, and maintaining

national standards and a common vocabulary.

The widespread availability and use of Web services and commercial technologies will improve information standards over time.

The Federal Government can help promulgate these standards

through incentives such as grant programs and targeted technical

assistance.

In response to the next disaster, data must be accessible from

many places via many methods of telecommunications. Web-based

systems, as opposed to those tied to a personal computer, allow an

evacuated law enforcement officer, like the New Orleans P.D., to

relocate to a city such as Irvine, TX, and still have access to their

data. As long as the system has adequate back-up and recovery capabilities, many will be able to complete their work from alternate

work locations. Katrina was a not-so-subtle reminder to Government personnel of the importance of continuity of operations and

proper planning.

In closing, I want this committee to understand that the law enforcement information is being shared broadly at a local and regional level. The Department of Justice, in partnership with many

Federal agencies, is attempting to make critical information exchanges more effective, more efficient, and more secure for our customers across the United States. We have many efforts underway

that are validating our approach and pushing new concepts so that

law enforcement personnel no longer need to think about sharing

but, rather, it comes naturally and they share as a matter of practice.

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Thank you for your time this morning, and I will be happy to answer any questions that you may have.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Hitch follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Well, thank you very much.

Let me start. This may not be a question you want to answer

here. It is really to all of you. But information sharing, is this an

issue that just cannot be overcome given agency structures and the

congressional authorization and the appropriation process? I mean,

we do things here to basically create stovepipes, too, just the way

that we authorize, the way we appropriate. We have turf battles

up here over the way committees operate. How would you suggest

dealing with stovepipes, oversight, and funding? And how does that

get into the mix of getting greater information sharing? Does anybody want to take a stab at that? Dr. Wells.

Dr. WELLS. I will start and I will pass to my colleagues. Since

information sharing is a human activity, there are certainly going

to be cultural and organizational biases that have to be addressed

in the process of doing it. I would actually say that I think the cultural issues are probably significantly more important than the

technical issues, given where we are today.

One of the things that the Department of Defense has done over

the past several years is to do a series of demonstrations that we

have called Strong Angel, and they have looked at not only the capabilities but all the sociological and, for us the military, doctrinal

issues needed to overcome some of the information sharing.

One of the things in tsunami, for example, that we learned which

applied to Katrina was we sent some people down there—a military doctor, a civilian doctor, and a retired Navy pilot—and what

happened when they got to Jakarta is the two doctors were welcomed with abrazos by the nongovernmental organizations there

because they had experience working together in Kosovo and Africa

and places like this. The Navy pilot could go on board the carrier

‘‘Lincoln’’ and fit right into the aviation community.

What they found a few days later when they got together was

that the military was prohibited by policy from sharing information

outside the military boundaries unless asked. The nongovernmental organizations didn’t know they had to ask and didn’t know

how to ask. Once those two groups got together, they were able to

make enormous progress very quickly in sharing information. It

was an issue of policy and procedures, not one of technology.

We applied some of this to Katrina, and there is an extensive exercise program that Northern Command is working on in preparation for the summer hurricane season to do this as well, to not only

deal with the technologies but also bring together those groups of

people that need to be able to cross these boundaries in communications. So I think that is at least as important a piece as any

technological part.

Go ahead.

Mr. HITCH. Mr. Chairman, I have been in the Federal Government now for 4 years, and I would observe that the hardest things

for me to accomplish had been to work across departments. So just

the size of the organization is a barrier to communications. But I

do think there are mechanisms in place that can make this more

successful.

One that I would hold up as an example in the area of information sharing is the relatively recent identification within the DNI

of the program manager’s office, who is specifically chartered to

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come up with an information sharing environment, first to make

sure that we are sharing terrorism information, but then more

broadly to make sure that we’re doing the things that we need to

do to share information across Government departments. And this

is something that I participate in on a weekly basis. We are having

weekly cross-governmental meetings where we are actually on a

very aggressive schedule to develop the concept of operations and

the technology that is necessary to make sure that we are sharing

information successfully.

The program that I mentioned that we have at Justice, the Law

Enforcement Information Sharing Program, is something that I

think I can bring to that group, because we have tried to do the

same thing within our own community in law enforcement, and the

DNI is actually trying to accomplish the same thing across Government.

I would say this is a good example because there does need to

be a mechanism for bringing people together under some sort of—

some appointed group who has a leadership authority, and that is

the case of the program manager. So I think that is a good example.

In the case of emergency response and so forth, you know, the

Department of Justice is not primarily a first responder organization, but in the Katrina situation, we did operate pretty effectively

in our own community, within the law enforcement community.

And I think that we share some traits with our DOD brethren in

terms of, you know, having a command-and-control structure that

is fairly regimented within the law enforcement community, and

also the idea of we know that emergencies are going to happen, so

we plan for them and we practice them.

So I think those are some things that I observed in my time in

Government that has been successful and I think were the reasons

for some of the success that we had in responding as we did in

Katrina.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Do you think the appropriations process

plays a negative role in this, the way we appropriate up here?

Mr. HITCH. I think certainly it makes it more difficult. The appropriations process is a challenge for us as individuals trying to

get support for the important programs that we are pursuing. But,

once again, I am hoping—this is a little bit more hope than experience—that through the DNI, that will be a help in making sure

that we get the support across appropriations groups and that

somehow that will get the message across the line.

Personally, I have had reasonable success. In working with our

appropriators, I think they understand the importance of the programs for information sharing and how important that is to us, not

only for emergencies like Katrina but for, you know, responding to

the counterterrorism challenge that we had after September 11th,

and a lot of our programs are focused in that way. And so I think

our appropriators have been reasonably responsible and responsive

in helping me deal with those issues.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. OK. Thank you.

Do you have any comment on the appropriation process, either

of you?

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Mr. VERGA. I would only add one comment to what my colleagues

have said, and that is that when we talk about information sharing

as a problem to be overcome, it is good to keep in mind that it is

one of those problems that does not have an end state that you can

finally reach. There will always be more information to be shared

than there are mechanisms for sharing it. And so I think the fact

that we have made significant progress over the last 3 or 4 years

I think shows us that progress can be made, but I don’t know that

we will ever reach an end state where people will be satisfied that

all the information is being shared to the degree they would like

to have it shared.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Yes, Dr. Wells?

Dr. WELLS. Two things to go with it.

First of all, as we share information, there is such a thing as too

much information, and one can—I have heard people complain now

that so much information is being shared that they are drowning

in data and that, if you will, the signal-to-noise ratio of valuable

information to just useless makes it hard for them to find the nuggets. And so I think it is important to not only share, but share

what is important for the problem at hand.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. OK. Thank you.

Mr. Cummings.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to

thank you all for your testimony.

As I see it, we have two general categories of failure to communicate. You have the one where, I guess, agencies are not communicating properly. Then you have another one with regard—when

you look at Katrina, with regard to communications equipment.

And I got to tell you, when I read that back a few years ago, back

when there was the Oklahoma bombing back in 1995, we had communication equipment problems. It is almost shocking to the conscience that we could come all the way up to 2005, in the greatest

country, in the most powerful country, and one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world—in the world—and still

have those kinds of problems.

It is interesting to note that when the folks from my State, Maryland, went down to the Gulf Coast, they discovered, Mr. Chairman,

that they had better equipment and were better able to communicate than the FEMA folk, which was incredible to me. So that

tells me that apparently the equipment is out there. The question

is, you know, whether there are standards for communication

equipment. In other words, I understand they were on different frequencies and all that kind of thing.

But I think that the thing that bothers me as I listened to all

the testimony this morning is I wonder if we will be right back

here 10 years from now, in other words, whether we will be saying

the same things. Other problems will have occurred by then, and

people will have died and people will have been in a position

where, in a matter of less than, I guess, a 100-mile radius they

cannot even communicate with each other.

So tell me, what are we doing with regard to equipment? What

are we doing with regard to standards so that people can communicate? And keep in mind when you look at the data and you talk

to the people in the Gulf Coast, you know what they said? They

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have said it over and over again. ‘‘We were not so much concerned

about the fact that we had a disaster. We knew that those kind of

things happen.’’ They said that they felt abandoned as Americans,

and part of that abandonment, I think, comes from the failure of

us to be able to have simple communications, for me to be able to

communicate across the street. And this is the United States.

I am just trying to figure out what are we doing about that. This

is now our watch. Hopefully we have learned a lot from Katrina.

I pray that we have. And if it is under our watch, what do we do

from here? I mean, what are we able to say? What is on the drawing board? And what do you see correcting that communications

problem?

Who is most appropriate to answer that? I guess you, Mr. Hitch?

Mr. HITCH. I don’t know that I am the most appropriate, but I

will take the first shot.

Mr. CUMMINGS. All right.

Mr. HITCH. I think, as I mentioned in my testimony, the standards issue is one that is being addressed and it is actually expected

of the Federal Government. It is something that we are expected

to do and we should be doing, and I think we are finally getting

to the point where we are doing it. And I mentioned a couple examples in my testimony of some standards that have been kind of

where the Department of Justice has taken the leadership role.

There is a program that I did not mention but that is in the written testimony called the IWN, Integrated Wireless Network. That

is where law enforcement officers across the country still use radio

communications. In the near term, in the not-too-distant future, it

will be other forms of communication, but right now it is a lot of

radios.

So we have a major program called IWN to set standards and to

establish a nationwide network for law enforcement across the

country. It is a cross-departmental effort between the Department

of Justice in the lead, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Treasury, where between those three departments that is

most of the law enforcement in the United States, to get them all

on a common network with common equipment and common standards and all that kind of stuff. So that will help a lot.

So there are efforts, and on a local level, part of that program

was something we called the 25 Cities Project, where we actually

go in and kind of take each city and see what the problems are

there and just try to help them solve them. In some cases, it was

buying a piece of equipment. In some cases, it was providing training. So there are a lot of different things that cause communications problems that are not just all technical.

In terms of response to a disaster, in some of the examples that

you alluded to where you could not communicate across the street

and things like that, one of the things that I think are real lessons

learned for CIOs like myself is the importance of back-up. Now, everybody for decades has known that you should have back-up for

your information systems. But something like Katrina just brings

that point home so clearly that the survivability of our systems are

critical.

You know, as information systems have advanced and our workers have become more and more a part of their everyday life, we

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depend on them. So if they are without them for a period of time,

they are at a loss. They can’t do their job.

So taking those systems away and not having adequate back-up

for those systems in time of emergency is just as bad as not giving

them the system to begin with.

So the term ‘‘survivability’’ and how do we provide for that, and

actually making sure that we are investing in the survivability of

our systems is, I think, a real lesson learned.

In some cases where you—in Katrina, you were missing many

layers of infrastructure and kinds of capabilities. You were missing

the power. So if you were—electric power. So if your systems were

all dependent on electric power and you had no back-up, battery

back-up or anything else, you were out. In some cases, the backup was gasoline-fired engines, and gasoline was not available either. So if your back-up depended on gasoline—first on electricity

and then on gasoline, you were without. So it is really looking at

what are the disasters that we are trying to address, what are the

ones we have to plan for, and what kind of back-up is going to be

needed in order to provide survivable systems under those circumstances. I think that is the biggest lesson from a technical

standpoint.

The standards issues that you mentioned I think are real, and

I think we are making a lot of progress in those areas.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Do we have any timetable for those standards?

I mean particularly when you consider the fact that a lot of the

same kinds of problems—if we had a terrorist attack, we would

need the same kinds of communications systems or whatever. I

mean, have you all set a timetable to try to have that done?

Mr. HITCH. Yes.

Mr. CUMMINGS. And as you were talking, I couldn’t help but

think about the fascination that my daughter, who is now a grownup—I will never forget when she saw—you know, she said she

couldn’t believe that we were communicating, when she was a little

girl, communicating on Earth to the Moon. To the Moon. She said,

‘‘Daddy, that’s a joke.’’ And then I think about how we are not even

being able to communicate within a city, you know, it is just fascinating to me.

Mr. HITCH. Right. In the case that I gave you of the Integrated

Wireless Network, we are embarking on a program that is going

to take about, give or take a year or so, 5 years to get that rolled

out across the country. And that will provide a long-term solution

to the interoperability problem, but there are shorter-term solutions which we also have in the mix because we realize it is going

to take a while to get it. There are technical solutions to solve the

interoperability problem between different law enforcement organizations who happen to operate on a different standard. They are

in existence today.

One of the things—again, back to Katrina, mobility is one of the

things that is important. I mean, if all your infrastructure is out,

being able to bring in something which is mobile on the back of a

truck or something like that to power the equipment is something

that I think really came home in that kind of an emergency situation.

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But on the standards issue, as I said, I think standards by definition is a longer-term issue, longer-term solution to problems. It is

the ultimate solution, but it is a longer-term solution. But there are

shorter-term answers that we have to have in the mix also.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Mrs. Schmidt.

Mrs. SCHMIDT. Thank you very much. I am not sure on the panel

who should answer this, maybe all three of you. I think one of the

biggest glitches with Hurricane Katrina was the inability for people

all over the ground to communicate with each other, and I know

that can be a local, a State, and a Federal issue.

From the Federal perspective, how can we coordinate communication so that the people on the ground know what is happening

better. And I know that there are going to be some proposals later

from people outside of Government talking about this very issue.

What kind of sensitivity do we have from a governmental perspective of a security of information perspective? And how can we make

the whole issue of communicating efficiently and effectively better,

and better pretty soon? Because the next natural disaster or, God

forbid, terrorist disaster could happen at a moment’s notice.

Mr. VERGA. That, of course, is the nugget of what we are trying

to do. One of the things that you have highlighted is that there is

a fundamental difference between interoperability of communications, that is, existing communications being able to work together,

and the operability of communications. What we discovered in

Katrina was the issues were more on the basic operability of the

communication side rather than the interoperability. There were

interoperability issues, that is, system A and system B were not

compatible, couldn’t talk to each other. There are a lot of initiatives

underway to fix that particular part of the problem.

But in a situation where you have the majority of the communications infrastructure, not just the public safety and security

communications infrastructure, but the common infrastructure generally that is destroyed, the fundamental policy question is sort of

what is the role of the Federal Government in this case in restoring

those communications in a disaster area. Most of the communications are commercially owned, so how do you communicate with the

American people? Hundreds of radio towers are down. Television

stations are off the air. The normal means of communicating with

the American people were not available.

So what, in fact, then is the role of the Federal Government in

restoring that communications infrastructure in a disaster area?

Dr. WELLS. One of the initial proposals, for example, was that

the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security should stockpile radios that could be handed out in this type

of emergency. Well, part of the problem is given the pace of technology today, if they have a warehouse full of radios that are degrading at the rate of Moore’s Law, or whatever, it is not a very

attractive way to do business.

There have now been a number of proposals to tap the genius of

the private sector, especially for the nongovernmental, and so one

example, for example, is use leased services that says I need to be

able to have a certain amount of communications up and a certain

amount of communications down at three spots anywhere in the

United States within 12 hours. And, you know, we will keep you

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on retainer to be able to provide that capability, and maybe 10

spots in 72 hours.

So this type of approach gets the Government out of the business

of warehousing equipment that could be obsolescent, allows for the

continual upgrading of the capabilities, and involves the private

sector more.

A related piece of this is that technology in this case is actually

on our side because the Internet protocol, which is the basis of so

much of our Internet communications, is now being able to be extended to mobile communications as well. And that then allows you

to bridge lots of different incompatible systems, and I think that

should be able to help.

If I may make one final point that the Congress could help with,

the emergency responders, the keepers of critical infrastructure—

power, water, telecommunications—are not now designated under

the Stafford Act as emergency responders, and this got into problems in at least Wilma, I don’t know about Katrina, but of people

who wanted to go in and restore telecommunications, not being allowed through the security boundaries because they had no valid

credential as an emergency responder. And so if there are ways to

make adjustment to that, I think it could be a real term fix.

Mrs. SCHMIDT. Mr. Chairman, may I have a followup?

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Yes, go ahead.

Mrs. SCHMIDT. In followup to this, gleaning through future people that will be before us today, one of the things that came out

of additional testimony is an apparent lack of leadership on the

ground, who was really in charge. You talk about people that wanted to help and didn’t have a clearance to help. Should we have a

designated body at the Federal level that, when a disaster hits a

community, whatever agency at the Federal level will be ultimately

and automatically in charge so that you don’t have the tension that

may have been created on the ground between two competing agencies, maybe a State, maybe a local? And let me tell you where I

am coming from. I know that in some cases, there are laws that

are written in various States and in various communities that

these local agencies have a certain jurisdiction. And it is not a turf

battle of power. It is a turf battle of the way those local laws are

written. And I don’t think it is incumbent upon us to demand that

those laws be rewritten, but I think it is incumbent upon Congress

to figure out that in certain cases—a national emergency, a hurricane disaster at the level of Katrina—that somebody supersedes

those locals on the ground so that we do not have this kind of confusion.

Having said that, how do you think that should be and who do

you think should ultimately be the decisionmaker?

Mr. VERGA. You have addressed what is one of the fundamental

challenges of federalism when you talk about how the Federal Government responds to any situation that is local in nature. The current national policy is, of course, that initial responsibility for responding to disasters of any type is within the local officials and

then with the State officials. And that is embodied essentially in

the Stafford Act as the legislation that talks to how we respond to

disasters.

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The legislation that established the Department of Homeland Security gave to that Department the responsibility for coordinating

the national response to any type of emergency, natural disasters

included. The principle that it operates under is one of unity of effort as opposed to unity of command, which is a term which is near

and dear to the military. We always know who is in command of

military forces. When you talk about organizing the efforts of everyone from a parish sheriff to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Defense, that is a coordinating

effort, not a command effort. The command, you know, on the Federal side comes together only at the President, and in the local side

it depends on the State, how different States are organized—Commonwealths, States, those types of things.

My personal view is I am not sure there is, in fact, a legislative

solution to that issue. The White House did an extensive study, as

you are aware, which was recently published, on the lessons

learned from Hurricane Katrina that talks to how we better organize the Federal effort to assist, but I don’t think contemplates removing or superseding the authorities of State authorities beyond

those provisions of the law which already exist. There are several

provisions in the law that go back in history that allow, upon request of the State or, in the absence of a request, upon the determination of the President, that Federal authority needs to be asserted in a given jurisdiction, that can occur.

So I think the mechanisms are probably there. I think if there

is something that Congress can do that can help, it’s to assist in

implementing those types of standards that make that process of

getting the unity of effort to work better in terms of how moneys

are appropriated, grants are given, those sorts of things.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. OK. Thank you very much. I have one

other question.

Dr. Wells, in your written testimony, you discussed the need to

establish social networks of Federal, State, and local partners as a

critical component of successful response to catastrophic events.

You state that one of the problems with the response to Hurricane

Katrina was the lack of familiarity with each other’s operating

practices and experiences gained through exercises between the

U.S. military and Federal, State, and local partners.

I think that is true. Although they had gone through the Hurricane Pam exercise at some time, you know, in an effort to try to

get there, what efforts have you all taken to establish social networks? Can you describe briefly any exercises you have or plans

you have with these partners?

Dr. WELLS. I mentioned earlier the Strong Angel series. There

have been two of those that have expressly been looking at how,

in the first case, military medicine reaches out to nongovernmental

organizations in refugee situations; the second focused on Iraq and

Afghanistan stabilization and reconstruction operations and sort of

an Arab world type situation; a third this summer will focus—in

August, will focus on an avian flu sort of situation, with more domestic, State and local responses.

Where this bore fruit was in tsunami, particularly, but also the

group came together for Katrina, where we developed a virtual

emergency operations center built around a commercial collaboVerDate 11-MAY-2000 11:16 Jun 29, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00071 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\27721.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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rative tool, and in there, there were over 600 people, and you could

go in—who had sort of signed up. It was all voluntary. So you could

say, ‘‘I need neurosurgeons who speak Bahasa Indonesia and also

have had experience in southern Thailand,’’ and find such people

to go and work the problem. That group has sort of stayed virtually

together and is available to be brought to bear on, you know, contingencies around the world, including domestic ones.

So it has been an ad hoc type of effort, but I think these types

of—the only way you get the trust among these groups—I mentioned the case in Indonesia where the doctors could walk into the

U.N. liaison center and be greeted because they were one of them.

You cannot just say, ‘‘OK, you are in charge today and go bond

with the people of New Orleans.’’ If you have not built up those relations over time, it will be very hard.

So I think this is something we need to establish—to continue

doing, and it will probably be regionally based. The people who

would respond best in the Gulf Coast may be different than those

who would go to San Diego in case of an earthquake. And so as

we build this corps, we just need to understand the strengths and

weaknesses and be able to mix and match on the fly, using information technology, to put together the best team for the situation

required.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

I want to thank this panel. It has been very helpful for us. We

appreciate the job that all of you are doing. The challenges remain

ahead. So I will dismiss this panel and take about a 1-minute recess as we get our next panel.

Thank you very much.

[Recess.]

Chairman TOM DAVIS. We will recognize our second panel. We

have John Brennan, president and CEO of the Analysis Corp.

Thank you for being with us. Dr. Donald F. Kettl, the director of

the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Brian Jackson, a physical scientist at the RAND Corp.

And Lieutenant Steve Lambert, Virginia Fusion Center, Virginia

State Police.

I want to thank all of you for being here. I am going to ask you

to rise and raise your right hands.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

We will start, Mr. Brennan, with you. We may have a vote in

about half an hour, and so I am going to try to get through. Once

the bells ring for the vote, we will have about 10 minutes before

I will have to go over to vote. But it will be our goal to try to finish

up at that point and get you out of here. So if you can keep your

testimony to 5 minutes, your total written statement is in the

record, and my questions are based on having gone through that.

Thank you very much. Mr. Brennan, you may start. And thanks

again for being with us.

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STATEMENTS OF JOHN BRENNAN, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, THE ANALYSIS CORP., McLEAN, VA; DONALD F. KETTL, DIRECTOR, FELS INSTITUTE OF GOVERNMENT, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, PHILADELPHIA, PA;

BRIAN A. JACKSON, PHYSICAL SCIENTIST, RAND CORP.; AND

LIEUTENANT STEVE LAMBERT, VIRGINIA FUSION CENTER,

VIRGINIA STATE POLICE

STATEMENT OF JOHN BRENNAN

Mr. BRENNAN. Good morning, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very

much for the invitation to appear today. The views I offer today are

my own, but they are informed by 25 years of experience as a CIA

official as well as by my tenure as head of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and of its successor organization, the National

Counterterrorism Center.

The term ‘‘information sharing’’ has become one of the most frequently used phrases in Government since the devastating terrorist

attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. Members of Congress

as well as senior officials in the executive branch have railed

against the lack of sufficient sharing of critical information among

Government agencies. The problem has been attributed, at various

times, to institutional stovepipes, bureaucratic malaise, turf battles

among agencies, excessive security requirements, mismanagement

of IT resources and budgets, and a lack of strong and visionary

leadership. I do not disagree that these factors have played a role

in preventing the flow of relevant information in a timely fashion

to departments, agencies, and individuals in need of such information.

But these factors have been allowed to flourish because of a

much more fundamental systemic problem that afflicts our Government and our Nation in dealing with matters such as terrorism,

hurricanes, a potential avian flu pandemic, or other challenges that

may be on the horizon. The systemic problem is the absence of a

coherent national framework that integrates and delineates roles

and responsibilities on issues of major significance. Such a framework is the essential prerequisite to an effective information sharing regime that optimizes the formidable capabilities, knowledge,

and expertise that are available in Federal, State, and local governments as well as in the private sector.

The purpose of sharing information is to ensure that individuals,

departments, and organizations are able, in a timely fashion, to

take some action or to perform some function for which they are

responsible. Such actions and functions include warning and notification, protection and security, analysis and forecasting, rescue and

recovery, policy decisionmaking, preparedness, and consequence

management—just to name a few. The challenge for information

providers, however, is that these diverse responsibilities are shared

by many and are scattered across Federal, State, and local jurisdictions.

In the absence of an overarching framework, or ‘‘business architecture,’’ that effectively integrates and articulates these responsibilities, the collectors, knowers, and stewards of relevant information are forced to make presumptive judgments about ‘‘who’’ needs

access to ‘‘what.’’ Similarly, the wanters of information are unsure

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to whom and to where they should look for information that addresses their needs. Confusion on both sides of the information divide has stymied the development of a symbiotic and synergistic relationship between information providers and users.

Unfortunately, it will take our Nation many years to adapt our

outdated 20th century institutions, governance structures, and dayto-day business processes so that we may more effectively meet the

challenges of the 21st century. In the meantime, and based on my

experience setting up counter-terrorism organizations and information sharing practices across the Federal Government, I strongly

recommend the establishment of a common information sharing

and access environment that can be utilized by the providers and

users of natural disaster information—whether they be Federal,

State, or local officials, law enforcement agencies, the private sector, or U.S. persons seeking information so they can make appropriate decisions for themselves and for their families.

Specifically, I recommend the establishment of a Web-based portal on the Internet that would serve as a National Hurricane Information Center. Administered by the Federal Government, the portal would allow authorized information providers to post information and enable users to self-select information they need. Such a

portal could serve as a one-stop shopping data mart containing virtually limitless archived and new information related to hurricanes, such as emergency contact information, weather reports,

maps, first responder directories, hospital and health care providers, casualty and damage information, critical needs relief providers, security bulletins, shelter locations, and other relevant matters. Information could be organized and searched according to

functional topics, geographic regions, or chronologically.

The portal could be constructed in a very flexible and versatile

manner. In addition to providing general information to anyone

who logs on as well as password-protected proprietary information

accessible only to authorized users, the portal could serve as a communication mechanism among communities of interest, such as

first responders. Unlike in the intelligence community, where complicated security requirements and multiple classified information

networks inhibit the creation of a common information sharing environment, natural disaster information is not so encumbered.

Thus, the ubiquity and robustness of the Internet makes it the

ideal information sharing and information access platform for the

Nation.

While the Federal Government would design and maintain the

portal, there would need to be shared responsibility for posting,

managing, and updating the content according to an agreed-upon

business framework. The Federal Government also would have the

responsibility for ensuring the portal’s availability during emergencies and periods of peak activity and for the deployment of

back-up systems when infrastructure is damaged. While this portal

would not take the place of established information technology networks that serve as command-and-control mechanisms for individual departments and agencies, the portal would serve as a shared,

collaborative information sharing and information access environment transcending individual entities.

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Our Nation faces numerous challenges in the years ahead. In my

view, confronting these challenges successfully hinges squarely on

the Federal Government’s ability to integrate capabilities and to leverage technology in an unprecedented manner within a national

framework.

I look forward to taking your questions.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Brennan follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Dr. Kettl.

STATEMENT OF DONALD F. KETTL

Dr. KETTL. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before you this morning and to explore these

issues about information sharing and operational awareness. The

report by the Select Committee on Hurricane Katrina has already

made an important national contribution to the question of how

best to try to share information and to build a robust national system that could respond to the issues that we face.

The fundamental problem, however, is that we have too much

thinking from the top down and not enough from the bottom up,

and our principal goal needs, indeed must be, to create a system

from the top down that works from the bottom up. That is the real

driving meaning of what operational awareness means, to make

sure that as we construct our systems, that it is real for the citizens who need help. And as the Select Committee identified, we

have important issues about communication as well as command

that we need to try to deal with.

The committee today has identified four basic questions that it

wants to explore: culture, technology, structure, and bureaucracy.

And as you sort through this, the thrust of both my testimony and

of some of the other lessons that you have heard is how important

the cultural piece is in establishing leadership and produce results.

The fundamental question here is what it is that we need to be

focusing on. The focus so often on the cultural side is on a narrow

stovepipe view of issues, but those issues and those structures

never match the way the problems actually occur, whether on

issues of terrorism or natural disasters. We need an all-hazard approach at the grass-roots level that will allow us to create a capacity for the Government to respond to the problems as they, in fact,

arise.

The second thing is that we clearly have some technological

issues that we need to face, in part making sure that we have communications systems that work in times of disaster and that connect with each other in times of disaster. I have talked with National Guard officials in Louisiana who have told me that one of

the biggest problems that they had, even with people from the National Guard from around the country arriving to try to help, was

that they arrived with radios that could not talk to each other,

even within the National Guard. And those are issues that, Mr.

Chairman, we fundamentally have to deal with.

We have some structural issues. If we had it do over again, we

probably would not put FEMA inside the Department of Homeland

Security, but we also know that continual disruption to FEMA’s operations would only get in the way of getting the job done. The

more fundamental issues are that we really cannot design any single structural solution that is guaranteed to solve whatever problem we face. The lesson of an all-hazards approach means that we

must have a much more flexible and dynamic system that adapts

our governmental operations and capacity to the problems that, in

fact, we do confront.

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One of the interesting things, in fact, is to look at FEMA’s regional boundaries and compare that to the path of Hurricane

Katrina, and Hurricane Katrina somehow miraculously found precisely the dividing line between the regions. There is no reason to

think that if we were to redesign the regions that we would then

not simply confront the same set of problems the next time we face

an issue like this.

The last piece has to do with the bureaucracy, and it is clear that

we have rules and procedures and other things that too often get

in the way. What is also clear is that operational awareness teaches an important lesson, that if we focus on results to focus on outcomes, we can focus all those throughout the system on what it is

that really matters most.

The good thing is that this is not simply a matter of hypothetical

conjecture. We have clear, demonstrated results from people on the

front lines who have proven that this approach works. Part of that

comes from the work of people like Admiral Thad Allen, who

played such an important role in coordinating the Federal effort in

New Orleans. Part of it has to do with lessons taught on the morning of September 11th just across the river here in Arlington County, where Federal, State, and local officials worked together in a remarkably seamless way. It is almost as if, Mr. Chairman, they had

read and could have written your report on Hurricane Katrina because they already have demonstrated the lessons of what it is that

works.

So, in short, Mr. Chairman, we know what it is that works, and

we know that it can be done. We know that what it requires most

is strong and effective leadership. A lot of people sometimes say

that it is just a matter of rocket science, or it is not rocket science.

Well, in a sense it is rocket science because if you look at the ways

in which people, in fact, launch rockets, they get people from the

different disciplines together in the same room, they work together,

they collaborate, they share information and work together under

a single command to decide what has to be done, how it has to be

done, and make sure that those effective disciplines come together

in the way to make the right decision.

In a sense it is rocket science, and in a sense the lessons of rocket science are the same lessons that we learned on the morning of

September 11th at the Pentagon. Effective, coordinated response on

the part of Federal, State, and local officials is something that we

know how to do. What we need to learn how to do is to figure out

how to do it more often, more predictably, and more regularly.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Kettl follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

Dr. Jackson.

STATEMENT OF BRIAN A. JACKSON

Dr. JACKSON. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, thanks for inviting me

to participate in today’s hearing. I should begin by saying that my

remarks are principally based on our published study entitled,

‘‘Protecting Emergency Responders: Safety Management in Disaster and Terrorism Response,’’ which was a joint research effort between the RAND Corp. and NIOSH, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

The focus of our study was on safety management, which is, of

course, a subset of overall disaster management. Many of the recommendations focused on improving safety management are focused on information sharing and are, therefore, very relevant,

looking at sort of a specific case within management of an overall

disaster. In our study, we looked at four disasters: the two September 11th responses, which have been mentioned previously; Hurricane Andrew in 1992; and the Northridge earthquake, to, again,

sort of build on we have been learning these lessons over a long

period.

Our work was done in close collaboration with the emergency responder community, including folks who were involved in managing those response operations, and our recommendations were also

vetted by other emergency responders, so this is really something

that is coming from the responder community.

I really want to focus in on three major lessons to sort of pull

out some of the elements from my written testimony.

First, disaster response operations have different levels of information sharing requirements. We have been talking about this as

sort of, you know, one topic, but to manage responder safety, for

example, the incident commander at the scene needs strategic-level

information: what injuries are happening to the responders and

what things they can take—changes in the way that the response

is done—to keep them safe.

At the tactical level for individual responders, the information

sharing requirement is very different. Getting information about

what safety actions they need to take to protect themselves. Again,

going back to the September 11th response, the question about

which respirator to wear when is a very important and operational

issue when you are dealing with a large-scale event.

This suggests that there is a requirements generation process

that is needed in this to ensure that the information that individual responders, whatever level of safety management they are, gets

there when they need it. And also differences that exist across the

country, even looking at the four cases that we examined in areas

with capable response organizations, imposing a one-size-fits-all

sort of solution from the top down, there are risks associated with

doing that because of the differences in the way the response organizations structure themselves and manage themselves. Furthermore, sort of the answer of getting all information to everyone at

all times, to sort of echo one of the points that was made earlier,

is also problematic because if you have to sift the critical information that you need out of a very large background of useful but perVerDate 11-MAY-2000 11:16 Jun 29, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00093 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\27721.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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haps not immediately useful information, more sharing may actually result in the information needs of the responders not being

met.

Second, the goal is not just getting information there. It is having responders be able to use it when they get there. So the other

part of the equation about making sure that the way information

is presented to different response organizations at these multiagency responses is important. The example from the safety case,

telling a responder that a certain contaminant is at 20 parts per

million in the air may be entirely irrelevant if you do not know

whether that is a hazard, or if it is a hazard, what you should do

as a response to it.

And then, last, again echoing a point made by other witnesses,

although technology clearly has a role to play here and failures in

technology can result in bad information sharing, information sharing is really driven in large part by people. In a disaster, managers

need to know what organizations to reach out to. If they don’t have

existing relationships with those organizations, the time-critical

point after a disaster is not the time they will be looking for the

relationships to build. They have to trust the information that they

get back so they can actually act on it and use it in what is generally a life safety situation. And so as a result, having representatives meeting each other for the first time in a disaster working operation is not a good recipe for success.

So as a result, our core recommendation in our report was the

need for individuals to play this role of human bridges. We were

looking at safety so we focused on individuals we called disaster

safety managers. Again, recognizing differences between areas, we

did not see this as something that was coming down from the Federal Government, but, again, bringing you back to some of these

sort of human network recommendations you heard earlier, safety

managers have to be local enough that they have these relationships with the organizations that will be cooperating if a disaster

happens in their area, but also have the knowledge to know where

and how to reach up to the Federal or other national level organizations that will either be coming to join or support an operation.

To us, that suggests that a model sort of designating individuals

drawn from either Federal, State, or local organizations where part

of their job was to build and maintain those connections.

So, in closing, I would like to thank you again for the opportunity

to address the committee today, and I look forward to answering

any questions.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Jackson follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Lieutenant Lambert.

STATEMENT OF STEVE LAMBERT

Mr. LAMBERT. Good morning, sir. I am Steve Lambert. I am a

lieutenant with the Virginia State Police and the agent in charge

of the Virginia Fusion Center. Thank you for the opportunity to

testify today in this important process, and I look forward to answering any questions you may have at the end of this testimony.

After September 11th, law enforcement agencies were forced to

rise and meet the informational demands created by the increased

focus on terrorism. The resources needed to provide proactive intelligence operations have increased exponentially. This mere fact has

compelled many States and regions to develop Fusion Centers that

bring together key critical response elements in a secure, centralized location in order to facilitate the sharing of counterterrorism

intelligence information.

Virginia now has such a center with the primary mission of fusing together key counterterrorism resources from local, State, and

Federal agencies, as well as private industry, in an effort to prevent the next terror attack. Our second mission, in support of the

Virginia Emergency Operations Center, is to centralize information

and resources to provide a coordinated and effective response to a

terrorist attack or a natural disaster.

It is our contention that having a Fusion Center does alleviate

much of the previous resistance to sharing information that has

plagued Government response in the past. This business of where

to get needed information or just what is available or who can I

depend upon for such information can be a terribly confusing process to most any Government or private agency. The bottom line is

that Fusion Centers provide a fundamental environment necessary

for Federal, State, and local governments to have the proper intelligence and situational awareness to perform their jobs.

Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly—it has been mentioned several times—Fusion Centers are conceptualized to provide

the environment of trust between locals to State and State to Federal Government agencies. This issue of trust is absolutely essential. All methods, policies, principles, and techniques are rendered

useless if trust is not established between these partners. So essentially the fusion process has created horizontal and vertical bridges

for information and intelligence sharing.

To answer the question the committee is particularly interested

in—‘‘Are impediments to more effective information sharing primarily technological, or structural, cultural, and bureaucratic in

nature?’’—the answer from our perspective is that the Fusion Center concept provides a structural solution. It also provides the all

important cultural or trust solution. It also provides somewhat a

bureaucratic solution and to some extent a technological solution.

However, there still exists a foundational and technological hindrance that applies to effective disaster response.

As you know, part of the intelligence process involves identifying

gaps in intelligence, and with that, and to my understanding, only

a few States have achieved a truly single statewide real-time information and intelligence sharing platform. Although the Fusion

Center has taken significant strides toward centralizing this procVerDate 11-MAY-2000 11:16 Jun 29, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00105 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\27721.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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ess, there still exists a serious lack of centralized analysis and dissemination function on all criminal intelligence. We all know that

good terrorism prevention is good crime prevention and vice versa.

However, and like many States, Virginia currently has a statewide

information sharing system that suffers from poor participation

due to being totally law enforcement centric—excluding all crimes

and all hazards—and running on an antiquated architecture. There

are simply too many silos. Too much criminal information is being

shared by word of mouth and through personal relationships rather

than on a single, Web-based, real-time information sharing platform.

The solution to this foundational problem, however, provides tremendous opportunities to revitalize the intelligence process by providing training and including eventually all Virginians in the intelligence process. Taking advise from the 9/11 Report, Virginia has

planned to adopt, ‘‘a decentralized network model, the concept behind the information revolution, that shares data horizontally too.

Agencies would have access to their own data bases but those data

bases would be shared across agency lines. In this system, secrets

are protected through the design of the network and an information rights management approach that controls access to the data,

not the access to the whole network.’’

Therefore, and in conclusion, how can we avoid the inadequate

information sharing and murky situational awareness that characterized the governmental response to Katrina? Establish a Fusion

Center or Fusion Centers built on the foundation of a truly integrated, Web-based, statewide information sharing platform that includes all crimes and all hazards.

Thank you very much, sir.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Lambert follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Well, thank you very much.

The votes beat us to it. What I am going to do is take a 20-

minute recess, and we will come back and try to move through the

questions in short order.

So I will declare a 20-minute recess, and we will be back. Thank

you.

[Recess.]

Chairman TOM DAVIS. The committee will reconvene.

Dr. Jackson, let me start with you. Despite the existence of the

Hurricane Pam exercise, Katrina showed how even when you predict a disaster, you train for it, it almost always is not sufficient.

How do you get people at all levels of Government to get on the

same page for preparedness and training?

Dr. JACKSON. Well, in talking to the responders in our research

process, the answer that we got from them about that is that it is

not a single exercise. It is relationships built over time.

One of the issues about the safety area in particular is that, in

contrast to information sharing areas where you can articulate the

information that you want to share beforehand, in the safety area

it is entirely dependent on the nature of the disaster. So you have

to be able to be flexible to reach out through relationships that you

perhaps would not have thought would be important beforehand.

And so, really, the only answer to that is sort of, you know, repeated interactions between responders during preparedness activities, in exercises. The experience at the Pentagon was cited earlier

by one of the panelists. That is an example where that repeated experience over time and the fact that the responders involved had

built up those relationships and trust meant that they could adapt

flexibly and have the operation go much more smoothly.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. So it’s like any teamwork, isn’t it? You do

your training and your training and your training, and one session

does not do enough to create the kind of teamwork.

Dr. JACKSON. Absolutely. You play like you train. And, you know,

on these relationships, you know, when—especially, there will always be people who rotate in and out of jobs, you know, within the

Federal Government, within the State responder, local responder

organizations. There are people who get promoted and move on.

And so you need this ongoing process over time, because even if

you buildup the relationships today and they are perfect, if, you

know, three of those people go on to be promoted and take other

jobs, you need to do it again tomorrow.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. So it is practice, practice, practice.

Dr. JACKSON. Right.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Dr. Kettl, in your opinion, has the Department of Homeland Security sufficiently integrated the local and

State emergency management functions to ensure a coordinated

emergency response?

Dr. KETTL. Among the many concerns, Mr. Chairman, I have

about the Department of Homeland Security, my biggest concern is

the lack of integration of State and local issues into the Department of Homeland Security. To be fair to them, they have an enormous challenge in trying to bring 22 different agencies together

into a coordinated whole, but the fact is that all homeland security

events begin as local events. And the instinct, as unfortunately we

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saw in Katrina, is not to view State and local responses as critical

or integral to their operations. It is perhaps the next generation of

responses, but it is a generation that needs to be sped up enormously.

If there is anything that the Department of Homeland Security

needs most to do is to devise a far more effective partnership with

State and local governments.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Yes, I agree with you. Just trying to take

170,000, 180,000 employees in 22 agencies, different cultures, different systems, different silos, I think sometimes our expectations

are out of whack to expect that to work overnight. And we saw

with Katrina that just their own internal communication was not

what it ought to be.

Dr. KETTL. I fear that is right, Mr. Chairman. But the point—

and this is the source of greatest worry—is that process of trying

to integrate all of these complex pieces together has created a kind

of top-down approach within Homeland Security, which is understandable. But in the end, Department of Homeland Security operations will only work if they are real from the bottom up and show

a sense of operational awareness. And we learned the hard and

painful way in the aftermath of Katrina that those instincts, unfortunately, are not there.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Right, and that was an unforgiving storm.

Mr. Brennan, you testified that we lack a cohesive national

framework for emergency response. Have you looked at the National Response Plan, which really never had a chance to be implemented with Katrina because we had——

Mr. BRENNAN. Yes, Mr. Chairman, I have.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. What do you think it needs? To be enhanced? Scrapped? What are your thoughts on it?

Mr. BRENNAN. It is a very bulky document that I think a lot of

people do not understand, and it has not really been absorbed within the Federal Government or beyond. I think there are some good

ideas and concepts in there, but it also runs afoul of some of the

existing statutory responsibilities, authorities, and there are a lot

of differences of view about the roles and responsibilities of individual departments and agencies even under that National Response

Plan.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Also, I mean, if you do not train on it, it

is such a big plan you are not going to wait for the storm to hit

and then read the plan in terms—if you do not train on it—right?—

if you do not practice on it, it is not going to do you really any good

when the big storm hits, is it?

Mr. BRENNAN. Right. I think it is—as difficult as it was to draft

a document like that, it is much more difficult to implement it. It

is like a piece of legislation. You know, as difficult as it is to get

it through the legislative process, actually operationalizing it is a

far cry from passage of that legislation.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Do you think it has too much flexibility,

or do you think it is too prescriptive? Do you have any thoughts

on that?

Mr. BRENNAN. It has been a while since I have looked at it, and

I think now is the time, after Katrina, to take a really hard scrub

at it and see why aspects of it did not work. But I think some of

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the underlying structures that it really would need in order to be

realized still are absent.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. I would just tell you that I know the problem we had with Katrina was that Michael Brown did not believe

in the National Response Plan, because in Florida in 2004, an election year, a key State, he was given kind of carte blanche to do

what he needed to do. He was talking directly to the White House.

The National Response Plan changes all that. He has got to go up

through a chain of command, and he was not used to that and did

not think he needed to do that. And it seemed like about halfway

through, all of a sudden the White House is saying, look, you better

go through channels on this. That led to frustration, and the emails show that we just kind of crumpled under that.

Mr. BRENNAN. Structure, discipline, and institutionalization of

these efforts really is just a prerequisite to actually making things

work well in emergency situations.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Now, you have had experience with DIA

and the FBI and other intelligence agencies. What strategies and

tactics do you think are the most effective in getting everybody to

play ball?

Mr. BRENNAN. Well, there are many different aspects of the ball

game. On the information sharing side, in my testimony I talked

about the importance of having a common information sharing environment. When I set up the TTIC and the NCTC, we had something called TTIC Online and then NCTC Online that all the different stakeholders would be able to provide information to. So it

was a one-stop shopping.

And I think if you take it away from a single department solution or a single functional sort of area, you know, what—it is not

a defense issue. It is not an FBI issue. It is not a law enforcement

issue. It is not even a single strata issue, as far as Federal, State,

or local. You need to have something that is going to bring things

together, and there are many different aspects of it: information

sharing, communication that we have talked about, command and

control. And that is why I really do think a lot of our governance

structures and institutions are very much outdated to deal with

21st century problems.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. OK. Thank you very much.

I think one of you mentioned and in the previous panel they

mentioned about how too much information could be a dangerous

thing. How does too much information hurt you? Just the ability

to sort it out and prioritize? I mean, can somebody explain that to

me?

Dr. JACKSON. Well, I was one of the people that echoed the earlier panel. I mean, too much information is a problem if what is

important gets lost in the flow of it and you can’t pick it out.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Right.

Dr. JACKSON. You know, a lot of our focus in our research was

at how to protect individual responders at the lowest level. So, you

know, you have a responder who is taking operational action. They

have a lot of missions to accomplish at a disaster. They want to

know what they need to know, when they need——

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Like you say, charge that hill.

Dr. JACKSON. Yes.

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Without getting into the foreign policy

and all that kind of stuff behind it.

Dr. JACKSON. Yes. And if you have to sort of pull out what piece

of equipment you should be wearing and what exactly you should

be doing from, you know, an entire tome describing everything at

the event, you are not—actually, your need, information need, is

not being met even though the information has been shared.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. OK. Lieutenant Lambert, let me ask you

a couple questions. You noted that the creation of the Fusion Center really breaks down the resistance to information sharing that

is ubiquitous in Government. In your experience, what has been

the key to successfully pursuing that new approach to information

sharing?

Mr. LAMBERT. It seems like we are singing the same chord of

trust, having the organizations that are represented, whether it be

the FBI, the National Guard, the Department of Emergency Management programs, whoever the first responders are or the information sharers in the same room together in the same building.

Actually building on personal relationships I think is probably, at

least from my experience, the most important thing we can do.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. You know, Gaebler and Osbourne wrote a

book a few years ago called ‘‘Reinventing Government,’’ and they

have a chapter on mission-driven Government versus regulationdriven Government. And one thing we found in the Katrina investigation is when the military came in, all of a sudden things got

down because they were mission-driven. When we saw FEMA and

everybody else there trying to go by the book and everything else—

and I guess relationships play a role in that. But as we drill on

these issues, as you practice and so on, are we doing enough

preaching about accomplishing the mission? Or do we preach don’t

violate the rules and the regulations? Anybody have a thought on

that? Dr. Kettl.

Dr. KETTL. Mr. Chairman, I think that is exactly the right point

because it both gets to the question of how to deal with the avalanche of information that comes down as well as the question of

how you bring different pieces together.

What we know is that operational awareness tends to frame the

nature of the problems that have to be solved. If you can get people

to agree on what problem has to be solved, it is much easier to

bring the pieces together, and it is a lot easier to deal with the

process of breaking down the stovepipes if everybody understands

what their contribution is to evacuating people off of roofs when

they are surrounded by floods, how to get food to people who are

hungry, how to deal with avian flu. If the problem drives the solution, it defines the players who need to be involved. It focused them

on the nature of the result. And to the degree to which you can get

people focusing on that instead of procedures, rules, and structures,

coordination is much, much easier. The lesson that people in the

first response community over and over and over again is focus on

the problem, allow that to drive the nature of the partnerships, and

it is a lot easier to then get past the bureaucratic boundaries that

so often hamstring action.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. We have a section of the Katrina report

where we talk about some of the unsung heroes, and a lot of these

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people, they were not going by the rules and regulations. We had

one doctor who literally broke into Walgreen’s to take what drugs

were there before they became flooded. He got out of there and

walked out with his bag so he could help people who had left home

without their prescriptions and the like. We had other folks that

were commanding boats that were just hanging around and that

would have been flooded out otherwise, basically very, very mission-oriented. Even when you see the action movies, you never saw

Steve McQueen or anybody look at the rules and regulations to get

it done.

Now, there is a fine line between being mission-oriented and

abusing the rules for other purposes and so on. So, you know, we

do the oversight on contracts and everything else. We have to recognize that in an emergency situation sometimes the rules need to

be relaxed.

I don’t know how you preach that, but maybe it is the trust between all the elements that you discussed, the fact that they practiced and drilled together and have relationships which makes a

difference and helps you define reasonable boundaries in times of

crisis. But that seemed to be a lot of the problem with Katrina. You

had the elements working together, but did not trust each other.

They knew what—they sort of knew what the mission was. They

were told what it was. But at the end of the day, even though we

had prepositioned more assets than any other storm in history, it

was not near enough. This storm was not just predicted. What happened was predictable, but nobody really got it. I think there was

a lot of jockeying around for position and so on, but the storm,

which was predicted with absolute—it was absolute in terms of

what they predicted, the category, where it would land, but the

folks down below really did not get it. And even though they had

gone through Hurricane Pam, but you did not have that string of

existing relationships that could have made a big difference in this

case. This was an unforgiving storm. You make a mistake. It gets

exaggerated just because of the size of it, and then the ensuing

flooding.

Let me ask Lieutenant Lambert another question. Altering Government agencies’ perceptions of information sharing, viewing it as

a benefit to everybody, as opposed to giving up turf, if you understand what I am saying, it is the biggest obstacle at the Federal

level that we have to overcome. It may be a little easier at the

State level to get people working together. You have a strong leader. You have Governor Kaine, let’s work for the team. At the Federal level, it is a lot more difficult. You have a lot of entrenched

career people that have survived a lot of administrations. Even on

Capitol Hill, turf and jurisdiction drive this place to a great extent.

A lot of good does not happen because people are nervous about

what their jurisdictional battles are going to be in the future of

their committees.

What challenges have you faced in this area of trying to get

around the perceptions of information sharing and turf battles?

Have you had any firsthand experience with that in Virginia?

Mr. LAMBERT. Well, I submit that the same turf battles that the

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velop trust among the locals, State to local. So I can appreciate

what they are going through.

I know we went through a time that for some time, just trying

to figure out who was organizing Federal intelligence, that we

might relate with them rather than dealing with so many different

Federal agencies. I think we have—and to DHS’ credit here lately,

they have really reached out to us, and we have even started a

pilot of three more information portals along with the possibility of

putting someone in the Fusion Center to, again, strengthen those

personal relationships.

But you are absolutely right. It is difficult to overcome all of the

bureaucracy.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. It helps to have George Foresman up

here, too, in Washington, doesn’t it?

Mr. LAMBERT. It doesn’t hurt. Yes, sir.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Dr. Kettl, many have suggested that

FEMA be at the center of homeland security events. But FEMA

really was not designed to be a first responder or even coordinate

the first response. Isn’t that right? Can you have FEMA at the center of all operations without enlarging its original scope?

Dr. KETTL. FEMA’s role, Mr. Chairman, has changed dramatically over time, and its organizational structure has changed along

with it. It is clear that somebody needs to be in a role of playing

the central coordinating function. I think of it as kind of a conductor of an orchestra, that you can have a variety of different instruments that appear before you, creating all kinds of different instruments depending on the score that orchestra is trying to play, and

the key is having an orchestra conductor skilled enough to be able

to play Beethoven one night and Bach the next.

The problem is that FEMA does not see its job as either that orchestra conductor or it does not have the skills for figuring out how

to do it. Somebody has to do the job.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. And it should be Federal, right?

Dr. KETTL. It should be Federal, and FEMA is as good a place

as any to put it. Now, to do that would require, first, recognizing

that is its job; second, getting the political support both from Members of Congress and from senior administration officials to define

that, in some cases to provide some additional resources, but then

to provide a lot of extra support and leadership essentially to make

Lieutenant Lambert’s job easier. FEMA’s job ought to be to make

Lieutenant Lambert’s job work better, to try to provide better response in situations like New Orleans.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. In the case of Katrina, Michael Brown

was not just the head of FEMA. He was the Federal officer in

charge. He was designated—he took it as a demotion, by the way,

when it was given to him. And there probably should be that overlap between FEMA and the people being in charge on the ground,

but it may be new to FEMA in the sense that they are not necessarily used to this. They were used to coming in 2, 3, 4 days later

and doing the mop-up work.

OK. Well, I appreciate that. Is there anything else anybody

wants to add?

Mr. BRENNAN. If I could make just one comment?

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Sure.

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Mr. BRENNAN. Talking about mission, the challenge is that there

are multiple missions that are underway in any type of national

disaster or challenge. And it is an unprecedented systems integration challenge that you have law enforcement, you have rescue and

recovery, you have security, you have information sharing, you

have policy. And my experience has been that there are a lot of disputes about who actually has that statutory authority to exercise

command and control over disparate mission elements that are outside of individual departments and agencies that go beyond the

Federal area. And that is one of the things that I think is going

to continue to be a challenge for, you know, natural disaster response.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

I am interested in having Ambassador McNamara, who is the

new program manager for the information sharing environment,

testify before this committee. I know he is just getting settled into

his new position, but is interested in appearing as soon as possible,

and given his important role in information sharing across Government and the committee’s role in setting the government-wide information policies, we would like him to appear here first when he

is able to do so.

I again want to thank this panel and the previous panel. It has

been very, very helpful to us. Hurricane season begins officially

June 1st, although it begins when it begins. And, you know, who

knows whether disasters may strike, and we need to be ready for

them. And I hope we have learned the lessons, and I hope this testimony, the administration will take it seriously. I know this committee does.

Thank you very much. The hearing is adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 12:18 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]

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