The Networked Way to Fight Terror
By David Kirkpatrick

(FORTUNE Magazine) – In Chicago, the FBI gets a tip that terrorists plan to infect large numbers of Americans with a dangerous virus. But in the past the informant revealed information on smuggling, not terrorism. Agents can't tell if his data are reliable. Meanwhile, in Kabul, someone with al Qaeda associations tells a CIA agent he's heard that sleeper cells are being set up in the U.S. While he can't remember many details, he recalls something about a Northwestern University microbiology student.

If the U.S. had good IT systems for intelligence, the two pieces of information in this hypothetical case would be quickly correlated. Northwestern is near Chicago, so the reports together might suggest a credible threat. But held by different agencies and taken alone, each could easily be underestimated--and today that's what is likely to happen.

"The government has not been designed for interoperability," says Zoe Baird, president of the Markle Foundation and co-chair of a task force it funded that produced the first comprehensive study of the information-sharing capabilities of the nation's intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. The above scenario comes from the report, which makes a powerful case that to counteract the threats in an age of terrorism, the U.S. must use the latest software to weave together its many intelligence-gathering agencies into a tight network. But logical though that sounds, the task force found that such a network is far from a reality, and developing it is not a priority.

Though six months have passed since Markle issued the report ("Creating a Trusted Information Network for Homeland Security," available at www.markle.org), the groups charged with keeping us safe continue to be plagued by technical ineptitude and a chronic fear of sharing data across agency boundaries. "We're not significantly safer now than we were before 9/11," says Tara Lemmey, a consultant who has been among the most active members of the task force.

The problem isn't lack of awareness on the part of agency leaders. It's more one of deeply ingrained culture. Despite the stridency of the group's conclusions, Lemmey says that she and her colleagues have been "warmly" welcomed into most of the relevant agencies--like the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the CIA--as well as the White House and in Congress. Some are aggressively upgrading their information systems, but only within their own turf-obsessed organizations. Though some officials, notably FBI director Robert Mueller, have taken bold steps to revamp their agencies, change is coming too slowly. People don't seem to want their systems to talk to one another.

Many agencies are just plain primitive in their use of information technology. Some key government groups even persist in using cumbersome faxes in emergencies, rather than speedier e-mail.

The good news is that the task force concluded that the country can build systems that enable information sharing without jeopardizing our privacy. For example, there's no need to create centralized databases of citizen information. When authorized by a court or other authority, a "federated" search across many databases could look for patterns of suspicious activity.

We need officials to speak out, from the White House on down, about the necessity of building networks to protect us in a networked age. Then comes the hard work of changing the institutional culture, the budgeting process, and the technology. We could be much safer from terrorism than we are today. It's up to our leaders to make it happen.

DAVID KIRKPATRICK is senior editor for Internet and technology. His column also appears weekly on fortune.com and by e-mail subscription. E-mail him at dkirkpatrick@fortunemail.com.