Hearing of the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment: Building the Information Analysis Capability...

HEARING OF THE HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, INFORMATION SHARING, AND TERRORISM RISK ASSESSMENT: BUILDING THE INFORMATION ANALYSIS CAPABILITY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

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Ms. Lofgren. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for calling this hearing to discuss the proposed fiscal year 2006 budget,
building the information analysis capability of the Department of Homeland Security.

Mr. Chairman, I look forward to working with you. I hope to be able to have a good, productive and professional relationship on this subcommittee, as I enjoyed in the last Congress with Chairman Thornberry. That was a very rewarding experience for me, and I think for Chairman Thornberry.

We worked together as a team. We developed our hearings together. We decided our witnesses together. We wrote bills together. In the end of the Congress, we issued not a majority report and a minority report, but we issued one report from our
committee. I hope that we will have that same level of success in standing up for our country and making sure that we are facing.

General Hughes, I welcome you and I look forward to hearing your testimony, as we work with you as we seek to empower the critical exchange of information within the Department of Homeland Security. You have a difficult task, and I hope that the subcommittee will be able to help you as you work to enhance the department's capability to collect, aggregate, analyze and share information.

I understand your office is responsible for four specific tasks: analyzing and mapping terrorism threat intelligence to vulnerabilities in the nation's critical infrastructure; sharing information with state and local governments and at times with the private sector on the public information concerning terrorist threats; meeting operational efforts regarding the homeland security advisory system; and providing intelligence analysis to senior DHS officials.

As you may know, I served for 14 years on the Board of Supervisors for in Santa Clara County, so I have a very keen interest in how information is shared with local governments so that they can take appropriate action. I am also very interested in how we have assessed what is vulnerable so that we can effectively map the threats that we discover.

Finally, I do not want to be a nag, but I am going to raise it anyhow. This is your first meeting before us and so I am going to cut a little slack to the department, but there is a Committee Rule, rule 11(j), that requires witnesses to have their statements to the committee in advance of the actual hearing. It is 48 hours that testimony is to be submitted, and we received your testimony just 4 hours ago.

So this is not a senseless rule. I like to read the testimony before I come to a hearing and have the staff analyze it, and receiving it 4 hours in advance of a hearing just does not permit that. If we are going to do our job well, you need to help us by complying with that rule. So I hope I will never have to refer to that rule again, and I look forward to your testimony.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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Ms. Lofgren. Thank you very much.

I am concerned about the number of contractors that are in the department, instead of full-time employees, not just in IA, but throughout the department. One question I have, without getting into the numbers, which we cannot, is whether you are confident that we have sufficient budget authority to actually have staff, as opposed to contractors, in the upcoming fiscal year.

Lieutenant General Hughes. Yes, ma'am. I believe that the budget authority is not in question here. Finding the expertise is a problem. And accompanying this, to the best of my ability to characterize the truth here, it is true that the contractors have offered us and we have taken advantage of their offer, some very fine people with some tremendous technical expertise that we were not able to acquire in any other way.

Back to the fiscal realities of this, those people are costing us more money than a federal employee would. However, you cannot get them. We have not been able to get them by hiring them off the street. They are a limited supply and high demand.

Ms. Lofgren. I know we cannot go into the numbers in this open session, but I would be interested in a secure setting to take a look at where that balance is so we can get a handle. I know in some of the other aspects of DHS, I have a better handle on the contractor-to-employee ratio and how it is working. I would like to do that if I could arrange that with you.

Lieutenant General Hughes. I would be happy to do it. In lieu of reading, which might take a longer time, I can get an information paper back to you that has the details at either the unclassified level or at the level of classification that we have.

Ms. Lofgren. Why don't you do that, and then if I have further questions, we can follow up further.

Lieutenant General Hughes. I am happy to do so.

Ms. Lofgren. I appreciate that.

In thinking about the task that you face, is it fair to say that the largest part of the IA job is to map the intelligence collected by other agencies to the critical infrastructure information maintained by IP? If that is the case, I am wondering what influence you have, if any, on the state of the critical infrastructure listing and analysis, and how much that is impairing your task?

Lieutenant General Hughes. First, the answer to the first part of your question, is that our primary or most critical function, my answer to that, I am sorry to say, is no. Our primary task and our most critical function has become, and I think it is logical for this to happen, departmental support across the board, working as an all-source intelligence producer for the department. That is really our work in its primary form.

The most important part of that work is to continue that interface between IA, the intelligence part, and IT that does the risk analysis and vulnerability assessment, but I will have to tell you that it is a little bit hard for all of us to understand, the risk analysis and vulnerability assessments are not done strictly on the basis of threat. They are done with civil characteristics in mind. One of them is apparent vulnerability to possible attack using means of attack. Another idea that is applied here is hether or not a particular kind of infrastructure has proven to be attackable if gaps are not closed and if vulnerabilities are not reduced.

Another idea behind it is the value of the infrastructure, whether it has ever been attacked or not. That is kind of a strategic assessment. As an example, I think Mr. Thompson mentioned miniature golf courses or something like that. Obviously, when you are using good common sense, not high-faluting intelligence, and you are weighting the importance of a miniature golf course against a nuclear storage site, hopefully most people would choose the nuclear storage site. That does not mean, however, that something in between those two extremes does not need some kind of protection.

Ms. Lofgren. I know my time is up, but the concern I had with the latter question is that in fact the miniature golf site is on the list and the nuclear power plant is not. So if part of your job is to map the threats to the listing of the critical infrastructure, and the critical infrastructure is just random, how do you do that job?

Lieutenant General Hughes. That should not be the case. I am not familiar with the specific part of the list that you are telling me the nuclear power plan is not on there, but let's suppose that that is accurate. That is a mistake and we need to fix that.

Ms. Lofgren. Okay. Thank you. Lieutenant General Hughes. You are welcome.

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Ms. Lofgren. This is just the beginning, obviously, and General, we do appreciate your being here today, even though we will not be seeing much of you for long. I think certain questions have become more ripe in our minds as we listened to you. The connectivity of the system obviously is important, whether it is the Internet or whether it is intelligence. Therefore, we are dependent on agencies both within DHS, but also without. So we certainly cannot do it today, I am thinking about the FBI system that we had great promise for, but did not produce, and how that is going to impact DHS.

I have spent 10 years on the Judiciary Committee paying attention to immigration, and I am very well aware of the deficiencies in the technology and that aspect, and the impact it has on the ability to gather information that then could be
shared. So I am hopeful that as we move forward in this year that we will be able to look at those as they connect and maybe
get some improvements that will make us all safer.

I did want to just follow up very briefly in writing, but comment that I am concerned about the ``need to know'' information issue. Certainly, the Congress cannot micromanage an intelligence agency. It would not be proper, but I am concerned that if that is an ad hoc decision being made in the agency, then we have maybe failed to actually have the policy, the ``who voted for'' implemented. I think we have to explore that further, Mr. Chairman.

Finally, my colleague from California mentioned the frustration that local agencies have. I think that has improved somewhat with Director Mueller and the FBI task force. At least the feedback I am getting from law enforcement is much different than I used to. But what I am hearing form local law enforcement is that they never hear from DHS. It is invisible to them. So I think we need to sort through and be parochial. There are more people living in Los Angeles County than there are in over 20 states, and how we are dealing with the gigantic nation-state of California and whether that system is going to work for that state or not, and how we might format it so we really do have a system that is slick and works and protects us.

I thank the Chairman for recognizing me.

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