Terrorism Information Sharing and the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Report Initiative: Background and Issues for Congress

The 2004 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States the 911 Commission cited breakdowns in information sharing and the failure to fuse pertinent intelligence i.e., connecting the dots as key factors in the failure to prevent the 911 attacks. Efforts undertaken since 2001 to tackle these issues include the following Congress mandated the creation of an information-sharing environment commonly known as the ISE that would provide and facilitate the means of sharing terrorism information among all appropriate federal, state, local, and tribal entities and the private sector through the use of policy guidelines and technologies. States and major urban areas established intelligence fusion centers to coordinate the gathering, analysis, and dissemination of law enforcement, homeland security, public safety, and terrorism intelligence and analysis. Various data mining programs were initiated in an effort to uncover terrorism plots. Data mining involves pattern-based queries, searches, or other analyses of one or more electronic databases.