Report concluds that by using currently available technology, the government can set up a network that substantially improves our ability to prevent terrorist attacks and protect civil liberties. It provided details for the necessary elements of a proposed System-wide Homeland Analysis and Resource Exchange (SHARE) Network that would more effectively combat terrorism than our current system, while protecting privacy. The public's trust in a governmental network that makes use of information about its own people can be achieved only if government-wide guidelines for information sharing and privacy protection are established after open public debates on the issue. The Task Force therefore proposed that the President set the goal of creating such a network, and issue clear government-wide policy guidelines for the collection and use of information about people in the U.S., including private sector information.

Security governance in the second decade of the 21st century is ill-serving the American people. Left uncorrected, civic life and national continuity will remain increasingly at risk. At stake well beyond our shores is the stability and future direction of an international political and economic system dependent on robust and continued U.S. engagement. Outdated hierarchical, industrial structures and processes configured in 1947 for the Cold War no longer provide for the security and resilience of the homeland. Security governance in this post-industrial, digital age of complex interdependencies must transform to anticipate and if necessary manage a range of cascading catastrophic effects, whether wrought by asymmetric adversaries or technological or natural disasters. Security structures and processes that perpetuate a 20th century, top-down, federal-centric governance model offer Americans no more than a single point-of-failure. The strategic environment has changed; the system has not. Changes in policy alone will not bring resolution. U.S. security governance today requires a means to begin the structural and process transformation into what this book calls Network Federalism. Charting the origins and development of borders-out security governance into and through the American Century, the book establishes how an expanding techno-industrial base enabled American hegemony. Turning to the homeland, it introduces a borders-in narrative—the convergence of the functional disciplines of emergency management, civil defense, resource mobilization and counterterrorism into what is now called homeland security. For both policymakers and students a seminal work in the yet-to-be-established homeland security canon, this book records the political dynamics behind the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing development of what is now called the Homeland Security Enterprise. The work makes the case that national security governance has heretofore been one-dimensional, involving horizontal interagency structures and processes at the Federal level. Yet homeland security in this federal republic has a second dimension that is vertical, intergovernmental, involving sovereign states and local governments whose personnel are not in the President’s chain of command. In the strategic environment of the post-industrial 21st century, states thus have a co-equal role in strategy and policy development, resourcing and operational execution to perform security and resilience missions. This book argues that only a Network Federal governance will provide unity of effort to mature the Homeland Security Enterprise. The places to start implementing network federal mechanisms are in the ten FEMA regions. To that end, it recommends establishment of Regional Preparedness Staffs, composed of Federal, state and local personnel serving as co-equals on Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) rotational assignments. These IPAs would form the basis of an intergovernmental and interdisciplinary homeland security professional cadre to build a collaborative national preparedness culture. As facilitators of regional unity of effort with regard to prioritization of risk, planning, resourcing and operational execution, these Regional Preparedness Staffs would provide the Nation with decentralized network nodes enabling security and resilience in this 21st century post-industrial strategic environment.

This Interagency Threat Assessment and Coordination Group (ITACG) Intelligence Guide for First Responders is designed to assist state, local, tribal law enforcement, firefighting, homeland security, and appropriate private sector personnel in accessing and understanding Federal counterterrorism, homeland security, and weapons of mass destruction intelligence reporting. Most of the information contained in this guide was compiled, derived, and adapted from existing Intelligence Community and open source references. The ITACG consists of state, local, and tribal first responders and federal intelligence analysts from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to enhance the sharing of federal counterterrorism, homeland security, and weapons of mass destruction information with state, local, and tribal consumers of intelligence.

Unauthorized disclosures of classified intelligence are seen as doing significant damage to U.S. security. This is the case whether information is disclosed to a foreign government or published on the Internet. On the other hand, if intelligence is not made available to government officials who need it to do their jobs, enormous expenditures on collection, analysis, and dissemination are wasted. These conflicting concerns require careful and difficult balancing.Investigations of the 9/11 attacks concluded that both technical and policy barriers had limited sharing of information collected by different agencies that, if viewed together, could have provided useful insight into the unfolding plot. A consensus emerged that U.S. intelligenceagencies should share information more widely in order that analysts could integrate clues acquired by different agencies in order to "connect the dots." This report focuses on information acquired, analyzed, and disseminated by agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community, but these concerns also affect classified information outside the Intelligence Community. Contents: (1) Background; (2) Changes Undertaken in Response to 9/11: The Information Sharing Environment; (3) Limitations and Risks of Information Sharing: Detroit Bomb Attempt; Fort Hood Shooting; WikiLeaks; (4) Conclusion. This is a print on demand report.