Word: fbi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East, first learned (but kept to itself) that a 25-year-old Saudi named Nawaf Alhazmi had links to Osama bin Laden? Or was it in March 2000, when the CIA heard from its spies overseas (but did not tell the FBI) that Alhazmi had flown to Los Angeles a few weeks before? Then there was the bungled meeting between the CIA and the FBI in June 2001, when the CIA hinted at Alhazmi's role but would not put everything it knew on the table. Washington may have had one more chance...
...STOPPING THE STOVEPIPING Apart from the terrorists, the biggest enemy the government faced before 9/11 was itself. Agents at both the FBI and the CIA had a longtime habit of stovepiping--keeping information to themselves or sharing it with only a handful of people. That made for good secret-keeping but discouraged critical thinking by the people on the front lines. When an FBI agent in Phoenix, Ariz. noticed two months before the attacks that Middle Eastern men were taking flying lessons in his backyard and alerted headquarters that something ghastly might be in the offing, agents in Washington took...
...FBI has begun to try to change its narrow way of thinking. Today disrupting a terrorist group gets top priority, and if secrecy is lost, blowing the chances of a successful prosecution, so be it. Director Robert Mueller has replaced nearly all the bureau's mid-level executives, and many of the agents who were over 50 have retired. Agents are being told they can no longer simply construct an edifice of known facts, as they would for a traditional prosecution. They must instead look around corners and try to understand a terrorist's intentions, habits, methods and psychology...
...FIXING THE HARDWARE PROBLEM Before 9/11, many FBI offices had ancient green-screen computers with no Internet access. Like scriveners from another century, agents wrote their reports out in longhand and often in triplicate. In fact, until a few months ago, many agents were still communicating with one another--and with outsiders--via fax. Some agents kept their best information in shoe boxes under their desks because they didn't trust the computer security system. That's hardly surprising after it turned out that one of their own--FBI security and computer whiz Robert Hanssen--had been working...
...past two years, Mueller has accelerated a long-overdue computer overhaul called Trilogy, which he says promises "worldwide high-speed data communications networks ... to share all kinds of data, to include video and images, among all of our FBI offices throughout the world." Now all field personnel have late-model desktop computers. It will still take months to replace the computers at the bureau's massive Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters. And it is only this year that many FBI agents have finally got e-mail...