U.S. officials nearly done with lessons-learned report from Christmas bombing
By Ben Iannotta
March 10, 2010
U.S. counterterrorism leaders are weeks away from delivering a report to the White House that will propose steps to prevent attacks like the failed Christmas day bombing in Detroit, said Timothy Healy, director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center.
Healy was among the intelligence officials who testified March 10 to a Senate committee that is examining lessons from the attempted bombing Dec. 25 aboard an airliner bound for Detroit from Amsterdam.
U.S. officials have acknowledged failing to tie together information that could have led them to move Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s name to the no-fly list given to the airlines. Abdulmutallab was listed in database that includes suspected terrorists, but officials did not include him on the FBI’s watch list.
The intelligence report will focus on improvements to analytical processes, Healy said. It will be delivered by the end of March to a panel of government officials headed by former CIA official John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, he said.
“We’re wrapping it up right now. We’ve got a tight deadline,” Healy said in a webcast of the hearing by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Counterterrorism officials are searching for improvements that would not run afoul of U.S. privacy policies and laws or risk overwhelming airlines with too-many names, the witnesses said.

They faced the toughest questioning over whether analysts should be able to conduct Google-like searches across the country’s entire set of intelligence networks, including those with information about U.S. citizens.
Analysts can conduct “Google-like searches” today, but not across all 30 intelligence databases, said Russell Travers, deputy director of information sharing and knowledge development at the National Counterterrorism Center.
“These technical limitations are born of privacy and security issues,” Travers said.
Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Susan Collins of Maine, the ranking Republican, said they did not like that response.
“It’s been a little unsettling to hear some of the answers,” Lieberman said. “Ultimately, security has to be given much more priority than privacy.”
In addition to privacy issues, officials said they are coping with deluge of data about suspicious people. Travers said listing all partial names and alternative names for suspects quickly becomes a “mathematical” problem for the lists given to airlines.
“You’re starting to look at the potential for millions and millions of names,” Travers said. “That’s one of the issues we’re struggling with.”