The officials said last week that much progress has been made in streamlining the management of initiatives to promote counter-terrorism information sharing, but the picture they painted was somewhat at odds with Monday's report.

"More than 4 years after Sept. 11," wrote investigators for the Government Accountability Office, "the nation still lacks the government-wide policies and processes ... for guiding and integrating the myriad of ongoing efforts to improve the sharing of terrorism-related information critical to protecting our homeland."

Although "a large amount of terrorism information is already stored electronically" in various government data systems, the report goes on, many officials with counter-terrorism responsibilities "are not connected to these systems," and the information they contain "about terrorists, their plans, and their activities is fragmentary."

Investigators said that the growth of overlapping and non-standardized controls on access to and handling of government information was a key problem.

Deputy Director of National Intelligence Gen. Michael Hayden, one of the officials responsible for leading the Bush administration's terrorism information-sharing effort, acknowledged that it would be a vital test for the huge government shake-up that brought his office into being.

"Frankly, this is the pass/fail aspect of the legislation," he said, referring to the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which established the director of national intelligence to manage the 16 U.S. spy agencies. "If we don't get this right, all the other things become far less effective."

Retired Gen. Dale Meyerrose, the recently confirmed chief information officer for the new director, said progress had been made, despite the recent departure of the official there in charge of the effort, which was highlighted by the GAO.

That official, the Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment John Russack, quit earlier this year, after complaints that his effort was hamstrung by turf struggles and bureaucratic inertia.

Meyerrose said Russack's successor was already at work, and said he had "reconfigured a portion" of his chief information officer's staff team "to work directly in support" of the replacement, former State Department official Thomas McNamara.

Meyerrose said he had dramatically streamlined management efforts aimed at promoting information-sharing -- the plethora of which had been a point made by critics.

He said he had found 123 committees or working groups dealing with the issue.

"We disbanded all of them," he said, warning "not to put too much stock in the exact number," because some of them appeared to be "the same committee with a different name."

Meyerrose spoke to reporters last week at a briefing where officials talked about the first year of operation of the new intelligence director's office.

He said he was using his authorities over management and procurement to establish "a streamlined governance for overseeing all of the activities within the intelligence business associated with information technology, communications and information-sharing."

He added progress was being made on the policy front by a White House interagency committee, the Information Sharing Council, which was in the process of clearing the U.S. government's first set of information-sharing standards.

But Meyerrose also said that there was already "a lot of information-sharing going on."

In fact, he said, the "large volumes of information" available to U.S. intelligence analysts and other officials "at the stroke of a keyboard," risked overwhelming them. "There's so much information-sharing that piling more hay on the haystack doesn't make the needles easier to find."

He said the "real gauge" of success was not the volume of information being shared, but "the ability to sort through to find the right information in time to make it relevant for whatever task you have in hand."

The key elements in that process were "discovery" -- finding out what resources or potential partners there might be, and "access" -- making sure that the right people could use the resources and collaborate with partners.

"We have to be more granular" in defining what was meant by information-sharing, he said, in order to "stop talking past each other."

One former senior intelligence official agreed that there was often a lack of clarity about what is meant by the term.

Information sharing is the "raison d'etre" of intelligence agencies, the official told United Press International. Agencies "collect intelligence from human and technical sources, analyze it, and disseminate the product to other intelligence agencies and to policymakers."

And agencies should also "if they are doing their jobs properly," share raw intelligence directly with analysts in other agencies.

"When you hear people within the intelligence community complain about the need for more sharing," the former official concluded, "they generally want access to source information and other operational details which the collection agencies guard jealously, and should."

But the former official and others familiar with the effort pointed out that many of the serious challenges associated with sharing terrorism information relate to transferring it to organizations other than the 16 intelligence agencies that the new director manages.

GAO investigators, for instance, determined that one major obstacle was the uncontrolled proliferation of new categories of restrictions on government information, such as the "Sensitive But Unclassified" markings employed by half a dozen agencies and departments including Health and Human Services and Commerce.

The report says there are 56 different such categories, but because each agency has its own rules for each category, the same designation can mean different things in different agencies. "Such inconsistency can lead to challenges in information sharing," stated the report, noting that "more than half of the agencies" they surveyed reported such problems.

The report adds that most agencies do not have rules about which employees can make such designations, and do not provide any training on the issue or carry out periodic reviews of their processes for using them. "Nor are there government-wide policies that require such internal control practices," the report finds, adding that "By not providing guidance and monitoring, there is a probability that the designation will be misapplied, potentially restricting material unnecessarily or resulting in dissemination of information that should be restricted."

"The uncontrolled use of these ill-defined markings continues to clog the information-sharing pathways needed to wage and win the war on terror," David Marin, staff director for Virginia GOP Rep. Tom Davis' Committee on Government Reform.

He said the report strengthened the case for legislation the committee has drafted to standardize and limit the use of restrictions on access to and handling of government information.

"Marking documents (in this way) has evolved into a catch-all means to keep them secret without the burden and costs of classifying them," added Steven Aftergood, who writes the "Secrecy News" blog and e-newsletter for the Federation of American Scientists.

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