Free Intel Wars by Matthew M. Aid Page A

rest of the intelligence community for whatever personnel and resources it got. So today, six years after its creation, NCTC is still trying to evolve and develop its own institutional identity as well as its independence from the rest of the intelligence community.
    At the present time, the NCTC staff is rather small by American intelligence community standards, consisting of five hundred full-time military and civilian personnel, only about two hundred of whom are actually NCTC employees. The rest are seconded to NCTC for one- or two-year rotations from sixteen U.S. government agencies, including the CIA, NSA, DIA, and FBI, who continue to operate their own larger and better-funded counterterrorism units.
    Because NCTC has no sources of its own, it is completely dependent for its supply of raw data on the U.S. intelligence, military, law enforcement, and homeland security communities. The amount of information pouring into NCTC’s operations center every day is mind-boggling—8,000 to 10,000 intelligence reports, each of which has to be read by NCTC’s analysts; plus the names of 10,000 individuals, every one of whom has to be cross-checked through NCTC’s database of known or suspected terrorists (Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE) to determine if the person has any ties to al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. According to data supplied by the NCTC, as of January 2009 the TIDE database contained the names of more than 564,000 individuals, of whom 5 percent were American citizens. The implications of this figure are staggering. According to NCTC there were in 2009 more than 28,000 American citizens known or suspected to be terrorists, or to have had some association with terrorists!
    The problem is that TIDE, according to two intelligence analysts who have served recent tours of duty at NCTC, is far from a perfect system. When TIDE was created in 2004, it was not supposed to be the “Mother of all Counterterrorism Databases” that it is today. The system kept growing and growing as thousands of names were added to it every day. NCTC analysts who have used TIDE say that it is sometimes cranky and unresponsive, and not the easiest system to use. Fixing this relatively simple problem has become increasingly more difficult because the size of the database continues to expand without corresponding software upgrades to handle the greater data load and the ever-increasing number of analysts using the system.
    Rather than design a new and more comprehensive database comparable to Google, NCTC’s software contractors kept adding on more features and memory on top of the old system, which rather than improve the situation just made the system worse. The system has become so complicated and cumbersome that it isn’t unusual for it to come back with a “no records found” response to requests for information on even the most banal subject.
    One former NCTC analyst recounted how she typed into the TIDE search engine the name of a well-known African terrorist leader, only to be told that there were no reports in the database matching her description. To put it mildly, the analyst was more than a little angry since she was the lead analyst on this particular terrorist group, and she had personally entered into the system three reports on the subject the week before, which the system for some reason failed to pick up.
    Dozens of complaints have been filed in recent years by NCTC analysts about the problems they have experienced trying to use TIDE. A larger and more capable database that was supposed to replace TIDE has been on the drawing board for years, but for unknown reasons the new system has never moved past the design stage. According to a former NCTC terrorism analyst, “We told [NCTC] management that unless a new system was brought online in the near future one of two things was going to happen: TIDE was going to crash or the system would lose a critical piece of