[Senate Hearing 109-765] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office] S. Hrg. 109-765 FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION OVERSIGHT ======================================================================= HEARING before the COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY UNITED STATES SENATE ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION ---------- JULY 27, 2005 ---------- Serial No. J-109-36 ---------- Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION OVERSIGHT S. Hrg. 109-765 FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION OVERSIGHT ======================================================================= HEARING before the COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY UNITED STATES SENATE ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION __________ JULY 27, 2005 __________ Serial No. J-109-36 __________ Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 46-051 PDF WASHINGTON DC: 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------- For Sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; (202) 512�091800 Fax: (202) 512�092104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC 20402�090001 COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania, Chairman ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah PATRICK J. LEAHY, Vermont CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts JON KYL, Arizona JOSEPH R. BIDEN, Jr., Delaware MIKE DeWINE, Ohio HERBERT KOHL, Wisconsin JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin JOHN CORNYN, Texas CHARLES E. SCHUMER, New York SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois TOM COBURN, Oklahoma David Brog, Staff Director Michael O'Neill, Chief Counsel Bruce A. Cohen, Democratic Chief Counsel and Staff Director C O N T E N T S ---------- STATEMENTS OF COMMITTEE MEMBERS Page Grassley, Hon. Charles E., a U.S. Senator from the State of Iowa, prepared statement............................................. 297 Leahy, Hon. Patrick J., a U.S. Senator from the State of Vermont. 2 prepared statement........................................... 311 Specter, Hon. Arlen, a U.S. Senator from the State of Pennsylvania................................................... 1 WITNESSES Fine, Glenn A., Inspector General, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C................................................ 36 Hamilton, Lee H., President and Director, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C............. 38 Mueller, Robert S., III, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.......... 9 Russack, John A., Program Manager, Information Sharing Environment, Director of National Intelligence, Washington, D.C............................................................ 44 Webster, William H., Partner, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, Washington, D.C........................................... 40 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Responses of Director Mueller to questions submitted by Senators Specter, Leahy and Feingold.................................... 54 SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD Fine, Glenn A., Inspector General, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., prepared statement........................... 275 Hamilton, Lee H., President and Director, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., prepared statement...................................................... 299 Mueller, Robert S., III, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., prepared statement............................................. 315 Russack, John A., Program Manager, Information Sharing Environment, Director of National Intelligence, Washington, D.C., prepared statement....................................... 324 Webster, William H., Partner, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, Washington, D.C., prepared statement...................... 327 FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION OVERSIGHT ---------- WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2005 United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, DC. The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:32 a.m., in room SD-226, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Arlen Specter, Chairman of the Committee, presiding. Present: Senators Specter, Grassley, DeWine, Sessions, Cornyn, Leahy, Biden, Kohl, Feinstein, Feingold, Schumer, and Durbin. OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. ARLEN SPECTER, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA Chairman Specter. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. The Judiciary Committee will now proceed with our oversight hearing on the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Before proceeding to the hearing at hand, I thought it would be useful to make a comment or two about the scheduling on the confirmation hearings of Judge Roberts. I had sent word to Senator Leahy earlier this morning that I wanted to spend a few minutes on that subject because we were being questioned about it incessantly. And Senator Leahy and I since the middle of last week, right after the appointment, have been talking about it repeatedly to try to work out an agreeable schedule. I compliment the distinguished Ranking Member for his cooperation and the way we have worked together in processing the work of the Committee, and to the maximum extent possible, that is what we want to continue to do. We have an obligation, as I see it, to finish the confirmation hearing so that the nominee is in place, if he is confirmed, on the first Monday in October, which is October the 3rd. My preference has been to start in September, but I have said from the outset that so far as I was concerned, I was flexible on the subject as to either August or September, depending upon all the circumstances. Notwithstanding the preference which I have expressed, I believe there is a duty to start the hearings at a time best calculated to finish by the October 3rd date. I talked to Senator Leahy yesterday repeatedly and posed the question: Is it realistic to get a commitment that we will vote on Judge Roberts by September 29th? And absent that commitment, it seems to me that we have to start in August, on August 29th. And it may be that we cannot finish by October 3rd starting on August 29th. There are too many imponderables which we have seen, and the Senate in large measure functions on what each individual Senator is willing to do. And one Senator can throw a monkey wrench into the process, and we have seen from experience--Senator Leahy has been involved in ten confirmation hearings and I have been involved in nine; Senator Grassley has been involved in nine--that there are many unpredictable things which arise. We have already had discussions about reviewing the records, and I note yesterday that the eight Democrats on the Committee sent a letter to the White House, which I am not at all critical of. I think it is perfectly appropriate. But that sort of represents the differing views which Pat Leahy and Arlen Specter will have no matter how closely we coordinate. And we cannot control our committees. We cannot control our caucuses. All we can do is our very best. But the nub of my conclusion is that duty comes ahead of preference, and unless there is a commitment--and, again, I repeat, I am not asking for a commitment because I do not think it is realistic to get a commitment, because if Pat and I could solve it, we have no problems. We would come to terms promptly. But we do not control the whole situation. But absent that kind of a commitment, it seems to me that duty will call on us to go ahead with August 29th. Let me yield to my distinguished Ranking Member now. STATEMENT OF HON. PATRICK J. LEAHY, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF VERMONT Senator Leahy. Again, I think if it was Senator Specter and myself, we could easily work this out. We could easily do it in September. I still think that is the better course. One, just a purely personal thing is that we have--it is not the members of this Committee will be back here in August, but there are dozens upon dozens--actually hundreds of people who work for the Senate, staff and so on, hundreds of members of the press, others who have determined that as a time that is always open, a time they could take their children back to school, a time they could actually spend time with their families. When I first came to the Senate, the only time you had a recess that you could count on was in the winter months because many of the older members wanted to go off to warmer climes. Of course, that did nothing for those with children. We then around the time I came to the Senate initiated the idea of having an August break, and it is the one time where families with children--and not only members but the hundreds upon hundreds of staff who work here--could plan time to actually be with their children. And the staff members work a lot later than we do. The press and everybody else could plan on that time. I think that that is something we ought to be considering if this is going to be a family-friendly Senate, as we have been promised it would be, or not. We are talking about somebody who is going to serve, if confirmed, to the year 2030, 2040. To spend a few days longer to make sure we do it right does not create a problem in my mind. If somebody is going to be there to the year 2030 to 2040, a few days one way or the other to make sure we get it right makes some sense to me. Now, I am convinced today, with the record we have before us, that there will be a vote by the end of September. The irony is the vote will probably be the exact same day, whether we hold a hearing in August or whether we hold a hearing in September. The difference is, of course, families' lives would be disrupted substantially in August. They would not be disrupted as much in September. But the end result would be the same. And for the life of me, I cannot understand why we should not do it this way. Now, we have worked cooperatively, and I commend the Chairman. As he knows, if the other party has to be in control, there is nobody I would rather have as Chairman than he. He has handled this as the smartest lawyer in the U.S. Senate, as he is. He has also handled this in the best manner of the bar to make sure we do it right. But I do worry that there are those special interest groups on the right and the left who want to make a game out of this when, after all, it is only the members of this Committee that are going to have the initial vote. I worry that--I saw a comment by the White House press secretary today suggesting that it is outrageous I might want to see something the President has not even read. Now, I know that the White House press secretary much prefers talking about Karl Rove, but I would suggest to him that that is probably an unrealistic standard to set, that I can only read things that the President has read, because I doubt very much the President, whom I respect greatly, has read Judge Roberts's opinions, to give you one example. I intend to read all of Judge Roberts's opinions. I do not expect the President has read all of Judge Roberts's opinions, nor would I expect him to. But these are the kinds of semantic games that we ought to leave to the side. Let the Chairman and me work this out. So I would again hope that we would start in September. You know, the Republicans control the Senate and, of course, they can decide to do it in August. I think it will give the impression that we are rushing to something before we are even prepared to go to a hearing. And it would also, of course, disrupt many, many, many hundreds of families if we do it that way. The irony is the final vote will still be on the same day, whether we do it in August or whether we do it in September. So I wish all the conflicting groups would back off, including the Senate leadership and the White House, and let Chairman Specter and me work this out. I have an enormous amount of respect for the Chairman. He keeps his commitments to me and to others. I think if it is left to us, we will have a hearing the Senate can be proud of. Chairman Specter. Thank you very much, Senator Leahy. Just one final word. We are very much aware of the commitments made in August, and in making this statement with all the staff here, I thought it would be better if the staff heard it from the Chairman and the Ranking Member than just reading about it in the newspapers and having a feel for what we are doing and what we are trying to accomplish. If we adjourn on the 29th of July, we will have 31 days until August the 29th. That does not alter my preference, nor does it alter my duty. And Senator Leahy may be exactly right that we may vote on the same date no matter when we start. And I am not unaware that around here you get a lot more done customarily in 3 hours cooperatively than in 3 days or 3 weeks. But at the same time, that extra week could be determinative, and that is what is on my mind. Thank you for coming in, Director Mueller, and the indulgence of everyone in talking about the Roberts hearing, which is sort of taking a lot of--the whole Roberts proceeding is sort of taking a lot of oxygen out of Washington. But the number one problem in America and the world remains terrorism, and the issue of avoiding another attack is the most important issue facing the Government of the United States to protect its people. We have met with Director Mueller on a number of occasions to talk about the changes which have been going on in the FBI to see what is happening. We all know that there were many signals before Director Mueller's watch which were not focused on: the Phoenix report, the Minneapolis report with Coleen Rowley, the wrong standard for probable cause, the information on Zacarias Moussaoui, the information that the CIA had about terrorists in Kuala Lumpur not passed on to Immigration. And we are all as determined as we can be to avoid that happening again. But it is going to take a lot of hard work, and a lot has already been done. This is the first in a series of oversight hearings. There have been very strong criticisms by both the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission and the 9/11 Commission. The WMD Commission found resistance to cultural changes as the FBI transitions to a ``hybrid law enforcement and intelligence agency.'' The WMD Commission was critical about the FBI still putting law enforcement ahead of intelligence gathering. The Commission noted that the Counterterrorism Directorate has seen six directors since September 11th, and the New York field office, where much of the FBI's counterterrorism efforts have been focused, has seen five directors since 9/11. Those are not encouraging signs. The WMD Commission concluded that the FBI ``is still far from having a strong analytical capability to drive and focus the Bureau's national security work.'' Nearly one-third of the FBI's intelligence analyst jobs remained unfilled in 2004 because of rapid turnover and other problems. The 9/11 Commission found that 66 percent of the FBI's analysts were not qualified to perform analytical duties. That is just the top of the iceberg, and I will put the rest in the record in order to save time and stay within my opening statement 5-minute limit. There were faults found on the intelligence operations, and then you have the issue of technology, a subject that I personally have discussed in some detail with Director Mueller. And when you take a look at the Virtual Case File system, part of the FBI's technology modernization product intended to replace the Bureau's obsolete case management system, after spending 3 years and $170 million on the Virtual Case File system, the FBI declared it to be a complete failure. Director Mueller, we appreciate what you are doing, and we have great confidence in you personally. And it is a gigantic task, and we want to be helpful to you. But there has to be some way to move through the tangle of problems because of the intensity and importance of our duty to prevent another attack and to be in a position to put all the pieces together. And had all of the so-called dots been on one format, I think 9/11 could have been prevented. And I know that is your most fervent wish and what you are working for, as are we. My red light has not gone on yet--there it goes. Senator Leahy? Senator Leahy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am glad you are holding this. I think it is a good hearing to continue our oversight. I welcome Director Mueller and the others, and I appreciate the time I spent with the Director a couple weeks ago. We went into this in some detail. As he knows, I mentioned the FBI translation program. I have been following this for years. I authored the PATRIOT Act provision aimed at facilitating the hiring of more translators at the FBI. The Inspector General this morning released an update to its 2004 audit of the translation program. He gives credit where credit is due, says the FBI is making progress. I know that the Bureau is working hard to address this talent. I am frustrated, however, that it takes the Bureau on average 16 months to hire contract linguists. I am aware of the number of hours of unreviewed counterterrorism audio is increasing. I know all of have this horrible sinking feeling, what happens if there are plans for an impending attack and we do not translate the audio until some time after the attack? None of us want that. I know that the Director does not. But I worry that we are not moving fast enough to get those translated. All of us want to see this program succeed. Everybody on this Committee does. The FBI is the lead agency responsible for the Terrorist Screening Center. It made significant progress, but the Inspector General shows that their operations have been hampered by inadequate training and rapid turnover among the employees staffing the 24-hour call center, and, of course, deficient technology. They were charged with what I think was an enormously difficult charge of consolidating 12 terrorist watch lists, but we have seen what happens when inaccuracies come in there. We have heard stories of planes being diverted because terrorist suspects on the no-fly list were allowed to board the airplane. If a person is so dangerous that he or she is properly on a no- fly list, then mid-flight is much too late to respond. On the other hand, we have seen so many people that they or their children might have the same name and are constantly being stopped--people that have had top secret clearance, people who have had distinguished military careers, Senator Kennedy. Of course, these Irish terrorists all look alike, but Senator Kennedy has been stopped numerous times from going on the same flight that he has been taking for 30 years because he is on a no-fly list. That does not give me a great deal of confidence that we are necessarily getting the right people. It is also, of course, horribly disruptive to people who get their name on there by mistake and then cannot get their name off. If they have a business where they have to travel around the country, they are loyal Americans losing their livelihood. I am displeased with the FBI's handling of the Virtual Case File. The Chairman has already talked about it, but I feel they have bit off more than they can chew. They did not develop a finite and final list of project requirements, and they poorly chose to issue a contract without putting penalties in there. But what really bothered me is that the Congress, and this Committee in particular, was not given the full story of how poorly the project was progressing until it collapsed under its own weight. Not only are we out well over $100 million, but we are out several years of time, precious time that was lost, when we should be fighting terrorism. I am disturbed by recent reports from GAO that an audit of the project has been substantially delayed because the FBI has taken weeks to schedule meetings and months to produce documents. I think there should be a lot fuller cooperation by the FBI with the GAO. They are not your enemy. They are your friends. With respect to the VCF's replacement program, I did ask the Director at a recent hearing about costs. He said he would rather discuss the issue in private citing procurement sensitivities. When we talked in private, he still did not want to reveal those figures. I would just state this: There have been figures in the media. I have not been able to get them. Somehow the media has had some figures. I can tell you right now that if the costs are anywhere near what the media is reporting, I think you are going to have a real problem with this Committee. So a lot has been undertaken since September 11th. The threats have changed. The Bureau is adjusting in several key areas. They have made some significant strides. I do want to underscore that. There is a lot of work to be done. We are not the enemy up here, even though some feel we are. We really do want to work together. This Committee has given an enormous amount of money, authorized an enormous amount of money for the FBI to make it better. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. [The prepared statement of Senator Leahy appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Specter. Thank you very much, Senator Leahy. We are going to proceed out of order because Senator Grassley chairs the Finance Committee and has a very pressing duty and is going to have to depart. He has been on this Committee since elected in 1980, sat next to me all that time. Quite a burden for Senator Grassley. And as I have just whispered to him and will repeat out loud, nobody has been more diligent on FBI oversight in the 25 years we have been here than Senator Grassley has. I may be second or may not be second, but there is no doubt that Senator Grassley is first. Senator Grassley? Senator Grassley. Thank you very much. Director Mueller, maybe it is not fair for me to go first because you may have had something in your opening statement that would satisfy me, but I do have to chair the hearing. I have been asking a lot of questions about terrorist fund raising cases that have been developed by the Immigration and Custom Enforcement there in Houston, and so far your headquarters at FBI and the field office at Houston have been giving contradictory answers. Essentially they have been pointing fingers at each other. Headquarters has blamed the field for mishandling the case, and the field has not accepted the blame. And since the FBI has refused to provide access to additional witnesses who might clear up the contradictions that are very obvious, how do you propose to resolve the conflicting statements? I think you are in a position to do it. They need to be resolved. And if it is determined that someone put the FBI's interest in turf battles ahead of the fight against terror, what would you do to hold that person accountable? Mr. Mueller. Southeastern, we have had discussions on this, and I know our staffs have had lengthy discussions, and I am also well aware of your interest. It appears to be a difference of recollection between at least two individuals that is irreconcilable. It is a difference in recollection relating to the timing of bringing information together in order to undertake an application. We take full responsibility for that delay. There was a delay. The difference in the timing I think was somewhat--in terms of the difference in recollection as to the timing, it is inconsequential in the sense that there was a delay; there should not have been a delay. My expectation is that as a result of this, we will not see this occurrence again. We have put into place procedures to assure that it does not happen. I do think it was a unique case, a unique set of circumstances, but we are determined that these circumstances not repeat themselves. There was a delay in putting together information from two areas. It should have been put together sooner. Ultimately, I believe that the appropriate action was taken and that the case is ongoing with the full support of both agencies. Senator Grassley. Director Mueller, I think it is difficult maybe for you to solve this. I can solve it if I just get a chance to see the people I want to see and question the people I want to question. And I think that that is only fair that we get to the bottom of this, and I think it is part of Congressional oversight to get the job done. I think it is a help to you, and I think we need to get to the bottom of it. On another matter, more than a month ago I had the opportunity to write the attorney for Basam Yusef, an Arab- American agent who is suing the FBI for discrimination, to request that he meet with my staff to provide information about problems in the Counter terrorism Division. His attorney sought permission from the FBI, but has not been given a clear answer on this. Given the FBI's recent attempt to fire another agent, Bob Wright, Mr. Yusef is afraid to honor my request without clear permission from the FBI. We need a clear answer. Will you allow Mr. Yusef to meet with staff or not? And can you assure me that if Mr. Yusef complies with my request that the FBI will not retaliate against him? What we need is the cutting through of red tape within the FBI to get answers to our questions about whether or not this person can meet with my investigative staff, and we need this red tape cut crossways, not lengthways. Mr. Mueller. Well, Senator, I think you are aware that I have been, I believe, cooperative in allowing persons to talk to your office. There is a protocol that one has to go through that gives some assurance that issues that are classified will be and continue to be appropriately classified. I would be happy to go back and see where we are in that process. You alluded in your statement to the recommendation with regard to Robert Wright. As I believe I explained to you, I am concerned about allegations of retaliation. I requested that the Justice Department do the investigation in the allegations he raised. When that came back to us, there were additional concerns that we had. We made a recommendation. But I think I bent over backwards in allowing Mr. Wright to appeal that recommendation to the Department of Justice. I can assure you that we will not retaliate against Mr. Yusef, have not retaliated against Mr. Wright, and have bent over backwards to give the actuality and, indeed, including the appearance of fairness. I know that you have the letter that was sent by us explaining to Mr. Wright the circumstances under which we made that recommendation, which we believed to be appropriate but we have given him that additional right to appeal to an independent outside arbiter. Senator Grassley. Well, then you are going to look at my opportunity to see Basam Yusef without retaliation? Mr. Mueller. Yes, absolutely. I can assure you there will be no retaliation. The circumstances under which the discussion is had, I will have to review where we are in that process. Senator Grassley. Thank you. Chairman Specter. Thank you very much, Senator Grassley. Just one concluding note. Senator Grassley and I are the two survivors of 16 Republicans elected in 1980, the last two. We have Senator Dodd on the Democratic side, but it is a small group which remains. Thank you very much, Senator Grassley, and without objection, we will put your opening statement in the record. Senator Grassley. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Senator Grassley appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Specter. We turn now to Director Mueller for his opening statement, really an extraordinary record, educational background, professional background, public service, graduate of Princeton University, 1966, international relations from New York University in 1967, law degree from the University of Virginia, served as an officer in the Marine Corps, led a rifle platoon in Vietnam, recipient of the Bronze Star, two Navy commendation medals, the Purple Heart, and the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry. Professionally, his career has been equally extraordinary, was United States Attorney in both the Northern District of California and in Boston, served as Acting Deputy Attorney General right before he became the FBI Director. And I think perhaps most noteworthy of his entire career, after having held lofty positions, he returned to public service as a senior litigator in the homicide section of the District of Columbia U.S. Attorney's Office, which is really remarkable, attesting to the fact that the best job, notwithstanding all these fancy titles, is being an assistant prosecutor. Director Mueller, thank you for the job you are doing, and we look forward to your opening statement. STATEMENT OF ROBERT S. MUELLER III, DIRECTOR, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, WASHINGTON, D.C. Director Mueller. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for having me here today. As you well know, having been one yourself, that is the best job one can have as an assistant prosecutor, particularly doing a service in cases that are so meaningful-- Chairman Specter. Senator Leahy just leaned over and said he agrees. Director Mueller. Another assistant prosecutor. Thank you for allowing me to appear before you today, and let me start by updating you on recent changes within the FBI and additional changes that we anticipate in the near future. Let me start by recognizing that last month the President announced that he had approved certain recommendations of the WMD Commission. And while the Commission had recognized in its report that we have made substantial progress in building our intelligence program, as I believe, Mr. Chairman, you pointed out, it expressed concern that our existing structure did not give the Director of National Intelligence the ability to ensure that our intelligence functions are fully integrated into the intelligence community. At the direction of the President, we are currently prepared a plan to implement a national security service within the FBI. While the details of this plan are currently being discussed with both the Department of Justice and the Office of the DNI, I would like to share with the Committee the broad concepts under which this service is being developed. One of our guiding principles since September 11th has been that the FBI's intelligence program be integrated with our investigative missions, and our FBI national security service will build on the progress of the Directorate of Intelligence and further promote this integration. The integration of our intelligence and investigative missions ensures that intelligence drives our investigative as well as our intelligence operations. And this integration enables the FBI to capitalize our capability, our capacity to collect information and to extend that strength to the analysis and production of intelligence. The national security service and intelligence service will be put together by combining our counterterrorism and counterintelligence components, and put it together with our Intelligence Directorate under the supervision of a single official who will report to the Deputy Director and to myself. The development of a specialized national security workforce is a key component of this new service, and we will develop this workforce through initiatives, many of which are already in place, but those initiatives are designed to recruit, hire, train, and retain investigative and intelligence professionals who have the skills necessary to the success of our National intelligence, national security programs. Finally, the creation of a national security within the FBI will enhance our ability to coordinate our National security activities with the DNI and with the rest of the intelligence community. The single FBI official in charge of the service will be able to ensure that we direct our National security resources in coordination with the DNI and the Attorney General. Also, as we all know, the DNI will also have authority to concur in the appointment of this official. Mr. Chairman, this is a very broad outline of our plans for a national intelligence service within the FBI, and I am happy to provide the Committee with additional details as the implementation of this initiative progresses. Mr. Chairman, you mentioned the Foreign Language Program, as has Senator Leahy. Let me just comment, if I could, on the findings of the Inspector General in this regard. We welcome the input of the Inspector General. His findings have been exceptionally helpful in giving us guidance on where we need to improve, and I want to say that I appreciate the work that he spends and the guidance that he gives. I will tell you that prior to September 11, 2001, translation capabilities, like many of our other programs, were decentralized and managed in the field. Since September 11th, we have established a Language Services Translation Center at FBI headquarters to provide centralized management of the Foreign Language Program. This provides a command and control structure at headquarters to ensure that our translator resource base of over 1,300 translators, distributed across 52 field offices, is strategically aligned with the priorities set out by our operational divisions and with the national intelligence priorities. We have now integrated Language Services into the Directorate of Intelligence. This integration fully aligns our FBI foreign language and intelligence management activities across all of our field offices. We, in addition, have instituted a prioritization process to ensure that foreign language collection is translated in accordance with a clear list of priorities. The Foreign Language Program receives regular weekly updates to FISA prioritization, and we are careful to ensure that the FBI's priorities are consistent with those of the intelligence community. I know, as you mentioned, Senator Leahy, you and we are concerned whenever there is a backlog, and the report of the Inspector General indicates a current backlog. I will tell you that we have triaged and prioritized so that we have our highest priority counterterrorism intelligence intercepts reviewed generally within 24 hours. And this prioritization and triage process has helped us to reduce that accrued backlog. As to that accrued backlog, if you review it you will see that much of it is what is called white noise from microphone recordings, and there is another piece of that backlog that is attributable to highly obscure languages and dialects that we are working hard to recruit translators to address. Mr. Chairman, I would also like to address some of the Inspector General's concerns about our hiring and vetting of linguists. Since September 11th, we have recruited and processed more than 50,000 translator applicants. These efforts have resulted in the addition of 877 new contract linguists and another 112 language analysts, less the attrition. The FBI has increased its overall number of linguists by 69 percent with the number of linguists in certain high priority languages, such as Arabic, increasing by more than 200 percent. At the same time, however, we must ensure translation security and quality. All FBI translator candidates are subject to a pre-employment vetting process that eliminates almost 90 percent of those who apply. I will tell you that more than 95 percent of the FBI linguists are native speakers of their foreign language and hold Top Secret security clearances. Their native-level fluencies and long-term immersions within a foreign culture ensure not only a firm grasp of colloquial and idiomatic speech, but also of heavily nuanced language containing religious, cultural, and historical references. Beyond these qualities, over 80 percent of our FBI linguists hold at least a bachelor's degree and 37 percent hold a graduate-level degree. These qualities make them extremely valuable to the FBI's intelligence program, but also, unfortunately, particularly attractive to other employers who are seeking these scarce skill sets. Mr. Chairman, we recognize that the FBI's Foreign Language Program is essential to our success, and we appreciate the oversight by the Committee. We appreciate the Inspector General indicating we have made progress. We understand that we have to make more progress and believe we are on track to do in those areas pointed out by the Inspector General. Let me spend just a moment, Mr. Chairman, on technology. As you or as anybody who looks at the intelligence community, indeed, the law enforcement community, we recognize the importance of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information both internally and with other intelligence and law enforcement agencies. We have made since September 11th modernization of our information technology a top priority and have developed, I believe, in the last 2 years a coordinated, strategic approach to information technology under the centralized leadership of the Office of Chief Information Officer. I will not go into the details because my prepared statement covers much of that, but I do want to point out that our proposed information management system, which we call Sentinel, is a form of a ``service-oriented architecture,'' which is a suits of services geared to evolve with our new and emerging needs. This Sentinel project differs in many respects from Virtual Case File in that it will serve as the platform from which services can be gradually deployed, each deployment offering added improvements. Sentinel will pave the way, starting with our legacy case management system, for subsequent transformation of all legacy applications to modern technology under our enterprise architecture. As we briefed the staff yesterday, the staff of the Judiciary Committee, and as I believe they heard, we are planning to deploy Sentinel in four phases over the next 40 months. I know that, as Senator Leahy pointed out, he is interested in the total cost of the Sentinel program. I must say that at this time cost estimates are considered ``source selection information'' as defined by the Federal Acquisition Regulations, meaning that any public disclosure might improperly affect the bidding process. I will assure you, Mr. Chairman, and the Committee that the FBI is committed to obtaining the best product at the lowest cost to the American people, and we do not want to prematurely disclose information which may influence bids from potential contractors. I might turn just for a second to the issue of our human resources, which have already been mentioned by yourself, Mr. Chairman, and by Senator Leahy. The men and women of the FBI are clearly our most valuable asset. In order to continue to recruit, hire, train, and retain quality individuals for our expanding human capital needs, we have undertaken a re-engineering of our human resource program. We have retained the services of outside consulting firms to review business processes for selection and hiring, training and development, performance management, intelligence officer certification, retention, and career progression. We have hired an executive search firm to identify a chief human resources officer for the FBI, an officer who has significant experience in the transformation of human resources processes in a large organization, not necessarily a governmental organization. At the same time, we have made substantial progress in building a specialized and integrated intelligence career service comprised of intelligence analysts, language analysts, physical surveillance specialists, and special agents. Finally, we have developed a special agent career path that will be implemented in October 2005. These career paths will take into account the background and experience of the agent in determining the agent's future career path in one of five programs: counterterrorism, counterintelligence, intelligence, cyber, or criminal. This policy will promote the FBI's interest in developing a cadre of special agents with subject matter expertise. These are just a few of the initiatives underway to improve the FBI's human capital and to ensure that we develop a workforce that is prepared to meet the challenges of the future. Finally, Mr. Chairman, when I last appeared before the Committee, my prepared testimony included a request for administrative subpoenas in support of our counterterrorism efforts, and I was remiss in not including that request in my oral remarks and would like to very briefly take the opportunity to do so now. As you know, the FBI has had administrative subpoena authority for investigations of crimes from drug trafficking to health care fraud to child exploitation. And yet when it comes to terrorism investigations, the FBI has had no such authority. We have relied on national security letters and FISA orders for business records. And although both are useful and important tools in our National security investigations, administrative subpoena power would greatly enhance our abilities to obtain information. Administrative subpoena authority would be a valuable complement to these tools and would provide added efficiency to the FBI's ability to investigate and disrupt terrorism operations and would also assist in our intelligence-gathering efforts. I would like to stress that the administrative subpoena power would allow and provide the recipient the ability to quash the subpoena on the same grounds as the recipient of a grand jury subpoena would have the opportunity to contest such a subpoena. Now, in closing, Mr. Chairman, I would like to address the concern expressed by some, including yourselves, that the FBI is resistant to change. One would have to admit that there are those in our organization who would adopt change more slowly than others. But I will tell you, in the 3\1/2\, almost going on 4 years that I have been with the FBI, I have witnessed the willingness of the vast majority of FBI employees to embrace change and to welcome recommendations for improvement wherever those recommendations come, whether it be Congress, the 9/11 Commission, the WMD Commission, or the Inspector General. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the pace and breadth of change within the Bureau has been significant. Occasionally I liken it to trying to change the tires on a car as it hurdles at 70 miles an hour down the road. But examples of this change are the following: We have nearly doubled the number of agents working counterterrorism investigations from 2,500 to 4,900. We have established 103 Joint Terrorism Task Forces across the country. We have embedded intelligence elements in each of our 56 field offices; they are called field intelligence groups. These did not exist prior to September 11th. We have established a Directorate of Intelligence to manage all intelligence production activities and intelligence resources. And we have collocated many of our counterterrorism personnel with counterterrorism personnel from other agencies, State and local agencies, in order to better address the global nature of the terrorist threat. And as a result of these changes and the commitment of FBI employees to that number-one priority that you have already articulated--that is, protecting the American people from another terrorist attack--we have over the past 3\1/2\ to 4 years experienced a number of counterterrorism successes. While most of these successes remain classified or are pending matters, because of the continuing intelligence we are able to develop from them, the following are a few that you are well aware of: The arrest and guilty plea of a group in Lackawanna, New York, pleading guilty to providing material support to al Qaeda after undergoing training in an al Qaeda in Afghanistan; The arrest and guilty pleas of five men and one woman in Portland, Oregon, on a variety of charges, including money laundering and conspiracy to levy war against the United States, after several of them attempted to enter Afghanistan after September 11th in order to fight the American forces; The arrest of Jose Padilla for planning activities relating to the deployment of--or undertaking a terrorist attack within the United States; The arrest of Lyman Farris, who, after admitting to carry out surveillance and research assignments for al Qaeda, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for providing material and support. These are just a few of those instances where, working together with others, we have been successful over the last several years. I will say that any success we have had, Mr. Chairman, is attributable to the dedicated men and women who are serving in our Federal, in our State, in our local, and in our tribal law enforcement and intelligence communities. These successes were also the result of the cooperation and assistance offered by the Muslim-American and Arab-American communities within the United States who have provided tremendous support to our efforts. These individuals and the Muslim-American and the Arab-American community share our desire to prevent any terrorist attack from occurring on our shores again. And these successes were the result of the men and women of the FBI who have embraced our changing mission, worked to enhance our intelligence capabilities, and adapted to new ways of doing business. We still face the threat of terrorist attacks. We still face other threats that will continue to evolve. And as those threats evolve, so will the FBI as it strives to meet the challenges of the future while at the same time upholding the civil liberties we cherish. Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, I thank you again for the opportunity to discuss these issues concerning the transformation of the FBI, and I would be happy to answer any questions you have. Chairman Specter. Thank you very much, Director Mueller, for your opening statement. We will now proceed with the Senators asking questions on our customary 5-minute round. Let me start with the ultimate questions, Director Mueller. How secure is our homeland from a terrorist attack? Or, stated differently, what is the imminence of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil? Director Mueller. We are, I will say, far safer than we ere before September 11th, and that is attributable to, I believe, three factors. The first is that we have removed in the wake of September 11th the sanctuary that al Qaeda had in Afghanistan, a sanctuary in which al Qaeda could plan, train, recruit, and coordinate, as was the case with the planning, the coordination, the recruiting for the September 11th attacks. We removed that as a sanctuary for al Qaeda to utilize. Secondly, a number of agencies, particularly the CIA, have been successful many times over, much of that which is not recorded and in the public, many times over working with our counterparts overseas to take off the leadership of al Qaeda, to detain, incarcerate, and remove them as capable leaders in the al Qaeda network: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaida, Hambali. A number of the leadership of al Qaeda has been removed as a potential source of managerial skill, organizational skill, and that is attributable to our brothers and sisters in other agencies, but it should not be overlooked. And, finally-- Chairman Specter. Director Mueller-- Director Mueller. A final point, if I can just make one more point, and I will make it brief, and that is what-- Chairman Specter. Okay. There are 3 minutes and 13 seconds. Director Mueller. I will do it in 10. The work that has been done with State and local law enforcement to work together to assure that our communities are safe. That has been tremendously important. Chairman Specter. Director Mueller, we have reviewed the problems in the Virtual Case File system with $170 million being expended without any results. We are now advised that on the new Sentinel system, we are projecting a date of 2009, which is a long ways away. We saw the lack of coordination on what information we had on the FBI Phoenix report, on the Minneapolis report, on Zacarias Moussaoui, on Kuala Lumpur and the CIA. Is it realistic to be able to put all the dots on the map and all the pieces together, which needs to be done in order to prevent another attack, if we do not have the technology in place? And how can we look for a date as far away as 2009 considering all the money which has been invested and the lack of results so far? Director Mueller. Well, the Trilogy project had three components to it: new computers, new networks, as well as Virtual Case File. We were successful on the first parts of the Trilogy project. We have the new computers. We have the networks that support it. The Trilogy project did not at that time contemplate the database structures that we felt were necessary in the wake of September 11th to put into place to assure that counterterrorism information was in one place. We have developed-- Chairman Specter. Do we need that database system in order to pull all these bits of information together to prevent another attack? Director Mueller. We do, and we have put it together since early in 2002. We have the database structure. We have millions and millions of documents relating to counterterrorism, all of our documents relating to counterterrorism in an up-to-date, state-of-the-art, relational database structure. The Sentinel project is due to--our hope is that we will have the contract in place by the end of this year. We expect that within a year afterwards, we will have the first deliverables. It is four stages. And the year 2009, it would take approximately 40 months--yes, approximately 40 months as we now anticipate to put into place the various components that we believe will be in the Sentinel project. And as-- Chairman Specter. One final question, Director Mueller, before my 5 minutes expire. There have been reports about the New York Police Department recruiting immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands where they have developed analyst and translator capabilities by drawing upon the immigrants familiar with languages and cultures under survey. Has the FBI undertaken a similar program? Director Mueller. Well, we certainly have undertaken a broad-based program to bring on board language specialists that have the full capabilities across all of the languages that we need. Some of them may well be immigrants. I will tell you, however, we have a very high standard for hiring within the FBI in terms of the clearances that are required to be obtained in order to get access to the information that we put before our translators. But, yes, we have an active effort to recruit and bring in persons, particularly with persons who have information or capabilities in unique and very specialized dialects. Chairman Specter. My red light went on in the middle of your answer, so I will now yield to Senator Leahy. Senator Leahy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Director Mueller, there are areas where I have been critical, as others have up here, of parts of the efforts down at the Bureau. But you and your leadership team and the hard- working men and women at the Bureau deserve the constant appreciation of all Americans for all you do, and also for the sacrifices that many of you make to do it. Now, after 9/11, the people of the FBI have put in untold overtime hours under great pressure. They have had to adjust to duties they never anticipated before that. And I compliment you and the people who work with you for doing that. And I think that it is also important that we have the oversight we do because I think it helps make everybody more effective. And that is what you and I and the Chairman and everybody else here are united in the same thing. We just want America to be safer. We want the bad guys behind bars. We want Americans to be safe. Now, the consolidated watchlist uses, as I understand it, four risk-based handling codes. They say how law enforcement should respond when they encounter people on the list. The Inspector General report found that nearly 32,000 armed and dangerous individuals are designated for the lowest handling code. That code does not require law enforcement to notify any other law enforcement or agency or the TSC. Some of there are described as having engaged in terrorism or likely to engage in terrorism. They enter the U.S. and are a hijacker or a hostage taker of use explosives or firearms. I understand there may be some legal requirements and there are strategic requirements, but I cannot understand why they are in such a low handling, why they are put so low. Does this put an officer who might pick them up at undue risk? I think in my own State--and this would be the same for most rural areas--if a State trooper stops somebody at 11 o'clock at night, his back-up may be an hour or 2 hours or more away. And the person may be in one of these dangerous categories, but they are at the lowest category. Am I missing something here? Director Mueller. I would have to get back to you on that, Senator. I know if the person is on the watchlist, the reason why the person is on the watchlist, there has been reason to believe that there is information or reason or evidence or intelligence to believe that the person needs to be on the watchlist. And then there are various categories, as you point out, for the handling and treatment. The fact that the person is on the watchlist means that when that person is stopped, the Terrorism Screening Center will be alerted. And the usual practice is that when the call comes in, the Terrorism Screening Center then goes, looks at the file and talks to the agency-- Senator Leahy. But this says they don't have to be. Director Mueller. Pardon? Senator Leahy. Those that fall in this number four category, they say the Terrorism Screening Center does not have to be notified, and yet some of them are said to be people who handle explosives-- Director Mueller. I will have to get back to you on that, Senator. Senator Leahy. Well, do me a favor. If you get back to me on it, would you review the answer yourself? Director Mueller. Yes. Senator Leahy. I understand from your testimony in another case that you usually do not review these answers. This one I am very concerned about. Whether they are in rural Pennsylvania or rural Texas or Alabama or Vermont, we have very brave police officers who are out there in the middle of the night with no back-up, and when they see a name come up, they should know whether this is somebody they ought to be a little bit more nervous about. Director Mueller. Let me check one thing, if I could. Yes, I will review that answer. Senator Leahy. Thank you. And I am disturbed by some reports from the GAO that an audit of the project, the Virtual Case File project, has been substantially delayed by the FBI. I understand that weeks go by before some meetings are scheduled. Sometimes the GAO has had to wait several months, as long as 9 months in once case, to receive documents, or the Bureau has provided wrong documents or posed other delays requiring the DOJ and the FBI attorneys to screen their documents. I know I have been told many times the FBI's answers to questions I have asked have been tied up in DOJ reviews. DOJ has raised these problems with the Bureau. They have received assurances that things will go better. Are things going to go better? Director Mueller. Well, I had heard this from--it came to me from your staff several months ago, and I immediately asked persons to look into it. They met thereafter with GAO. And I believe whatever issues that were outstanding have been resolved. Now, if you will allow me one second? That is what I understand. Yes, I believe that is taken care of. Senator Leahy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Specter. Thank you very much, Senator Leahy. Senator Cornyn? Senator Cornyn. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks, Director Mueller, for being here. You have earned all of our respect, and we appreciate your great service. Let me just ask you about two subjects, one that I think you will regard as a fairly straightforward question. The other is not designed to be hostile but, rather, constructive and that has to do with technology that you already touched on. I have, frankly, never understood the opposition to the use of the administrative subpoena in fighting the war on terror, as benign an instrument of law enforcement as it is to gain business records. It is already used in 335 different types of applications. Why we would deny that same tool to our law enforcement efforts when it comes to fighting the war on terror. Do you understand what the concerns are? I realize a lot of what we do here is not necessarily rational. This just seems to be totally irrational, denying that tool to the FBI, to other law enforcement in fighting the war on terror. Director Mueller. As I discussed in other fora as well as here, I believe it is a tool that would be exceptionally helpful, and to the extent that we have it in 300-plus other areas, it does seem that it would be appropriate to have it in this--for use in national security investigations and terrorist investigations, and I am hopeful that this Congress will see to support it. Senator Cornyn. Of course, the Intel Committee, in voting out its version of the PATRIOT Act, has included the administrative subpoena in its version. We did not in this Committee, but it is my hope that it can be restored on the floor and that tool can be made available. Let me talk to you about information technology, and you have been kind enough to come by my office and talk to me about my concerns in this area. And I guess I do not want to go over old territory with regard to the Virtual Case File, but I am concerned because in 2006 it is estimated that the Federal Government will spend $65 billion on information technology. And I just want to make sure that we do not waste the taxpayers' money. I know every taxpayer in the country would willingly send their dollars to Washington to help the FBI and other Federal agencies perform the important work that you are doing to keep us safe. But they want to make sure the money is spent wisely and efficiently. And so would you just, in the few minutes we have remaining here, describe the steps that you have undertaken that you believe were going to result in successes in the FBI? I know the creation of the CIO has been one step, but would you describe that for us so we can have greater confidence that the FBI and other Federal Government agencies are going to be spending that money wisely? Director Mueller. Well, one of the things we have done is have a very competent CIO we have brought on board. We have expanded his shop. Perhaps as important, we have given the CIO's office the control over both the funds and the new projects. We have developed an enterprise architecture for the Bureau so that each new component of high-tech or information technology fits into the enterprise architecture for the Bureau. As we have developed the Sentinel project, we have elicited support from any number of outside groups and specialists and experts. We have brought several on board ourselves to expand the CIO's office. I can tell you as we go down this path that we will be looking for outside scrutiny and suggestions in terms of how to do it. I have a Director of Science and Technology Board that I look to with a number of people who have expertise in this arena. We have had independent assessments by outside entities such as the RAND Corporation. We deal with the Markle Foundation that focuses on these issues. We have a Strategics Guidance Council within the FBI. I have special advisers who have accomplished this type of transformation in business in the past who I call upon and get an outside view from periodically. We want to work with the Inspector General's office as we go along so that the Inspector General can point out to us any areas in which there are flaws. We will continuously brief Congress at will. I would like nothing more than to have the process of developing this IT transparent and will take any suggestions from anybody on how to make it better. Senator Cornyn. It sounds like you are throwing everything you can at the problem, and I congratulate you for taking it so seriously. As you working closely with the Office of Management and Budget in their efforts across-- Director Mueller. Absolutely. Senator Cornyn.--Government agencies to try to develop strategies to avoid these failures and to increase the likelihood of success in the future? Director Mueller. Absolutely, and there are some areas--and I think that the Office of Management and Budget will look at the work that has been done by our CIO shop in certain areas and say that we are leading in areas. And we in the future want to lead when it comes to information technology, as we have led in other areas. And I believe that we are building that capability. I will tell you that I meet every week with our CIO. Myself and the Deputy sit down and go through where we are on Sentinel, where we are on the other projects. It is as important a priority as we have in order to assure that we protect the United States, particularly against terrorist attacks. Chairman Specter. Thank you, Senator Cornyn. Senator Feinstein? Senator Feinstein. Mr. Chairman, thank you. I wanted to continue the discussion on administrative subpoenas, if I might. We discussed this privately. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time publicly that you have asked for an administrative subpoena for intelligence purposes. You have for law enforcement purposes, but this is the first time, to the best of my knowledge, for intelligence purposes. I voted against the intelligence bill in Committee because of the broad administrative subpoena language, and since Senator Coburn raised it, I would like to respond to it. The administrative subpoena language in the intelligence bill is extraordinarily broad. There is no requirement for a certification of an emergency. There is no requirement for a sign-off by the DOJ, just a sign-off by the SAC. And the non- disclosure is limited. Now, the reason that an administrative subpoena is different from the 350 other subpoenas in health and other areas is because it is not discoverable and the target essentially never knows that the Government is gathering information against them. And this can go on for years under the language in the intelligence bill. So that was one of two reasons why I voted against that bill. I did, however, move an amendment, which I would be prepared to support, and the first part of that amendment was a certification of emergency--in other words, the rationale for needing the subpoena, the fact that it would relate to some criteria with respect to cause, that it had a sign-off by the DOJ--this could be by an AUSA--and coming to some agreement on non-disclosure. Now, you asked for an administrative subpoena for certain specific documents that you are looking for. Let's say you go into a hotel and you say I need all of the records of everybody that is registered in this hotel. Now, in my view, you have to have cause, a rationale to do it, and that would be the certification. And the sign-off that the documents you are looking for really are relevant would be by an AUSA, similar to what a judge might do when called on a weekend with respect to a search warrant. Would you agree to these provisions being added to an administrative subpoena provision? Director Mueller. I would oppose it. Senator Feinstein. You would oppose it. You would not want any criteria at all? Director Mueller. I do not. Let me explain my thoughts on this, understanding your concerns. You raised a concern that persons whose records have been subpoenaed would not find out. Well, that may well be true also in a health care or a child pornography case. Senator Feinstein. My understanding is it is all discoverable in a court of law. Director Mueller. If there is a case. There may well not be a case. So there may be a case on either side. But I think I am not certain that I would give a lot of weight to that particular argument. The other argument with regard to certification of emergency-- Senator Feinstein. Before you do that, let me just discuss that with you. Therefore, the Government could, under foreign intelligence, begin to collect data on people which conceivably could last for a very long time. Director Mueller. Relevant to a particular investigation, absolutely, in the same way we collect data now as a national security letter, absolutely. But-- Senator Feinstein. But there is no criteria to show that-- Director Mueller. Relevant to an investigation-- Senator Feinstein.--it relates to an investigation. Director Mueller. Relevant to an investigation. And I will tell you, we had an example a couple of weeks ago in the wake of the bombings in the U.K. We had an example of a case in which an individual who was associated with the room that was believed to be the room in which the bombs were constructed, it was no longer in that area, but whenever we find out--I guess it was up in Leeds, in the wake of the July 7th bombings in the U.K. And we had an occasion in which we believe this individual had been in the United States, had gone to college in a State in the United States. The person had expertise in chemistry that would enable that person to construct these bombs. We went to the university with a national security letter. They declined to produce the documents pursuant to a national security letter. We had to, because there is a case that was aligned to it, we had to go back with a grand jury subpoena. Now, in my mind, we should not in that circumstance have to show somebody that this was an emergency. We should have been able to have a document, an administrative subpoena that we took to the university and got those records immediately. The other point I would make, if I could-- Senator Feinstein. Let me stop you. If you will, just allow me, because I think this is really important for many of us, Mr. Chairman. Why would you-- Chairman Specter. Senator Feinstein, take a few more minutes here. You have been at the core of this problem in both Intelligence and on this Committee. Senator Feinstein. Thank you very much. Why would you object to a DOJ sign-off, A, on emergency and, B, on the relationship to an investigation? I do not understand that. Director Mueller. Because I believe that the special agent in charge should be-- Senator Feinstein. It is not going to slow anything down. Director Mueller. There should be a level of review, and my belief is the review should be the special agent in charge. In this particular case, it resulted in a 2-day delay. And the other point that I would make with administrative subpoenas that is different with an NSL, and that is that the recipient of the subpoena has the right to go into court and challenge it. And so there is a process there that allows the recipient of the subpoena to go into court and challenge it before a Federal judge, and that in my mind is sufficient and adequate to assure that you will have sufficient review of that process. Senator Feinstein. Of course, with the administrative subpoena, that is not true. They do not know about it. The target does not know about it. Director Mueller. The third party does not, but the recipient-- Senator Feinstein. But the hotel might object, using that analogy, but the target never knows. Director Mueller. True. Senator Feinstein. So you could do school records, you could do business records, you could do anything on anybody, and that is my concern. All I am asking for is certification of emergency, sign-off, just as you would get a judge, a police officer would pick up the phone and say, look, this has happened, I need this warrant. A judge at night would sign off on it. See, the resistance to this makes me suspicious. Director Mueller. I would try to alleviate your suspicion. I will tell you, day in and day out, we get threat information, the Internet, letters, walk-ins, about a particular person at a particular place who is going to undertake a terrorist attack. In this day and age, in order to respond to every threat, we have to go out there, we have to get records of who is in a particular hotel room, who is utilizing a particular telephone, and the need for speed is such that it makes sense to us to have the ability of the SAC to sign off in this administrative subpoena and give us the flexibility and the speed in order to get those records we need to assure ourselves that the information we may have received from the Internet or from a walk-in is erroneous and that we have done everything we can to assure that there is no further terrorist attack. Senator Feinstein. All we would be requiring would be the phone call. But it would be some oversight over the FBI within the DOJ. You do not want that. You do not want even a phone call? Director Mueller. I believe oversight is appropriate with assuring that the upper levels of the FBI are required to sign off on the administrative subpoena. I believe that is sufficient. Senator Feinstein. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Specter. Thank you, Senator Feinstein. Have you convinced the Director? Senator Feinstein. I beg your pardon? Chairman Specter. Have you convinced the Director? Senator Feinstein. No, but then he has not convinced me either. [Laughter.] Chairman Specter. Senator Sessions. Senator Sessions. Senator Feinstein is such a good law enforcement supporter, I think she will be convinced before long. I am just convinced of it. This is an area that it baffles me. I agree with Senator Cornyn completely. Director Mueller, if the Drug Enforcement Administration is investigating a drug dealer, and they are believed to have checked in at a motel, can that Drug Enforcement officer get an administrative subpoena and get the records of the motel without declaring an emergency and without having the approval of the Department of Justice? Director Mueller. I believe so. I have to look at the specific statute, but I believe so. Senator Sessions. I believe so too. Can the IRS get people's records? Director Mueller. I believe that would be the case. Senator Sessions. They do not have to declare an emergency to get that. Director Mueller. No. Senator Sessions. But if an FBI agent is investigating a terrorist who may be staying at a motel and would like to verify that through motel records, they cannot get it without going to the FISA Court and getting an order that may take who knows how much time before it ever comes back to them; is that not right? Director Mueller. That is one of the avenues. We do have the NSL avenue, but that is one of the avenues. Senator Sessions. I just think this is unbelievable that we would provide all kinds of health care document that can be produced by the health care inspectors and other people that collect these documents and we cannot do it for our National security. Of course people collect the documents and the FBI maintains a file on it, but it does mean that they are going to produce that to the world or prosecute somebody who is innocent. I just really am concerned about that. I think this is a good thing. Would you think that if a FBI special agent in charge, which is a fairly august position at least in the eyes of those who work for that agent in charge, maybe send a copy of it to the U.S. Attorney or something if that would make people feel better, but to me we ought to have at least the powers that we have in other agencies of Government to investigate terrorism. Would you comment on that in general? Director Mueller. I would agree. I do believe if you have it in 300 plus other circumstances, including child pornography, IRS, and certain areas of the DEA, it would be not only appropriate but an important device for us to have as we address not just terrorism investigations, but counterintelligence investigation and investigation in which other countries, other people are seeking to steal our secrets and provide it either to groups outside the United States or other countries outside the United States. Senator Sessions. I would just share this thought. Historically, public documents outside the control of an individual--you have been a long time prosecutor. You have handled these things for many years. You are a professionals professional. You serve Republican and Democratic administrations. You have been United States Attorney in a high position in the Department of Justice. You have personally prosecuted lots and lots of cases. You understand what it is like in a courtroom. So my question is essentially, has it not always been the legal principle that with regard to documents outside your control, not the records you have in your house or in your desk at your office, but where you sign a motel receipt or a phone receipt, you do not have the same expectation of privacy in that document as you do something that is within your own personal sphere of control; is that correct? Director Mueller. That is accurate and the Supreme Court has so held. In fact, it was Sandra Day O'Connor in a case--I cannot remember the name off my head--that held that. Senator Sessions. So whenever you sign in at a motel, the clerk knows your name and what you filled out. Anybody that works at that motel you have an expectation has access to that document or else they would not have asked you to fill it out. It does not have the same degree of secrecy that you would if it were in a document maintained in your home. Director Mueller. Correct. Senator Sessions. So that is why we have always done that, used to in the past, motel records, even telephone records were turned over by these entities whenever you asked for them. Director Mueller. Grand jury subpoena generally, standard is relevance. Senator Sessions. But in the old days, when Dragnet and Jack Webb and all were investigating crimes, they would just go down to the motel and the guy would give it to them, right? Normally. Director Mueller. Normally, yes, way back when. Senator Sessions. Then they started being afraid they would be sued or something, so they will not give any records. They want a subpoena, and an administrative subpoena will allow for that and maintain a record of it. If they do not want to turn it over, they can file a motion to quash. Just one more thing if you would. I think the Nation has been watching the case involving Natalie Holloway in Aruba. Director Mueller. Yes, sir. Senator Sessions. She is a resident of my State. We have been concerned about that. I understand that the Aruban authorities in recent days have been more open with the FBI. I think you have personally made some effort on it. What can you tell us about the status of that? Director Mueller. Originally I did talk to the Attorney General down there, and we had a number of agents that were helping out, assisting in the initial stages of the investigation. We currently are offering expertise to the Aruban authorities to the extent that we can provide it, and in the last couple of days I believe we have been in discussions where we are offering and providing expertise to the Aruban authorities in hopes of having a break in that case. Senator Sessions. I certainly hope so. I have been told by the Prime Minister that he welcomes any assistance, so if there is not full cooperation, I hope you would let me know so we could approach that with him. Director Mueller. Yes, sir. Senator Sessions. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Specter. Thank you, Senator Sessions. We now have Chairman's call. Senator Feingold was here earlier but left, and Senator Durbin has been here longer. But we passed you by, Senator Feingold, so the tie goes to you. You are next in line. Senator Feingold. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Director, for not only being here today but for the time you spent with me in my office recently which was very helpful. I am pleased that there was a good exchange before I got here with Senator Feinstein about these administrative subpoenas. We talked about it at some length, and I do hope that you will continue to consider alternative ways that we can get at these problems which you explained very well to me in my office, but I really hope we do not have to have such broad powers used in order to get at these emergency situations. I would like to talk to you about the bill that the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously reported out of Committee last week reauthorizing the USA PATRIOT Act and making some changes to some of its most controversial provisions. As I stated last week, the compromise bill made some meaningful improvements but did not address everything that I believe needs to be revised. One provision that I would have liked to have seen in the bill is an ascertainment requirement for roving taps under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, just as there is now an ascertainment requirement in the criminal law for roving taps. It is a simple concept. It ensures, when the order itself does not designate the phone or the computer to be tapped, that the investigator actually has a sufficient basis for turning on a wiretap of a particular phone or a computer. It just ensures that innocent people's phone and computer conversations are not intercepted. Would you have an objection to including an ascertainment requirement for FISA roving taps? Director Mueller. I would have to look at that, Senator. I will tell you one of the things that is a challenge is this day and age is the swiftness with which some discard communications devices and replace them. I would certainly look at and consider any language that you would propose, but I expect to balance it against our need to move efficiently from communications device to communications device without always having to go back to the FISA Court on a daily or hourly basis. So I would have to look at it. Senator Feingold. I understand the need for that kind of balancing. I guess I would just like you to speculate on how this works, how an agent makes the decision of which phone or computer to tap. If you do not somehow ascertain that the target is using the phone or the computer, how do you decide which phone or computer to tap? Director Mueller. First of all there has to be the belief that the person is a agent of a foreign power or a terrorist so there has to be some initial threshold finding before you get to the device that is being used, and then the application would have some description of the device or types of devices or where they are being used or how they are being used in order for the court to be able to articulate an appropriate order to the facility that was providing the service. So inherent in that process is some degree of specification. Senator Feingold. This is the whole point of ascertainment. You do have a target out there. You have somebody you are concerned about. But how do you connect that person to the particular phone or computer without an ascertainment requirement? Director Mueller. It depends on the circumstances. I would have to look at your-- Senator Feingold. You have indicated a willingness to look at it. I think this is a gap that we need to change something about this in order to protect innocent people, and I hope we can work together on that. I would like to get your response to some testimony we heard at a PATRIOT Act hearing a few months ago. One of the witnesses at that hearing was Suzanne Spaulding, who has spent a good portion of her career working on intelligence issues at the CIA on two different commissions examining issues relating to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and in Congress where she had the privilege or working for our Chairman and on the Intelligence Committees. She explained why we have to be particularly careful in the oversight of intelligence investigation, and I want to read what she said. She said: ``Intelligence operations by necessity are often wide ranging rather than specifically focused, creating a greater likelihood that they will include information about ordinary law-abiding citizens. They are conducted in secret, which means abuses and mistakes may never be uncovered, and they lack safeguards against abuse that are present in the criminal context, where inappropriate behavior by the Government could jeopardize a prosecution.'' She continued: ``Because the safeguards against overreaching or abuse are weaker in intelligence operations than they are in criminal investigations, powers granted for intelligence investigation should be no broader or more inclusive than is absolutely necessary to meet the national security imperative and should be accomplished by rigorous oversight by Congress, and where appropriate, by the courts.'' Do you agree with the statement and sentiments that I just read? Director Mueller. She said an awful lot in that statement. There are certain aspects that I would agree with. I do believe that one has to be careful in establishing, for instance, an intelligence directorate or a national security service, that one has an objective for the collection of intelligence. I do believe that one of the reasons both the 9/11 Commission as well as the WMD Commission believe that the growth of a domestic intelligence capability in the United States should be in the FBI is because we have a lengthy detailed training with regard to the controls on our activity, whether it come from the Constitution, whether it come from statutes, whether it come from the AG guidelines. I do believe that one of the reasons that it is important for the FBI to undertake this capability is that I think we have a way of looking at sets of circumstances that is fact driven and is consistent with the Constitution, its applicable statutes and the AG guidelines. By the same token, I do believe that in order to address the threats of today and tomorrow in terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, there has to be a growth and some capabilities along the lines of administrative subpoenas to allow us to have access to the information that will alert us to the threats against the United States, with appropriate Congressional oversight. One of the things that I do believe is important for us and others is to see what you have done but not put impediments to action. In other words, in my mind, adding a test or issuing administrative subpoenas are impediments to swift action, where you can look after the fact and see if it was appropriate. And in my mind, as you build an intelligence capability, as you look at oversight, there needs to be oversight in the institution, in the Department of Justice, but the oversight should not inhibit the swift reaction to a set of circumstances that you just do not know where it is going to go and you have to act quickly. Senator Feingold. Thank you, Mr. Director. Chairman Specter. Thank you, Senator Feingold. Senator Durbin. Senator Durbin. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Director Mueller, for being here. I continue to have the greatest faith in you. I think you were an excellent choice by this administration. You have served our Nation well, and I would say the same for all the men and women who work at your Agency. We are fortunate as Americans to have people with your dedication to the common good and the protection of America. Thank you for your service. You have been very open with me. There have been times when we have had discussions where you were candid about your misfortunes and disappointments, and things that we had hoped would turn out better. So please take whatever I ask in that context. I respect you very much for your public service. Let me go if I can to the underlying--I have two questions, and I will state them both though they are unrelated, because I will run out of time otherwise. The first is this. We have had several colleagues talk about the PATRIOT Act. I voted for the PATRIOT Act. It was a strong bipartisan vote for passage of it, and I commend the Chairman and other members of the Committee. Our proposed revisions of the PATRIOT Act passed 18 to nothing on a strong bipartisan roll call, and that is exactly the way it should be. I think we found the right balance between security and liberty in what we have come up with to revise the PATRIOT Act. If you will listen to the questions of my colleagues and mine, you will understand there is still an underlying concern that maybe we have gone too far in some specific areas of the PATRIOT Act, gone too far in compromising our basic rights and liberties as individual citizens. The reason I raised that--we are not going to resolve that today, not likely we will at any time in the near future. But the basis for the PATRIOT Act is to give the Government the authority it needs to collect enough information, intelligence, to protect us from terrorism, and crime for that matter, but protect us from terrorism. What troubles me is as we debate about how wide we are going to open the top of this funnel to collect information, once collected, that information passes through a very narrow chute when it comes to the analysis of the information, the collection, the analysis of that information and the sharing of that information, and it is at its narrowest point in your Agency at this moment. I think it is reflected in the fact first of the information technology problems which beset this Agency for a decade or more. According to Judge Webster, you are facing an obsolete system today at the FBI. It is clear from all analysis that it will take as long as 3\1/2\ years from now to complete the Sentinel system which is the modernization of your information technology, which means from start to finish, 9/11 to completion of the system, 8 years, 8 years. Secondly, the Inspector General talks about the backlog of collected counterintelligence and counterterrorism audio, that we still have more than one-fourth of that that goes unevaluated, unreviewed. Even as we collect more and more information we still do not have the people to review it to determine what is important there to keep us safe. 10 years to coordinate our fingerprint collection from start to finish when the Federal Government said to the then Immigration Naturalization Service and the FBI, can you collect the same sets of fingerprints so you can share this information? Maybe at the end of 10 years they will have been able to accomplish that simple task. Then of course the information that will come out in this hearing, that about one out of five of your intelligence analysts plan to leave within the next 5 years. So when you put all this together, my basic question to you is one that my former Congressional colleague and Commissioner of 9/11, Mr. Hamilton, is going to raise later on. If it is going to take us another 3\1/2\ years to get all this together, can we afford to wait? Can we say that that is an acceptable timeline? Is there anything you can do or we can do to speed this up and to make certain that intelligence gathering analysis and collection is done in a more timely fashion? The second question, totally unrelated, goes to the administration's interrogation techniques. These have been extremely controversial. The idea that we would change our approach in interrogating prisoners and detainees in the war on terrorism has been the subject of a lot of debate, dissension from people like Secretary of State Colin Powell, JAG lawyers, an amendment pending on the floor yesterday from Senator McCain, Senator Graham and Senator Warner about whether or not we ought to be more explicit in saying the United States will not engage in cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners. Your FBI agents have been some of the most outspoken critics of this administration's interrogation techniques, saying in memos that we have received that have been declassified, that first, torture is ineffective. A person in pain will say anything to escape the pain. Secondly, that the techniques that are being employed go too far. Some of your FBI officials have said they are not permitted by the U.S. Constitution. Others have said that they are harsh techniques that do not produce good intelligence. My question to you is this. I want to commend the FBI for standing up for American values. I think you are recognized as the Agency that probably has been the premiere agency in effective interrogation techniques. What has been your reaction to the interrogation techniques of this administration, the critique of your agents, and to your knowledge, have the Defense Department's interrogation changed because of FBI oversight and observations of excesses? Director Mueller. Let me start on the delay that it is going to take in various areas to get where we want to be. I do not see an endpoint. Information technology has to grow month by month, year by year. Sentinel now is going to be in four stages. We have 100 different programs, different systems, many of which are obsolete. You have to do a triage on those systems to put into place new systems that will give you the same information but in different ways. One of the things that people do not recognize, that it was a huge advance for us to have everybody with the most modern computers, to have the networks in place, the modern networks, and to have the database structures in place that will enable us to share that information. So I see Sentinel as one piece of a process where it is going to be in four stages. We get returns 12 months from December, hopefully. I will say ``hopefully'' given my experiences. And then several months or a year afterwards the next iteration of it. We tend to look at this as one project, look at it as a whole, but there are other things that will be happening at the same time, and it is an iterative process. What we have done in my mind is put into place the capability to manage this process as a large corporation, modern corporation would. When it comes to human resources, what we need to do is put into place the same capabilities that a large corporation would have in order to bring people on board to recruit them, to hire them, to train them and to retain them. We are putting in place the, redoing the infrastructure to put in place a modern human capital capability that will enable us to do this down the road. I see putting into place these building blocks that will enable us in these other areas, besides just investigation, besides just intelligence gathering, but enable us to conduct these two activities much more effectively and efficiently than we have done in the past. But it is a continuous iterative process. So we will have returns far before 2009 or 2011 or 2015, but you get to 2009, the process and the capability still has to be there to build. With regard to the question in terms of the interrogation techniques, I have not been-- Senator Durbin. If I could ask you one last follow-up on the-- Chairman Specter. Senator Durbin, you are three-quarter minutes over. How much more time will you need? Senator Durbin. I was living by the Feinstein rule, but the Durbin rule is a much shorter one, so whatever you can say I would appreciate. Chairman Specter. You are past the Feinstein rule, Senator Durbin, but my question pending is how much more time do you need? Senator Durbin. Just if he could answer the last question. Chairman Specter. Okay, fine. Go ahead, Director Mueller. Director Mueller. Our agents have followed the protocols that have established in the Bureau over a period of time. To the extent that we have had information brought to our attention, where we believe that matters should be taken up by other authorities, we have provided that information to the Department of Defense the follow up on. Senator Durbin. I am sorry. I did not understand your response. Director Mueller. Where we have information relating to standards of interrogation that we did not believe may be appropriate, we have taken those pieces of information and provided them to the DOD to review and to address. Senator Durbin. If I had time, I would ask you whether they had changed their interrogation techniques as a result. Chairman Specter. Senator Durbin, do you have another question? Go ahead. Senator Durbin. That is my last question. Director Mueller. I do believe they have, but I am not privy myself to the changes and the developments in that regard, but I believe they have. Chairman Specter. Senator Durbin, you did not have another question. Director Mueller just had another answer. Senator Kohl. Senator Kohl. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Director Mueller, there was a story in the New York Times the other day about how fearful Londoners are to ride the subway. My question is, why should citizens here in our country feel any safer in the subways of America? What can you tell the American people about our law enforcement officers today and the system that we have going that would get them to feel that law enforcement here is better than it was in London, and that they should not be as fearful as Londoners are today? Director Mueller. Allow me to say I happened to be on a pre-scheduled trip in London last week, and I can tell you the Londoners go about their business the next day. They have been through this before. The fact that there was a second wave certainly would cause some concern, I will tell you that the Londoners are back in those subways. The ridership was not down much at all, and if it was down, it was down a day and then was back up a day afterwards. We have, I believe, in the United States, together with Department of Homeland Security, the State and local law enforcement authorities, through our joint terrorism task forces, through our relationships, through understanding the threats to our communities including our subways, have worked together to do what we can to protect the subways, to do what we can to protect the trains, and there probably is more that can be done. The fact of the matter is, you can never protect it 100 percent. You can never protect it 100 percent. And so you want to minimize, reduce those risks. We are doing everything we can to minimize, reduce those risks. Throughout the United States we are sitting side by side with State and local law enforcement, understanding what is in the community, the threats in the community, and when we see a threat in the community, we have moved quickly I believe to address those threats either by prosecuting the individuals on material support where it is appropriate, prosecuting the individuals for other criminal offenses where it is appropriate, or in other case where the person is here illegally, deporting the person where it is appropriate. Senator Kohl. You feel that people in our country have legitimate reasons to feel safer because of the measures that we take, that you take with your Department, and Homeland Security takes, then perhaps people in London? Director Mueller. I think that it is just not Homeland Security, it is not just the FBI, it is other Federal agencies, it is State and local law enforcement, and it is our intelligence community operatives overseas that have had as much or an effect in terms of disabling al Qaeda as any entity in the United States, as I pointed out before. Detaining and removing from the battlefield the leaders of al Qaeda were done by our sister agencies, and they have done a fantastic job and that has made us safer. I always say it has made us safer, not safe. Senator Kohl. Speaking about al Qaeda, how would you assess the level of threat that al Qaeda poses today? Is it closer to what the administration officials have repeatedly been telling the American public, or closer to the assessment of other terrorism and intelligence experts who believe that they are still today coordinating attacks as the London attack? Director Mueller. I think most people would agree that there are a number of instances in the past where individuals who have an ideological compatibility with the violent extremism articulated by bin Laden have come together to undertake attacks. The extent of the direction from afar is different depending on the attacks. It may be financial support. It may be information and capabilities in manufacturing devices. But you have to look at each incident to determine to what extent there was support from outside the place in which the incident occurred, and to what extent that can be tied to a particular person who is known to be in the inner circle of al Qaeda, and that is difficult to do. I will say, as I was saying before, I think we are a lot safer, certainly a lot safer than we were before September 11th, but the fact of the matter is, while we are a lot safer, you cannot 100 percent guarantee there will not be another terrorist attack. Senator Kohl. What makes it so terribly difficult for us to capture Osama bin Laden? Director Mueller. I would hesitate to speculate that. That probably should be directed to others in the intelligence community, because I am somewhat familiar with the terrain and the difficulty in operating in the terrain where he is believed to be. I am somewhat familiar with the difficulties in identifying with specificity where he is, but I am certainly no expert in that. Senator Kohl. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Specter. Thank you very much, Senator Kohl. Senator Biden. Senator Biden. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I apologize, I had to be in Delaware this morning at the State Fair to speak to the agricultural community, and I apologize for being late, Director. Let me begin by thanking you. I think you are doing a heck of a job, and I think you are doing a heck of a job under very, very difficult circumstance, and all of us so-called policymakers and administrations and Congress, we all like finding somebody else to blame for some of our problems, and your Agency has been I think the target of some criticism I do not think it has deserved. I would like to make one broad statement and then ask you to respond to a few specifics. It is sort of like we have had a perfect storm occurring here. We had a decision made based upon--and I am not asking you to comment--but a decision, right or wrong, to end the COPS program, drastically cut the aid to local law enforcement for no hiring and for a lot of other things. We were providing over $2.4 billion in local law enforcement aid. Now we are down to $167 million. The aid that goes through Homeland Security, none of that is allowed to be used for hiring personnel, and it is less than targeted. You have had enormous additional responsibility placed upon you in the counterterrorism area, enormous. You have justifiably and understandably had to tell local law enforcement, overstating it to make a point, we do not do bank robberies or interstate car theft any more; you guys are on your own. Violent crime task forces have had to be curtailed. It is not a criticism, it is an observation. I do not know how you could do it with the number of agents you have. My recollection--and I am sure they are in my notes here--I do not recall them exactly, but the total increase in the number of agents is de minimis since 9/11, and at the same time we are getting reports--and I am going to ask you to comment on this-- from the Counterterrorism Center, John Brennan, and many others because all of us have been dealing with this in other capacities beyond this issue, that a greater threat is homegrown terrorism, not importation. I do not know if that is true. I am going to ask you whether you agree with that. The end result of all of this is, it seems to me--and I know you are in a tough spot; I do not know what your answer would be. I hope it would be candid or you would just demur, but not tell me something that is not--and that is, I think you need 1,000 more agents. I am not being facetious. I think you need 1,000 more agents. I think we have to reconstitute the Violent Crime Task Force. I think you have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. I think we cannot--not the you are leaving it hanging, but you are not able to assist locals like you were before. With all your intelligence work, and pray God--I see the Co-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission is here--pray God these fixes will be successful. But it is more likely to be some local cop coming from the Dunkin Donuts Shop, going behind a super mall in my State or yours, that detects a guy climbing out of a dumpster, who has just put Sarin gas in the ventilation system. It is not going to be a guy with night vision goggles, and you are not going to be able to all the time have the intelligence to anticipate where this is going to occur. And I add one last factor. I think it is close to politically--if there is such a phrase--criminal for us to not have provided additional security for rail. We are nowhere near safer, notwithstanding what the great Director says. All I ask you to do is leave here, go get in the train that the Chairman and I get on as it takes out Union Station, go to the back window, look out the window. Tell me how many cops you see. Tell me whether you see any protection of the switching devices. Tell me if you see a single camera. Tell me whether you see anything, anything, anything. More people visit that facility than any other facility in Washington. This morning there were more people sitting in an aluminum tube underneath the tunnels of New York City than in 7 full 747s, virtually no ventilation I say to the Chairman of the Commission, no lighting, no escape of any consequence, tunnels built in 1917. Go through the Baltimore tunnel built in 1869, no ventilation, no lighting, no escape under the harbor. This is criminal. Now, it is none of your responsibility, Director, but if you add all these things up, it seems to me you need more resources. Are you able to do what you think you need to do with the roughly--what do you have now, about 14,000? Director Mueller. We are up to 12,500 I think. Senator Biden. 12,500. Director Mueller. Approximately. Senator Biden. Is that enough? Director Mueller. Well, we have had to prioritize. We have been working, for instance, with the Inspector General's Office to determine where there have been--since we have reprioritized and made our first priority counterterrorism, making certain that we follow every counterterrorism lead, there are areas in which we have not been as active as we have been in the past. I believe that the studies will show that there has been a picking up of the slack by the DEA in drug cases, as well as State and local law enforcement. We still will, in isolated circumstances, do bank robberies, where they are armed bank robberies, where we can add something. But where we do not add something to the table, we have had to prioritize and focus our efforts, and I think we are doing a fairly good job on it. There is one area in which I believe we will have to look at in the future, given what I believe the IG report may come out with, and that is when it comes to smaller white-collar criminal cases, with the Enron cases, with the Qwest cases, with all of those cases we have had to put substantial resources on the larger white-collar criminal cases, focusing on those, and the smaller white-collar criminal cases which we have done in the past, we are not doing so much of, and that is an area where I think there is a gap that we will have to look to. We have in front of Congress the 2006 budget, where we are receiving additional resources. My expectation is I will ask for additional resources in 2007. I will tell you that we have had to reprioritize and we will continue to have to do that, but that is not all together bad either, because we should use our unique capabilities where they are necessary, and not replicate the capabilities of others because we like doing it. Senator Biden. May I have 30 seconds more, Mr. Chairman, to make a brief comment? Chairman Specter. Go ahead, Senator Biden. Senator Biden. My dad used to say, if everything is equally important to you, nothing is important to you. You are being asked to prioritize and you are put in a tough spot. I would like to throw you in the briar patch. I believe it is absolutely irresponsible for us not to be increasing substantially the FBI, substantially the aid for transit in this country, and substantially local law enforcement. And for the President to tell me there is a priority on a tax cut, tell me there is a priority on anything else, I find irresponsible. If you cannot walk your streets, if you cannot be safe, if you cannot provide for a better shot at dealing with terror, then it seems to me none of your other liberties from education to highways makes any sense. I thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to try very hard to throw you in the briar patch. Chairman Specter. Thank you, Senator Biden. Director Mueller, just a couple of more questions before turning to the second panel with respect to your comments on the PATRIOT Act. We have made a fair number of changes to accommodate what the FBI have said after the Specter-Feinstein bill was introduced. We have eliminated the reporting on FISA, on the pen register because you thought that was troublesome. We have had sunsets on some of the provisions and not on other provisions. As to the roving wiretap, we have inserted a requirement to have some idea as to who is the subject, so you just do not have John Doe, and it is consistent with your prior representations that even when a target's identity is unknown, you must have significant information about the person before initiating a roving wiretap. We have omitted the mail cover, but you did not even ask for the mail cover, which is an expansion of authority, which is in the Intelligence Committee. That is correct, is it not, Director Mueller, that you did not ask for the mail cover? Director Mueller. Did not. That does not mean, however, that we would not like to at least have it. We did not request it, but in reviewing that bill, it is something that would be beneficial because it would enable us to have more authority over obtaining the mail cover information that we currently have, but I did not ask for it, you are right, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Specter. Director Mueller, we would have to guess about what you wanted if we were to include things you did not ask for. And then on the scale of what is really necessary, we obviously weigh pretty critically what you have not asked for as not being as important as what you have asked for, pretty fundamental analysis. With respect to section 215, we have inserted language on relevancy which meets the grand jury standards. You had commented that you do not have to show probable cause to get a grand jury subpoena, which you are exactly right. The grand jury has a proceeding which seeks to establish probable cause. On the requirements of section 215, we have said that there ought to be a statement of facts showing ``reasonable grounds to believe that the records or other things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation.'' The PATRIOT Act currently has a relevancy standard, but does not have any elaboration as to what that means. We have a number of prosecutors on the Committee who dealt with probable cause, and it is a lower standard. It is a standard, as I have said on RT enterprises. So what we have tried to do is to have a balance. As you well know, the PATRIOT Act has been challenged from both the right and the left, a lot of concern about civil liberties, a lot of concern about terrorism, and our Committee has tried to strike a balance. We had a remarkable result in getting all 18 Committee Members to agree, including the one Senator on a 99-1 vote in 2001, who did not favor it, and I am advised this morning that the two leaders are what we call shopping unanimous consent request, because it appears that the bill which the Senate Committee turned out has met with almost universal approbation. Let me give you one last chance to register whatever complaints you have as to what you think ought to be changed from the bill which passed out of our Committee. Director Mueller. Let me thank you for all the work that has been done on the PATRIOT Act. This Committee and Congress as a whole, I saw some time ago a fairly broad gap, and I think that has been closed. It is very narrow at this point. There is one area in which-- Chairman Specter. Very narrow at this point, a very narrow gap at this point? Director Mueller. Very narrow at this point, very narrow. Chairman Specter. Good. Director Mueller. There is one area under 215 where we would agree with the relevance standard, but there is an additional phrase in there--and I would have to get back to you on this--that ties it to an agent of a foreign power, and the relevance standard, given our--well, the relevance standard which we think is appropriate, should not be limited by a further showing of relating to an agent of a foreign power. I would have to get you the specific write-up on that phraseology, but that is the one piece that I think is still outstanding that we have some concern about. If you allow me just for a second to check. There is one other problem that I-- Chairman Specter. The provisions that you may be referring to, Director Mueller, is the language pertains to a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power relevant to the activities of a suspected agent of a foreign power who was subject of such authorized investigation, or pertaining to an individual in contact with or known to a suspected agent of a foreign power. Director Mueller. In our minds it should be relevant to an investigation as opposed to having to identify a particular person. Chairman Specter. If that is the only gap we have, provide additional information because we will be going to conference with the House and we want to very, very carefully consider any request you have. Director Mueller. Thank you very much. Thank you for that opportunity. We will do so. I appreciate it. Chairman Specter. Director Mueller, thank you for two hours plus. It is a long session, but you saw a lot of interest here by the Members. We know how busy you are, so when we have you at the witness table, we like to ask you lots of questions. There is one more that I told you I was going to ask you, and that is about the Journalist Privilege Statute. Deputy Attorney General Comey did not come in when we had that hearing last Wednesday, and we had given you notice in advance that this would be an opportunity for the administration to state whatever objections the administration has to that proposed legislation. So now is the time. Director Mueller. If I could, I have not been involved in discussions there. I know Deputy Attorney General Comey filed a statement in opposition to the legislation, and I am sure as a representative of the Department of Justice and the administration, that statement should stand as the policy, or the views, I should say, of the Department of Justice on that legislation. Senator Leahy. Mr. Chairman, if I could? Chairman Specter. Senator Leahy. Senator Leahy. I was far from satisfied with Mr. Comey's statement. I think part of it looked like it was prepared prior to some of the changes made and some of the legislation. I am very disappointed. This is not directed at you, Director Mueller, and your answer is the only one you can give I think under the circumstances, but I was very disappointed that Mr. Comey did not testify. I think this whole question of a shield law, however you describe it, is an important one. It is one that one way or the other the Congress is going to wrestle with. I would hope that we have Mr. Comey up here to testify, or the Attorney General, to testify on this because it is not fair to put you in the position to have to. I think at some point we are going to have to because there is going to be legislation that will be coming forward on a shield law, and a lot of us would like direction more than a out-of-date statement, with almost like a note saying, oh, by the way, I cannot show up. That is not at you. I am just saying that we have to have some. Director Mueller. I am not certain what iterations the legislation has gone through the committees. I was alerted to the fact that I would be asked the question, and a statement would stand as the position of the Department. I will say that one of the concerns that I will voice here, I think is a very valid concern, is that one would not want to have a mini-trial every time you need information from somebody associated with some form of the media, whether it be television or the newsprint or what-have-you. So in looking over it briefly and not having spent any time on it, that is something that jumped out at me as a concern that we would have or I would have in terms of conducting investigations. But I preface this, or I guess add to it the fact that I have not had an opportunity to review the legislation itself. I have had an opportunity to look at the statement of Mr. Comey, and that is something that stuck out at me as something that I think we would be validly concerned about. Chairman Specter. Thank you very much, Director Mueller. Director Mueller. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Mr. Mueller appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Specter. We will turn now to our second panel. Inspector General Glenn Fine of the Department of Justice; former Congressman Lee Hamilton; former FBI/CIA Director William Webster; and Program Manager, John Russack, of the Information Sharing Environment, Director of National Intelligence. Thank you for joining us gentleman, and thank you very much for your patience. Our first witness is Inspector General Glenn Fine, has an outstanding academic background, magna cum laude from Harvard, Rhodes scholar, BA and MA degrees from Oxford, law degree from Harvard. Prior to joining the Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General, Mr. Fine practices as an attorney specializing in labor and employment law. In 1995 he joined the Department of Justice and served in varying positions, including Special Counsel to the Inspector General, Director of OIG Special Investigations, and Acting Inspector General. Thank you for joining us, Mr. Fine, and as you know, we have 5-minute rounds, and then 5-minute rounds of questioning. Thank you for being here, and we look forward to your testimony. STATEMENT OF GLENN A. FINE, INSPECTOR GENERAL, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, WASHINGTON, D.C. Mr. Fine. Mr. Chairman, Senator Leahy, Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify regarding the oversight work of the Office of the Inspector General within the FBI. In my written statement I provide a summary of the findings of several recent OIG reports, such as reviews of FBI intelligence analysts, FBI information technology, the Terrorist Screening Center, and intelligence information related to the September 11th attacks. I also describe several ongoing OIG reviews in the FBI of interest to the Committee, such as the FBI's compliance with the Attorney General's investigative guidelines, the FBI's handling of the Brandon Mayfield case, and the FBI's observations of alleged mistreatment of detainees at military detention facilities. In my testimony this morning I would like to provide observations on the FBI's transformation and key challenges it faces, and briefly summarize the findings of an OIG report released today that examines the FBI's foreign language translation program. The FBI is undergoing significant changes since the September 11th terrorist attacks. Despite shortcomings we have found in some FBI programs, I believe that Director Mueller is moving the FBI in the right direction, but there are areas in the FBI in need of significant improvement. The first is the urgent need to upgrade the FBI's information technology. Without adequate information technology, FBI employees will not be able to perform their jobs as fully and effectively as they should. Second, our reviews have found that the FBI is affected by high turnover and key positions at headquarters and in field offices. For example, in the past, rapid turnover in IT positions hurt the FBI's ability to manage its information technology modernization projects. A third critical challenge facing the FBI is its need to effectively and efficiently share intelligence and law enforcement information, both within the FBI and with its law enforcement and intelligence partners. Fourth, the FBI must value to a greater degree FBI staff with technical skills. While the FBI's culture is changing, more needs to be done to support the work of intelligence analysts, scientists, linguists and other staff who are critical to meeting the FBI's changing mission. Fifth, the FBI previously exhibited an insular attitude with an aversion to oversight. In the last several years the FBI has opened itself to outside scrutiny from the OIG as well as other groups. While not everyone in the FBI has welcomed such change, I believe the Director, senior FBI leadership, and many FBI employees recognize the benefits of this oversight. I would like to now turn to the OIG report regarding the FBI's foreign language translation program. In July 2004 the OIG completed an audit which found that the FBI's collection of counterterrorism and counterintelligence audio material had outpaced its translation capabilities. The audit also found that the FBI had difficulty in filling its need for additional linguists. Because of the importance of these issues, the OIG conducted a follow-up review this year to assess the progress of the FBI's translation program. Our follow-up review concluded that the FBI has taken important steps to address recommendations from our previous report, and has made progress in improving its translation program. However, we found that key deficiencies remain, including a continuing backlog of unreviewed counterterrorism and counterintelligence materials. For example, the FBI estimated that its counterterrorism audio backlog was 4,086 hours as of April 2004. In this follow-up review we found that the counterterrorism audio backlog had doubled to 8,354 hours. Although that is a small percentage of total counterterrorism audio collections, the FBI has no assurance that these materials do not contain important counterterrorism information unless they are reviewed and translated. We also attempted to determine the priority of the counterterrorism material that was not reviewed. We found that none of the counterterrorism audio backlog was in the highest of the FBI's five priority levels, that almost all of the backlog was in cases designated in the second and third highest priority levels. With respect to counterintelligence collections, the amount of unreviewed material is much larger and has also increased since our previous report. Our review also found that a continuing issue for the FBI is the time it takes to hire contract linguists. According to even the FBI's statistics, the average time to hire a FBI contract linguist has increased from 13 months to 14 months. In sum, our follow-up review found that the FBI has made progress in improving the operations of its translation program, but key deficiencies remain. While I believe the FBI is moving in the right direction, it needs to make further progress in its foreign language program as well as in other critical areas. To assist in these challenges the FBI will continue to conduct reviews in these important FBI programs. That concludes my statement and I would be pleased to answer any questions. [The prepared statement of Mr. Fine appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Specter. Thank you very much, Inspector General Fine. I will not turn to former Congressman Lee Hamilton, a colleague on the Hill with both Senator Leahy and myself for many years. He has served some 34 years in the Congress before undertaking activities with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Congressman Hamilton's resume is so long, it is difficult not to get lost in it. While a member of the House of Representatives for some 34 years, he was Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Chair of the Joint Economic Committee, Chair of the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress, and without objection, we will put a full copy of his resume into the record because it is very long. He was Co-Chair with former Senator Howard Baker on the Baker-Hamilton Commission to investigate security lapses at Los Alamos, and his most recent post was Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission which did such an extraordinary job in leading to the revisions of our National intelligence structure. A graduate of DePauw University, Indiana University School of Law, attended the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. While this is the last line, it may be the most important, former high school and college basketball star and a member of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, which is no mean accomplishment. Thank you for joining us, Congressman Hamilton, and we look forward to your testimony. STATEMENT OF LEE H. HAMILTON, PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR, WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS, WASHINGTON, D.C. Mr. Hamilton. Thank you, Chairman Specter. Of course the reason I was elected 34 times was that I was in the Basketball Hall of Fame. I think that was the chief reason. [Laughter.] Mr. Hamilton. Chairman Specter and Senator Leahy, I am delighted to be with you this morning. I think the best thing for me to do is start with my conclusion, and that is simply to say that on the 9/11 Commission we said that our recommendation was to leave counterterrorism intelligence collection in the United States with the FBI, and that that assessment requires that the FBI make an all-out effort to institutionalize change, and if it does that, it can do the job. We still hold to that assessment. We believe that Director Mueller is making a very strong effort to effect change. We believe the obstacles are immense. We applaud the progress that he has made. We urge him to forge ahead, and we want to give him our support so that he can get the job done. We want to try to be helpful and constructive. We believe that the FBI has been reforming itself for 4 years, and everybody recognizes, as does this Committee for sure, there are still significant deficiencies. I will mention then in just a moment. It is fair, however, to ask the FBI how long is it going to take to make these reforms? Director Mueller's timeframe for effecting reform at the FBI is not, should not be infinite. The United States has not been attacked at home since 9/11, but we all understand the threat of terrorism is very real. It is also true that the threat to reform is real. The threat is inertia and complacency. We need to maintain a sense of urgency to push the reform forward as quickly as possible. I believe this Committee has a very important job to do with its expertise in providing oversight to the Director, and I am pleased to see you had this hearing this morning. Let me identify very quickly for you the areas that I think need real emphasis with regard to the FBI's progress, and that you need to watch carefully. One of course, as you have heard about already, that is the question of analysis. The FBI must have a strong analytical capability to drive and to focus its work. The traditional division between the agent and the non- agent--and we all know that in the past being an agent puts you in a very superior position in the FBI. The FBI, however, now, with its new function needs to have the best possible analysis. The collection of intelligence is not worthy very much if it is not adequately translated into realistic threat assignments. The FBI did not perform that job prior to 9/11. Doing the job well has to be a priority. You cannot decide what actions to take, you cannot decide what priorities to make, if you cannot assess the nature of the threat. So the Bureau needs to become a premiere agency for analysis. In order to do that it has to give analytical capability the attention and respect that it deserves. There have been some problems, as have been cited for this Committee, with regard to attrition rate for analysts and many other things. A second point is information sharing. The biggest single impediment to all source analysis is the resistance to sharing information. We found of course that sharing the right information with the right people in a timely fashion is critical, and we again, and again, in the report stress the necessity of sharing intelligence. Now, there are a number of barriers to that, and so breaking down those barriers has to be a very high priority. You have to motive institutions and you have to motivate individuals to share information. Congress created this position of the Program Manager--he is sitting with us this morning--for Counterterrorism Information, sharing across the Federal Government and with State and local agencies, and also as appropriate with the private sector. But if you are going to be effective in sharing information, you have to have leadership at the top. The success of information sharing needs the personal attention and the support of the Director of the FBI. It needs the personal support and direction of the Director of National Intelligence, and it needs the personal attention and support of the President of the United States. Only the President can lead a Government-wide effort to bring national security institutions into the information revolution, and that is absolutely critical if you are going to have the kind of information and the kind of analysis of the information that is necessary to stop terrorism. Two or three other matters and I will conclude. FBI management. Obviously there has to be greater stability in management. Mr. Chairman, you cited the figures early on. Another point is the relationship between the National Security Service and the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI. The FBI is shifting to an all together different paradigm to prevent counterterrorism, and it has to be institutionalized. The WMD Commission recommended the National Security Service. That is a good recommendation because it makes permanent some of the reforms that we have been talking about. I see my time is concluding. Let me just say very quickly that the FBI has to have strong relations with the CIA. The relationship between the two has to be seamless. We must not tolerate any more failures to share databases on terrorists between agencies. The FBI relationship with foreign and domestic intelligence services is critical and has to be strengthened, and setting priorities for State and local government is important as well. Often I have encountered sheriffs and policemen who say to me, in this whole effort of counterterrorism, what am I looking for? What am I trying to get from the FBI? What does the FBI want from me? The idea is that the FBI of course has to build a reciprocal relationship. Finally, let me say the whole question of civil liberties-- you have been talking about that very much this morning--but I believe it is important for the Director of the FBI, Mr. Mueller, for Mr. Negroponte and others in leadership to say loudly and clearly by word and deed on law enforcement, terrorism prevention and also on the protection of civil liberties, and that becomes an immensely important part of the so-called war on terror. I have gone over things very, very quickly, Mr. Chairman. I will be glad to elaborate on them, and of course I ask that my statement be submitted into the record. Chairman Specter. Without objection, Congressman Hamilton, your full statement will be made a part of the record. [The prepared statement of Mr. Hamilton appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Specter. We now turn to Judge William Webster, who has had a storied career, a Federal Judge in the District Court in Missouri, Court of Appeals Judge for the Eighth Circuit, Director of the FBI, Director of the CIA. We will put into the record his very long list of other public accomplishments. Amherst College graduate, law degree from Washington University. A frequent visitor to the Judiciary Committee over the year. Thank you for joining us, Judge Webster, and the floor is yours. STATEMENT OF WILLIAM H. WEBSTER, PARTNER, MILBANK, TWEED, HADLEY & McCLOY, LLP, WASHINGTON, D.C. Mr. Webster. Thank you, Chairman Specter, Senator Leahy. Thank you for the privilege of appearing before you this morning to discuss generally the role of the FBI in collecting, assessing, data mining and sharing intelligence of interest to many agencies, Federal, State and local, who have been waging the battle against terrorism, especially since the tragedy of 9/11 almost 4 years ago. While the emphasis is on an examination of progress made since 9/11, I think, if you will permit me, some reminders of an earlier period are in order in order to add some context to what has become the FBI's response to terrorism. I took office as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in February 1978 in the wake of the investigations which led to the Church and Pike Committee reports. When I called on Vice President Mondale as a new Director, he presented me with copies of both reports and admonished me to read them carefully. These reports contained strong recommendations against the CIA engaging in activities inside the United States, and discouraged the FBI from engaging in operational activities abroad. The predominant restrictions related to ``need to know,'' and that was the hallmark. In the 14 years that I served first as the Director of the FBI and then as Director of Central Intelligence, the guidance that we received from the Department of Justice and our own legal counsel was strongly influenced by those two Congressional documents. A reasonable shorthand would be: Stay away from each other. Beware of using evidence developed through intelligence sources in criminal investigation, and on it went. But of course there were exceptions, and important cooperation did occur in the worldwide struggle against terrorism. For example, in 1987 a notorious terrorist, Fawaz Younis, was located in Cyprus after he had left his Sudanese sanctuary. The CIA managed to lure him into open waters, where a U.S. Naval vessel was waiting just over the horizon. The arrest was effected by FBI special agents, and he was brought to the United States where he was tried and convicted. There are other examples, but of course they were largely overseas, but I mention the fact that it is not true that the FBI and the CIA could not, when called upon to do so, work closely and successfully together. In 1987 when I was Director of Central Intelligence, I signed a memorandum of understanding with the Director of the FBI, following the unfortunate Edward Howard investigation in which the CIA agreed to notify the FBI promptly whenever one of its employees became a suspect on national security issues. This is a recurring theme, getting the two organizations together in a timely way in order to do good work. The adoption of the PATRIOT Act following the 9/11 tragedy, shifted the emphasis to ``need to share.'' It was like a large ship changing course against the tides of Church and Pike. Getting the word out and understood was doable, but not an easy task. Moreover, the archaic condition of the Bureau's electronic case management system, designed during the Church- Pike Committee days, did not lend itself readily to tasking from other agencies of the intelligence community. Efforts to patch what is now a 14-year-old mainframe has been both expensive and frustrating. I put this right at the top of problems affecting information sharing by the FBI with other agencies. When I chaired a special commission to examine the internal security provisions of the FBI in the wake of the arrest and conviction of Robert Hanssen in 2001, we filed four classified appendices to our report relating to these computer deficiencies. I believe that more than patchwork, however expensive, is absolutely required so that the FBI can fulfill its mandate of sharing the vast amounts of intelligence which can be mined from its stored data. Although I have seen reports to the contrary, I believe it is unfair to attribute problems and information sharing to cultural attitudes. I believe they are more rightly attributed to the understandings that flowed from the Church and Pike Committee reports and were underscored and supported by departmental guidance and Congressional opposition to domestic intelligence sharing. In my 9 years at the FBI I found the men and women ready to respond to new directions that did not embroil them in unfair charges or put their careers at risk. The various joint projects, such as counterterrorist centers, brought the CIA and the FBI closer together in a common cause. Still, in my view, ``need to share'' is not a total substitute for ``need to know.'' Sources and methods must be protected and honored if law enforcement and intelligence agencies are to be effective in recruiting and utilizing information obtained at great risk from such sources. There also continues to exist the problem of the third agency rule, under which the FBI or the CIA receives sensitive information from the intelligence agency of another country on condition that it not be shared outside the agency to whom it is presented. I see that my time is expiring if not expired, and I will try to be fast about this, but I am currently serving as Vice Chairman of the Advisory Council on Homeland Security, an organization established by President Bush shortly after the 9/ 11 tragedy, and with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, we have been directed to work closely with the Secretary of Homeland Security, one of the challenges to make important sensitive information available to the Department of Homeland Security, and at the same time honor the ``need to know'' principle. There are as many as 100,000 first responder agencies, police departments, fire departments and so forth, who are most likely, as pointed out, to be first on scene, and may also be best suited to prevent a terrorist incident if they have the needed information. Homeland Security is entitled to and does receive intelligence from the CIA, the FBI and other members of the intelligence community. First responders rarely need to know the sources of the information or the methods by which the information was obtained. I believe it is sufficient to supply these agencies promptly with finished intelligence, which sets forth the information without disclosing sources or methods. There may be more exceptions, but this should certainly be the basic principle if sensitive sources are to be protected. In 1978 when I took office the three top priorities of the FBI were organized crime, white-collar crime and foreign counterintelligence, a considerable shift in gears from the days of stolen cars and bank robberies. I added terrorism to that list in 1980. We have been experiencing approximately 100 terrorist incidents a year, certainly not of the dimension of the attack on the World Trade Center, but life-threatening, lethal and a danger to our society. Within the FBI we focused on getting there before the bomb went off. Prevention and interdiction obviously depended upon much better intelligence than we had had in the past, and we worked on this, developed our sources, worked effective undercover operations, and acted preemptorially when appropriate. As I moved to the CIA in 1987, we were down to 5 or 6 terrorist events. In the year following, there were none. I attribute this to highly skilled, dedicated professional law enforcement, and especially to better intelligence, along with cooperation from friendly agencies in Canada and other parts of the world. We have made very substantial progress in coming to grips with even larger terrorist activities and plotting in the past few years, but intelligence is the key, as every speaker before me has said this morning. Without it, the terrorist is likely to succeed in his terrorist activity, leaving it to law enforcement to track him down and prosecute him. Prevention requires intelligence. In summary, I believe the FBI has significantly transformed itself to meet the current threats. It does probably need to improve its analytical capability which historically has been under developing. Translators are badly needed to keep up with processing signals intelligence, documents and other important information. But the biggest challenge in my view is to confront in a rational way the consequences of an archaic electronic data system that preceded the PATRIOT Act and would be considered obsolete by any modern enterprise. It needs a search engine that can be navigated with much greater speed and with more precision in locating those dots that were not found when they were needed. The FBI deserves a great deal of credit for many forensic improvements, DNA, the computerization of fingerprints, psychological profiling and other scientific techniques, and these efforts should be supported and properly funded, but it makes no sense to have the best trained special agents I the world if they are not properly equipped and guided by the best available information. Sir William Stephenson, the famous ``man called Intrepid,'' once wrote about the importance of gathering intelligence and managing the process, and he concluded that in the integrity of that guardianship lies the hope of free people to endure and prevail. If you will permit me another moment, and with all respect, when we talk about guardianship there is also the matter of oversight. The special commission on 9/11 strongly recommended that the Congress streamlined its oversight procedures, and in my view, this has not yet happened. It is my understanding that there are some 88 Congressional committees that claim oversight responsibility in the Department of Homeland Security alone, and this needs to be addressed. Finally, we now have a new organization in the intelligence community and a new leader. While the 200-page Act covers many of the issues, the key authorities of the Director of National Intelligence were not as expressly granted as I would have liked, but I believe that Director Negroponte will assert them fully as needed. Of paramount importance is his responsibility to insist upon the level of cooperation and sharing among the members of the intelligence community that I believe the President and Congress-- Chairman Specter. Judge Webster, how much longer would you need? Mr. Webster. I am finishing my sentence and that is it. That I believe the President and Congress intended in this reorganization, and that it be done with appropriate protection of sources and methods so essential to our National security. And as Congressman Hamilton, and in preserving at the same time the civil rights that are so important to us. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Mr. Webster appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Specter. Thank you very much, Judge Webster. Our final witness on this panel is Mr. John Russack, recently designated by the President to be Program Manager, responsible for terrorism information sharing pursuant to Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. Mr. Russack has a long, distinguished career in the Navy, Navy Captain, commanded the Aegis cruiser, has worked in the CIA as Director of Operations, has worked with the CIA's Nonproliferation Center, and I note is a graduate of the University of Kansas. Are you a native Kansan, Mr. Russack? Mr. Russack. No, sir, I am not. Chairman Specter. Too bad for you. [Laughter.] Senator Leahy. In case you did not realize, the Chairman is. Chairman Specter. And also ROTC graduate, but Air Force. If it had stuck to ROTC I might have had a distinguished career by this time. But I note your Kansas affiliation and I could not resist the temptation to ask you. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to your testimony. STATEMENT OF JOHN A. RUSSACKS, PROGRAM MANAGER, INFORMATION SHARING ENVIRONMENT, DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE, WASHINGTON, D.C. Mr. Russack. Thank you, sir. Thank you for the opportunity to be here and appear before you and Senator Leahy and to join this panel. As you noted, I was appointed by the President in April to be the Program Manger for the Counterterrorism Information Sharing Environment. I am responsible for planning and overseeing the implementation of that environment, to make improvements on the already existing environment, to work on policies, procedures, guidelines, rules and standards that pertain to the environment, and then I am to support, monitor and assess the implementation, and in fact, report progress on the implementation to the Congress, to you, sir, to Senator Leahy, and to the President of the United States. Let me first of all say that the mandate for the Program Manager extends across the Federal Government, and then up and down from the Federal Government to State, local, tribal and the private sector. So the environment is not just Federal, it is all-encompassing. We are sharing information better than we ever have. However, the present environment at best is flawed. We need to share it even better than we do today, and that is my mandate. I am a volunteer for this job. I care very deeply about information sharing and in fact about the national security of my country. I will be assisted in accomplishing this task by a very small staff of approximately 25 people, most of whom will come from detailees from other parts of our Government. I will probably hire about 5 or 6 people, and the remaining 20 will come, as I said, as detailees. I will also be assisted in the job by an Information Sharing Council. As you recall, Executive Order 13356, which was signed by the President last August, started work on the information sharing environment. In fact, I led the mission team responsible for Section 5, which was a plan for the information sharing environment. We divided in half, a technical side and a mission side. So I am familiar with the issue, and in fact the impediments to information sharing. I was required by law to issue to the Congress and to the President a report on the 15th of June. I did that. The basic content of that report was a summary of the impediments to information sharing. And to sum that report up, sir, I would say that the impediments are not the flow of electrons. In fact, technology is an enabler to information sharing. Most of the impediments that we have today to information sharing have to do with roles, missions, responsibilities that sometimes overlap, occasionally they conflict. They are training, they are fostering changes in the way we do business, and I think that we can achieve over the next 2 years--I have been appointed to this job for 2 years, and at the end of 2 years I make a recommendation to the Congress and to the President on how the information sharing environment is at the end of 2 years, and what the future of the present position I have been appointed to will be. But I think we can make dramatic improvements in information sharing. I will also say that most of the low- hanging fruit has been plucked. What is left to be done is really hard, and I welcome your oversight, and I look forward to reporting to you and to Senator Leahy, and the rest of the Committee on our progress as we make information sharing better than it presently is today. Thank you, sir. [The prepared statement of Mr. Russack appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Specter. Thank you very much, Mr. Russack. Mr. Fine, you have published reports going into some detail as to the failures on the FBI, noting five missed opportunities to prevent the September 11th attacks, lack of effective analysis, failure to use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Beyond the role of being a critic, you get very, very deeply involved in all of these issues. Have you made any affirmative suggestions to the Bureau as to how to solve these problems? As I listen to the plight of the Bureau, there are lots of difficulties, and a constant theme is things are improving but not enough. But from your vantage point as Inspector General, it seems to me you would have the capacity to--maybe it is beyond your purview, but your purview could be changed--to make suggestions to the FBI as to how they ought to correct these problems. Have you worked that angle of the issues? Mr. Fine. Yes, Mr. Chairman, we absolutely do that. One of our missions is obviously to look backwards and find out what went wrong and to assess the current state of affairs within the FBI, and we have found key deficiencies, but we do believe it is one of our most important missions to also provide recommendations to them on how to improve the operations of these very important programs. In each of our reports we make recommendations to the FBI. In our information technology report we made a series of recommendations on how to better oversee the acquisition of information technology, in our intelligence analyst reports as well. So in each of our reports we provide recommendations to them and we follow up on them to see whether they are implementing our recommendations. In many cases they say they have or will take corrective action. With healthy skepticism we try and go back and see whether they do, and in fact, that was the genesis of our follow-up report on the foreign language translation. We did our report in July 2004. We made a series of recommendations, and we wanted to see whether they had actually implemented those recommendations. They had some. They have more progress to go on others as well. Chairman Specter. Congressman Hamilton, your leadership on the 9/11 Commission, along with the Chairman was certainly exemplary, and you are pursuing the Government, notwithstanding--you filed your report. I do not know that your Commission is over. And you have articulated a sense of urgency which I think is right on the button. What are the plans for the 9/11 Commission to raise hell with the intelligence agencies to see that they follow your advice? Mr. Hamilton. Well, the Commission, Senator, of course if out of business. It was a statutory commission and our time expired last year. We did move ahead, Tom Kean and I, and raised some money privately for a public discourse project in order to try to push forward some of the recommendations not adopted. Chairman Specter. But are you not still in the wings, fronting the Federal agencies? Mr. Hamilton. We are. We took very seriously the recommendations we made, and we want to push them forward. We have been really pleased really that many of them have been adopted by the President and by the Congress, but we feel the number is still dangling out there, including the one that Judge Webster mentioned a moment ago on Congress. Congress has not done what it ought to do with regard to getting its oversight function more robust, and that is a serious problem I think, and there are other recommendations we are going to push forward. We are pushing forward the idea that Homeland Security funds need to be distributed on a risk assessment basis and not on the basis of politics. We are pushing forward the idea that a part of the radial spectrum should be dedicated to first responders. That is a no-brainer from my standpoint. I cannot understand why it takes so long to get it done. We are pushing forward the idea that much, much more emphasis has to be put on the weapons of mass destruction coming into the hands of terrorists. We have a lot of things we are pushing on, but none really any more important than what we are talking about this morning, trying to get the FBI to make the kind of changes that are necessary. I sit here this morning and I listen to all of these things that are being said, and I think they are almost all on the mark, and yet it sounds to me very much like business as usual. And business as usual is not satisfactory. Chairman Specter. How do we change that? Mr. Hamilton. Maybe London will change it. Maybe Madrid changes it. I do not know. But I think there does need to be a much greater sense of urgency. When I hear about some of these reforms not coming into effect till 2009, I say to myself, you are just giving the terrorist activities an opening, and the risk goes up for the American people the longer you extend these deadlines, the more time you take to make these changes. I agree with everything that has been said about the remarkable that Director Mueller has made, but he needs a lot of support from many of us in order to get this job done with greater sense of urgency. Chairman Specter. I am going to go over a little on time. I want to ask a question of both Judge Webster and Mr. Russack and the hour is growing late, so I will try to be brief. Judge Webster, you have the unique background of having been the Director of both the FBI and the CIA, and you cite the Fawaz Younis case which is a fascinating case. I recall that. About 1983--I would have to go back and look at the record--but I believe that I posed in one of the hearings where you testified an idea that I had about kidnaping terrorists. There was a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1886, where a man accused of fraud in Illinois went to Peru, and the Supreme Court was very blunt in identifying his return to Illinois to face criminal charges as having been kidnaped. Fawaz Younis was not technically kidnaped because he was on the Mediterranean, but you cite that as an illustration of cooperation between the FBI and the CIA. What insights do you have as a result of your being Director of both of those agencies to find some way to have them do a better job in talking to each other, or do you think that problem has now been solved? Mr. Webster. Well, I recited at perhaps too great length the consequences of the Church-Pike Committee reports that drove it in the other direction, and the sudden change that occurred with the PATRIOT Act. I have watched and believe that the two organizations sincerely desire to work together. They have different missions, like the nature of the intelligence that they gather and whether it can be used in a criminal court under the Brady rule if it is offered in evidence and they have to tell where it came from. So some of these problems still need to be addressed, and Congress can play a role in that. But I think the toughest problem--and I know that I am making more of it than I should in terms of the time I take--is getting the FBI to the point where it is capable of supplying the vast amount of information that the CIA and other agencies legitimately want to know. Their old mainframe was designed to chase criminals, and it was organized on an investigative structure that only permitted you to ask one or two questions in order to get answers. It is really archaic, and although Congress has generously given many millions of dollars to fix it, I do not believe it is going to be fixed until people are brought in who understand it. I would say get Bill Gates and tell him to take 6 months and help us solve our problem. In the past I the construct of this, we were anxious to get in the computers. I started the computerization of fingerprints 100 years ago, but we tried to do it too much with our own people, thinking we could do anything that we set our minds to do, and we did not identify and bring in the kind of expertise that was necessary. It is badly needed now. It is indispensable now. When I hear talk about providing more agents, that is great, and it has a great deal of appeal to be able to tell constituents that I got 1,000 more agents for the FBI, but there is no sex appeal in getting a new computer. But my point I tried to make in my remarks was you have to--if you are going to have the best trained people in the world, you have to equip them appropriately rather just add to their numbers, and that is where we need it. Chairman Specter. I have another question or two for you, Judge Webster, and for Mr. Russack. But I am going to yield now to Senator Leahy. Senator Leahy. I was struck by the comments made by several on oversight and other things. Congressman Hamilton is an old friend, whom I respect greatly, and I would note on one thing, we talk about the number of committees that might have oversight, there has been precious little oversight. Except for Senator Specter and a couple of others, there really has not been. There have been many requests for oversight and for years after 9/11 we were told that it might be embarrassing to the administration to have real oversight, so we should not have any. And a complacent and compliant Congress went along with that. We do not look at some of these problems that Inspector General Fine has pointed out, and he incidentally, is one of the finest public servants I have ever known, and has done great, great service to all of us, to the FBI and to the Department of Justice, to the Congress, and we do not take advantage of that adequately. We do not follow up on a number of things. We can spend 4 months in the Senate talking about nuclear options, and the American public is not fooled that we are not talking about somebody setting off a nuclear bomb, but we are talking arcane procedural matters within the Senate. We can certainly ramp up and go fast and tell the Schiavo family, irrespective of the tragedy of their family, irrespective of the fact that courts have done that, by golly, the Congress can step in and we can make the decision for them because it happens to be the headline that day. We have fallen down on the job. The 9/11 Commission was helpful. I do not know how many people were paying attention to it. The question I have of Mr. Russack is--and I am trying to do this without going into classified areas so I will be somewhat general--we talk about the weaknesses of threat assessments. I do not find an awful lot of products that look across the intelligence community and all the various aspects as you have, the nature, range, likelihood and target of long- term terrorist threats. One of the greatest terrorist events in the United States was Oklahoma City, and I like to think that a white, American, former military, devout religious person and all that, that that is not a fair assessment to jump up, and let us hope it is unique. But I find when I talk to State and local authorities, who are oftentimes the ones who are going to see these people first, that there is confusion about the roles of the FBI, DHS, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, how that works. Are there impediments here? Can we improve the area of threat assessments? I realize we do a lot of the symbolism things. We have a 90-year-old women going through the airport being told to take her shoes off, and has to explain with some desperation the nurse at the nursing home usually does that, she cannot do it. That may make us feel safer, but are there impediments to improvement in the area of threat assessments? Mr. Russack. Senator I think there are some impediments. Some of what you ask me goes well beyond the realm of my job as the Program Manager for Information Sharing, but what I see from my vantage point is a real effort on the part of--let us just take NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center, as an example. I see a real concerted effort on the part of organizations like NCTC to do a better job in threat assessments. Even if you have a better threat assessment, you also bring up the problem of impediments to sharing that information, and you cited an example from State and local government. I think there are impediments to sharing. I think what we will do on the Program Manager's staff for information sharing and then the Information Sharing Council is try and codify or make better, develop the business rules for information sharing, and provide State and local government a clearer point of contact. In other words, make unmurky the presently at least somewhat murky waters. Try and make it clearer what they need to worry about, and in fact, try and share information, all forms of information with them, you know, keeping a balance, as Judge Webster said, between need to share and need to protect sources and methods. I think we can share more and still protect sources and methods, and at the same time, give State, local, tribal and the private sector better information with which not only to act upon and hopefully prevent terrorist activities, but also in the case of the private sector, State, local and tribal, to also protect what they need to protect. Senator Leahy. Thank you. I appreciate that. We have gone over time. I want to thank both Lee Hamilton and Bill Webster. They have given enormous pro bono time, and I appreciate this. It is sort of like you leave Government and you think you have left, but nobody lets you leave. I appreciate the time you spend on that. And within Government, superb people like Mr. Russack and Mr. Fine. I think a lot of us forget how fortunate we are in this country, people not only in Government, but people who have left Government and are willing to come back. Mr. Hamilton. Senator, I thank you for that. I want to emphasize here the importance of this job of Program Manager. The whole thrust of the 9/11 Commission report was you got to share information better. The impediments are not hard to find. The impediments are stovepiping within agencies. They do not want to share information across agencies. The impediments are so much emphasis on the need to know that you ignore the need to share. Bill Webster is absolutely correct, you have to get the right balance in there, but for years and years in the intelligence community, the whole emphasis was on need to know, need to know, need to know. That excluded a lot of people, and it brought about in fairly direct terms, 9/11. We simply did not-- Senator Leahy. Look at the people from Oklahoma who were out-- Mr. Hamilton. We simply did not share the information we needed. Okay. Now you come along with a new structure, and the place where it all comes together is in Mr. Russack's position. He is the Program Manager. He is the fellow that has to see that we get all of this information shared. And if you do not get that information shared across agencies, if you do not get the information shared vertically within the FBI, as well as horizontally across various intelligence agencies, you are not going to have the most effective means of fighting terrorism. So the Program Manager's position has to be empowered. He has to have the resources. He has to have the people. He has to have the political support in order to get the job done. Senator Leahy. I agree. That is why my first question was to Mr. Russack. We are counting on people like him pulling these things together. I think of those people who are trained to be pilots, and the area FBI call in with their concerns to headquarters and being basically told, no, there is nothing for you to worry about, and we do not want you to keep bothering us. Go about, I guess, catching bank robbers or car thieves or something, and of course, these are the pilots that flew airplanes in 9/11. Inspector General Fine, if I might, I have one more question. I keep going to this linguist area. I have the frustration of many of us, how few Americans actually learn other languages or can speak other languages and how it hampers us in dealing now with some very, very serious problems. You conducted an investigation, you did the audit of the translation program. I have that from July of 2004. But you conducted an investigation into the allegations of lax security and possible espionage as made by a former contract linguist. And you made some recommendations regrading security in the translation program. How do you feel about the security of the program? How has the FBI responded to the recommendations you have made? Mr. Fine. I think they have generally responded well. We followed up on that and tried to provide an assessment of where they are now in our follow-up report. They do now have written guidelines for risk assessments and how to judge whether there are risks involved with the hiring of certain contractors. There were no written guidelines in the past. They now have instituted a procedure whereby the supervisors assign who is going to be translating which materials, rather than the linguists themselves, which created problems in that case. They are trying to train the linguists better, and they are also providing better tracking of which linguists translate which material so there can be an audit trail. So they have made some changes. Their policy manuals are not complete, and they are still making further changes, but I think they are generally receptive to it. I do believe in the importance of oversight, the importance of Congressional oversight and Inspector General oversight, and we see that when we come back and try and follow up, that often spurs them into a sense of urgency to get it done, and I think that is what is happening here. I do think they are receptive to it, but needs more that should happen. Senator Leahy. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. If I have any other questions, I will submit them later. Chairman Specter. Thank you, Senator Leahy, for your service in 3 hours plus, Ranking Member. Where are all of our colleagues now? Senator Leahy. I think what they are doing is frantically trying to rearrange the schedule now that the Republican leadership is overriding you and saying we want to have the Roberts hearing in August. So I am hoping you are able to override the override. Chairman Specter. If we go back to that, there will be no more questions for anybody except Judge Roberts. [Laughter.] Chairman Specter. Mr. Russack, you said you have a 2-year appointment and at the end of 2 years your office expires? Mr. Russack. Yes, sir. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act required that the President designate me, and it says in the law that I shall be designated for a period of 2 years. In fact, there is a caveat in there that says-- Chairman Specter. Does the whole office sunset at 2 years? Mr. Russack. Excuse me, sir? Chairman Specter. Does the whole office sunset? FBI Director Mueller should have heard about a 2-year sunset for the entire office. He would have been appalled. Mr. Russack. Yes, it does. Chairman Specter. He does not want-- Mr. Russack. As a matter of fact, there is a caveat that says it could actually expire sooner if I do not do a good job, so I am committed to do a very good job. Chairman Specter. Are you doing a good job? To ask you a leading question? Mr. Russack. I think the answer to that question is we are just getting started. Chairman Specter. I asked you the leading question for a purpose. I am advised by counsel that you do not have any employees. Mr. Russack. Well, I have one. I have one and I have two contractors, so there are four of us right now. So we are making progress, Mr. Chairman. In fact-- Chairman Specter. Progress? Mr. Russack. Yes, sir. Chairman Specter. Sufficient progress, Congressman Hamilton? Mr. Hamilton. It is not even close. Chairman Specter. Your office has been in existence for a year, Mr. Russack, and to have one employee and two contractors, that sounds very nebulous to me. Mr. Russack. Mr. Chairman, the office has not been in existence for a year. In fact, I was designated in April, and in June it was decided that I would work for the President through the DNI. So we have-- Chairman Specter. Was the Program Manager for Information Sharing, was that position created a year ago? Mr. Russack. It was created with a law, and the law said that-- Chairman Specter. When was the law signed? Mr. Russack. I am not exactly sure. I know it was signed in 2004. Chairman Specter. Could it have been a year ago? Mr. Hamilton. It was December. It was December last year. Chairman Specter. Is that sufficient progress, Inspector General? We are going to take a vote here, Mr. Russack. [Laughter.] Chairman Specter. You may lose your office sooner. [Laughter.] Chairman Specter. How do we get the sense of urgency? I am overriding the question, Mr. Fine. I am withdrawing the question. How do we get the sense of urgency? Congressman Hamilton, do you--that is right on the head. Now, how do you do it? If you have some ideas and bring them to this Committee, we can have oversight, except that I am not sure Judge Webster likes it because we are one of 70 some committees exercising oversight, and they all have long hearings. This is a short hearing for oversight. [Laughter.] Chairman Specter. How do we get the sense of urgency, Congressman Hamilton? Mr. Hamilton. I think oversight is a very tough problem for the Congress. I do not know of any way to do it, Senator, except the way you are doing it. You have got a marvelous staff in back of you, and your job, it seems to me, is to be both a critic and a partner with regard to the FBI. You want to help them as much as you can, but at the same time you want to point out areas where you think better performance can be made. One of those things is to convey that sense of urgency. All of us on the 9/11 Commission are very worried about this. There was a real sense of urgency in this country after 9/11. And we have been very fortunate not to have had an attack here. But so many things intervene, that we tend to lose it. I think one of the responsibilities of a Congressional Committee that exercises oversight is to try to impress upon the Director and his staff that sense of urgency. Chairman Specter. Judge Webster, you are currently the Vice Chairman of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. So are you still on the payroll? Mr. Webster. No, I am not. [Laughter.] Chairman Specter. No payroll for that, but at least you have an official position. Unlike the 9/11 Commission, your Advisory Council is in business. Mr. Webster. We are in business. Chairman Specter. Are you raising hell with the Homeland Security folks to give them a sense of urgency? Mr. Webster. We are trying to do that, and we are actively inspecting sites to see what progress has been made in beefing up the various agencies. We have undertaken task forces, one of which addresses the whole issue of public source information and how it could be marshaled to help our joint effort. It is a Committee of some very good people, I might say, and they have taken on individual task force assignments. Chairman Specter. Mr. Russack, we want to help you. If I were to write a scathing letter, whom would I address it to to give you some help? Mr. Russack. Well, first of all, before I answer that question, let me just tell you, sir, that we have been working hard on this, even though we have a very small staff. Chairman Specter. Do not need any help? Mr. Russack. Yes, sir. I mean I am not saying id o not need any help. In fact, what we just did is write a letter to the deputies of the departments and agencies within the Federal Government and define the positions that we are trying to fill, and I can assure you that there is a sense of urgency to get those positions filled. Yes, I do need help. As Congressman Hamilton said, I accept your criticism. I would like to point out that we are very small, we are working very hard. Filling the positions that we have defined is going to be critically important, and I think you write your letter, since I work for the President through the DNI, to the Director of National Intelligence, and express your concerns. But I can also tell you that the Director of National Intelligence cares very deeply about this office and he is committed to helping. So I accept your help in addition, sir. Chairman Specter. I know the Director, and I am going to write to him. They just brought me another bottle of Gatorade which is indispensable to sustain me, so we can go another 40 minutes. [Laughter.] Chairman Specter. Thank you, gentleman, for coming in, and thank you for your patience in waiting through two preliminary hours, and we are more than an hour into this panel. You bring a great deal of experience and a great deal of expertise to these issues. And this Committee is going to be undertaking oversight on a very extensive basis, and it is not too gratifying sometimes because the same problems seem to recur, and the sense of urgency really is hard to transmit. You, Mr. Russack, have a really critical position by the way the title sounds, and your background in the Navy and CIA and DCI, you are really in a position to do something. So consider yourself a quasi-adjunct to the Judiciary Committee, and we are going to write to the Director, and let us know if you need more help. Mr. Russack. I will, sir. Chairman Specter. Thank you all. That concludes our hearing. 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