While the FBI has made some progress in keeping up with ever-evolving national terrorism threats since the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency still needs to improve its intelligence programs and information sharing to "complete its transformation into a threat-based, intelligence-driven organization," a congressional commission said Wednesday.
The 9/11 Review Commission report said the agency needed better and more integrated intelligence analysis and collection, needed to hire more linguists, and value its intelligence analysts as part of a "professionalized workforce" with specific training and education requirements, reported The Associated Press.
To improve its intelligence gathering and analysis, the report suggests that the FBI should acquire more informants. In the five counterterrorism investigations that the panel examined, not one confidential source "provided actionable intelligence to help prevent or respond to a terrorist operation," according to the 127-page report.
Such improvement are especially urgent considering the emergence of groups like the Islamic State and an increase in Westerners flocking to join militants in Syria.
"This imbalance needs urgently to be addressed to meet growing and increasingly complex national security threats, including from adaptive and increasingly tech-savvy terrorists, more brazen computer hackers, and more technically capable, global cyber syndicates," the report states.
Frequent leadership changes also contribute to the bureau's slow improvement, the report said, and the FBI needs to coordinate more effectively with the private sector and other federal agencies to address "increasingly complex [cyber] threats" which have "demanded unprecedented intelligence support and analytic capability in the midst of a global information revolution," according to the report.
Congress ordered the FBI performance review to assess the bureau's progress on counterterrorism matters and determine how much progress has been made in executing recommendations made by the 9/11 commission in its 2004 report.
FBI Director James Comey welcomed the critique as a "tremendously valuable tool," saying Wednesday at a news conference, "I think this is a moment of pride for the FBI," reported The Washington Times.
"An outside group of some of our nation's most important leaders and thinkers has stared hard at us and said, 'You have done a great job at transforming yourself.' They've also said what I've said around the country: 'It's not good enough.'"
Comey added, "There are a lot of ways you can be even better."
