Thomas Cincotta

Thomas Cincotta’s report is a comprehensive investigation of the post-9/11 “information sharing environment” among law enforcement, explaining how Suspicious Activity Reporting violates civil…

The recent attempted bombing of NWA Flight 253 in Detroit underscores the fact that the main terrorist threat to U.S. persons is from foreign terrorists linked to Al Qaeda. Every official review of U.S. intelligence failures that led to the 9/11 attack concluded that bureaucratic cultures at the CIA and FBI impeded effective information sharing and analysis.

In a 2007 article for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Colonel Bart Johnson explained how state-level intelligence “fusion centers” collect data from a range of sources and connect “seemingly unrelated” incidents that could be precursors of terrorist activity. At the time, Colonel Johnson led the New York State (NYS) Intelligence Center in Albany, where officers from a range of federal, state and local police agencies as well as civilian analysts function as a “nerve center” for all calls into a statewide terrorism tip line.