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Point Man

George Vinson lends his vast law enforcement intelligence to California.

George Vinson draws on all of his 33 years in law enforcement in his new post as Special Advisor on State Security to California Gov. Gray Davis. Vinson was appointed to the position in November 2001, and later was named as a member of the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center Executive Advisory Board. Vinson retired from the FBI in 1999 after a 23-year career as a special agent. He ended his career with the FBI as special agent in charge of the San Francisco office.

Q: What is your role as special advisor and what's the function of the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center?

A: My basic mission is to act as a liaison, coordinate and advise Gov. Davis on all counter-terrorism and state security issues. The nuts and bolts of the job really entails working with the four core agencies, which are the Department of Health Services, the National Guard, the Office of Emergency Services and the CHP, who we consider to be the primary responders and consequence managers if there was an act of terrorism or an event. I'm also fully engaged as the primary liaison to the governor and the Office of Homeland Security and Tom Ridge and his team. I'm heavily involved in the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, and that is designed to basically intake information from almost 90,000 police officers from the state of California, go through an analysis process, try to connect the dots and see if we can spot patterns, couple that with other public source information that our search engines look at every day around the world and then funnel patterns up to the FBI and the federal folks to see if it connects to anything they're working and we want them to also exchange information with us.

Q: That's a lot of intelligence. Are other states doing this also?

A: Other states are now coming on line. We were the first to get an actual intelligence center up and producing an intelligence product. That was largely because, Number one, California is pretty aggressive and innovating, and we attached the piping or the networking and integration of our center off of the Regional Security Information System and the Western States Narcotics Information System. We have a clearinghouse for de-confliction of criminal cases. An example would be if the DEA and a narcotics team from Los Angeles were working the same targets and run their information through the de-confliction center, if they get a hit they notify both parties that you're working the same subject, and if you're going to serve a search warrant, there could be a problem. So we hung our hardware off the existing pipes and that's why we were able to get it up so quick. The difference between intelligence however, and criminal databases is significant. The governance of an intelligence base and the audits that go on are much more rigid because you can't just put George Vinson's name in an intelligence base if there's no criminal nexus. So the governance of it and the building and maturity of this base has to be watched very closely.

Q: How do you get those officers on the street to collect the right data, first of all, and then get it to where it's supposed to be?

A: It's a good question. The first part of it, how do we get it from the street to the situation room, is being done on interactive CD-ROMs and teaching materials that are going out to every police department and sheriff's office in the state. In addition to that, the CHP has field offices in all the districts in California and they have gone out to actual briefings and talked about how to get this information from the street and to the situation room. There are 386 police departments, most of them with less than 25 to 40 officers. What I emphasize to everyone as I go around the state is a four-man department in Kerman, Calif., is just as significant as a 10,000-man department in Los Angeles. The nugget of information that's going to help us prevent the next attack can come from anywhere, and very remote places, as a matter of fact. Each venue and jurisdiction is based with police officers and sheriff's deputies who know their community. So it's kind of difficult for the state or federal government at the high end to start telling you what to look for. Terrorists are criminals. [I tell officers], "You guys are experts at working criminals. So if you see abnormal behavior; if you stop someone and your enforcement instincts - or the contact is not going in a routine fashion, then you probe a little deeper and if you come up with phony ID, if you come up with visas that don't match things, literature, paraphernalia, whatever, it happens to be, then that is the unusual stuff we want you to send to Sacramento. You are the eyes and ears that will gather this nugget of intelligence that may help us."

Q: Is there a situation where you can have so much information that it's hard to decipher? We had information on the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center but still couldn't stop them. How are you using this information you are collecting and turning it into something that can be useful?

A: It's a valid question and it's a valid criticism because what you find out in intelligence analysis and intelligence gathering is that you get data -- sometimes it's information, sometimes I hesitate to call it information. And it's an art form, it's not a science. It's a very murky, foggy business. And you can be overwhelmed with information such as the National Security Agency in Maryland; they suck electronic information out of the air from all around the world. They probably shred four to five train cars full of paper every 24 hours in their analytical machination. It's difficult. The best you get is a bird's eye view, a 30,000-foot view of the load of information that comes in and then you keyword search it because you have other intelligence that tells you about a potential cell, a potential target. You have key names, you have key regions and that's how you try to spot patterns and habits. I'll give you an example at the basic level way beyond international terrorism or terrorism cells, or state cells: You may get a gasoline rig and 18-wheeler stolen in San Diego that Redding, Calif., would need to know about because they may have a bit of information up there that says somebody was talking about stealing a gasoline rig, running it up on a bridge, lighting it on fire and burning up the bridge. Well, in the past, without this centralized intelligence center to pass information and share information, Redding would never know that this rig was stolen and now we've got a license number and a color. That's how this will work, hopefully. It's a real fuzzy, foggy art form and you can be overwhelmed.

Q: Is the culture of law enforcement changing to more of an intelligence mode, where they collect intelligence before an event rather than evidence after one? The FBI for example has been criticized for being a good prosecutorial agency, but one that is not good at ferreting out and sharing information that could have been useful in preventing crimes.

A: Yes and no. It's yes that the FBI has reorganized and reconfigured their resources. A thousand agents were assigned to counter-terrorism intelligence. They have bumped that up to 4,000 of their 11,000 agents, a significant block because they are in a counter-terrorism program mode to prevent the next attack. So they've had to refocus these resources, they've had to change the culture in that now they have to share information if they're going to be successful, both vertically and horizontally. That means send it down to the states, get it up from the states. The states meaning the counties and cities. They have to do it horizontally with the CIO, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the INS, the State Department, all these independent stovepipes that collect intelligence need a fusion center, a way to pipe it to one another. That's a huge culture change. It creates turf fights and the Office of Homeland Security is trying to be the honest broker and sit in between this situation. But the president on down has mandated these agencies will change. Will the FBI go away from criminal investigation work? The answer is no. They're going to stay in that mode; they will still do traditional investigative techniques, follow the evidence, stay behind the evidence, collect the evidence, get enough to present it to a prosecutor for filing charges and indicting, taking things to trial. They're not going to get out of that mode but there has been a shift. The state officers who used to complain about the FBI holding onto the information have gone through a transition in these last five months. They're realizing that intelligence is foggy and messy and a lot of the criticisms of the past against the FBI, that they were holding back information-now they realize that they didn't have it to start with and if they had the information and data, they weren't sure how to disseminate it with any validity. So the silver lining is the states are understanding how difficult and different straight intelligence work is as opposed to criminal investigative work.

Q: It's been tough to get agencies to share. What's it going to take to remedy that?

A: It took probably Sept. 11, 2001, and an attack that killed 3,000 innocent Americans to move the bureaucracy off the mark. Having said that, in hindsight, everybody dealt with intelligence for different reasons. The Defense Intelligence Agency never shared with anybody because they collected worldwide for war fighting. Much of what the CIA and the NSA collect is classified at the origin level. That presents problems for declassification to get it down to people that don't have certain clearances. It's kind of a straw man argument though because, as I told FBI Director Bob Mueller, the county/local agencies do not need top secret information, they need relevant information to help them work with this threat. You can sanitize the methods and source of collection and still provide relevant information if you have the will to do it, and that's what's changing, and that's the reality. I was at an Orlando meeting earlier this month with Attorney General [John] Ashcroft, Director Mueller from the FBI, the INS and the NSA. It's the first time they've sat down with law enforcement people and really tried to develop a matrix or blueprint for how we can exchange information freely. When a foreigner comes in the country on a visa whether it's a work visa, a student visa or a tourist visa, we don't have methods of authenticating who that person is or who was issued the document, and have they complied with the agreements to come in to work or school or to tour. And that's how high-risk folks who want to do a lot of damage get lost in the shuffle. Then they can fade into the woodwork, plan operations and the results are a tragedy like Sept. 11.

Q: The Office of Homeland Security is planning to unveil a "national blueprint" for homeland security later this summer. What do you expect from that blueprint and how will it affect state and local governments?

A: I'm not positive what to expect. But I know in theory, and I can back it up in California because California tends to be way out in front of preparedness and response planning -- were not called the disaster state for nothing. The incident command or system command and consequence management behind the natural disaster transitions to a man-made disaster, such as a terrorist attack. So what [the Office of Homeland Security] is going to look for is "Does the state have a good outline for preparedness. What are you doing to prepare?" That is an educated guess but it's a guess based on history of what terrorists like to do. They attack monument buildings, other monuments, high profile events, populated events electrical grids, anything to disrupt and create a lot of fear. So in preparedness, do we have the defenses in place to handle the majority of those threats? And do we have the response plans and capabilities to marshal all the resources to go handle it? They are building a national model that's not going to require mirroring or duplicating, but they want the state models to at least mesh or integrate with the national model. And then they want to test with training exercises like tabletops. That will trigger the release of the federal money to help each state fund its homeland defense.

Q: How real is the danger of a homeland security backlash from the public? Will they get tired of hearing about homeland security? Will issues like interoperability, which is not a new issue, get the attention they deserve?

A: It's going to depend on the patience and attention span of the American public, because the elected officials respond to that. The event of Sept. 11 was a crisis and a horror that drives bureaucracies in my view, to change. Interoperability has been talked about for around 40 years and law enforcement and emergency services and medical services have been screaming and cajoling people to provide this, but the funding or the will and the turf fights were in the way. Now the trigger behind this attack and the fear of future attacks will drive, in my view, these bureaucracies to get off the mark to get stuff done that they weren't able to get done during normal times. I'm not sure homeland security and the terrorist issue is going to fade quickly but it has a shelf life and if we have no more events it will fade like any other issue.

When the alert systems came out Tom Ridge told me his worst day on the job was the first national alert he put out because of the backlash. We're trying to set up a mechanism that will give people an alert and then give them some protective measures to go along with the alert. There could be a backlash but it's a dicey business and it's our job to work this through and to represent and advise our elected officials on how best to deal with it. If it weren't controversial I wouldn't be in this job.

When I was still in the FBI in '93 and Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, before it was called al Qaeda, attacked the World Trade Center, we couldn't get very many people to listen to us that he was hijacking a country, putting a regime in. They trained 10,000 people in their camps. Those 10,000 people weren't killed by our special operations groups and they're somewhere in the world. I make the assumption that there are a certain number of them in the United States. And there are a certain number of them in California. When I get up in the morning I keep those assumptions in my mind so I can keep California's eye on the ball.

Q: What kind of new technology do you think will be useful in the future in this area?

A: It's a thousand fold. We have to leverage technology. Technology will never replace human thought, human assessment, but there's tremendous amount of source code being written or that's commercial now that can be adapted for this fight. I use examples of the science that Lawrence Livermore is trying to develop for us so we can read and screen cargo containers that come into the state for chemical, biological, narcotics, radiological mischief. We have no method right now of doing that. We need to check every piece of luggage that goes on our aircraft. There is technology and science that's built. Now you're starting to hear about the MRI technology that's used on humans to scan for diseases, to actually be adapted to get more specific about what's in our baggage and what have you. Necessity is the mother of invention and we are getting flooded with good ideas about current technology and how it can be adapted for this fight.