New intel information sharing policy coming

The intelligence community will have a new information sharing policy by next week.

Mike McConnell, the outgoing director of national intelligence, says the new policy will address the roles and responsibilities for sharing information among the 16 intelligence communities. He says he will sign the policy in the next day or two.

"It's the policy to hope we would never repeat Sept. 11," says McConnell during a press briefing at ODNI's headquarters in McLean, Va. "The changes that have been made the way we share information, the way we respond to it and the way we follow it up in the context of terrorists, I have very high confidence that we are much better than we were."

This is another in a series of policy updates the Office of the Director for National Intelligence has been working on over the last two years.

McConnell, who likely will be replaced by Adm. Dennis Blair in the Obama administration, also has signed policies around intelligence, analytical outreach and sourcing requirements.

This latest policy will detail an incremental process to share information.

"If it's a finished product, no question we will share," he says. "If it's sort of the next layer, we have agreement on that. If it's the next layer down, there are some exceptions. When you get all the way back to the identity of the spy who is giving us the most important information, we will not share that."

McConnell says ODNI has decided to digitize and tag all data, and make most of accessible to analysts with the right clearances.

This new policy introduces the concept of a tag called originator control.

"The question is what is the access of this analyst who is asking for information?" he says. "We will have role based attributes. There will be some mechanical function asking if the analyst has access or not."

McConnell says the key to the policy is the DNI now is the adjudicator when information exists, but there is disagreement on whether or not to share it.

"About 95-98 percent of these disputes are resolved instantly at the GS-14 level because we will have a process," he says. "The hard ones will bubble up to me and I will have to make a judgment."

McConnell says because more and more intelligence community databases are tied together, there needs to be rules for how discovery will work. This policy dictates some of those rules, he adds.

"We will discover information that we have never discovered before," he says. "It will be staggering amount of more data. When you connect the databases of the largest six intelligence agencies, think of the potential acceleration of an analyst's job if they can touch it all at the speed of light."

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On the Web:

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ODNI- Policy documents

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