Information Overload?

• Position: Linton Wells II concerned about information security

While the U.S. intelligence community struggles to create inter-agency links and eliminate the barriers that prevent them from communicating and preventing another terrorist attack, some officials have sounded an alarm on a problem few considered: too much unfiltered information.

Linton Wells II, the Defense Department's principal deputy assistant secretary of defense of networks and information integration, said John Negroponte, the head of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, told him agencies were sending out data like "spam."

Intelligence gatherers are tossing unfiltered information "over the transom" to the center in order to cover themselves in case an event does take place, Wells said at a National Defense Industrial Association conference on network-centric operations.

This is creating a "fog of information." Even the predictions of "Australian psychics" were finding their way to the center, Wells said.

Overall, the intelligence community is doing a better job of sharing information although there are still pockets of resistance, Wells said.

Clark Smith, director of the information sharing environment technical group in the office of the director for national intelligence...