105th Congress Rept. 105-135 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 1st Session Part 1 _____________________________________________________________ INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1998 _____________________________________________________________ Mr. Goss, from the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, submitted the following R E P O R T [...] FBIS Reorganization The Committee supports the further establishment and maintenance of a strong open source capability within the IC. A comprehensive open source collection, translation, and analytic effort is crucial to the IC's ability to maintain global coverage and to understand developments both in "lower" and "higher" tier countries. Not only do open sources provide insight into open societies, careful scrutiny of "closed society" media (e.g., Iran, North Korea) can also reveal valuable information on trends, new developments, and leadership plans and intentions. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) re- engineering strategy calls for using more modern and commercially available technologies as FBIS's operational linchpin and to transition from traditional large-scale, static collection and processing centers toward a more agile and less expensive architecture. The Committee applauds CIA's efforts to adapt FBIS's infrastructure and operating practices to incorporate new technologies and to meet intelligence requirements more efficiently. The Committee has several concerns, however, about the current FBIS re-engineering plan. First, the Committee is concerned that important resource allocation decisions are being made without fully taking into consideration "customer" requirements; there currently is no formal, direct open source requirements system that can be tapped to help translate requirements into rational resource allocation decisions. In addition, it is unclear to many FBIS customers what regions of the world will be affected by significant decreases in collection, translation an analytical activities. The Committee believes that open source customers must be kept fully informed of what changes in services they will see as a result of the re-engineering. The Committee also believes that open source collection should be driven by the direct input of major customers, particularly the all-source analysts who best understand where their information gaps lie. It should be noted that the Committee will closely scrutinize any fiscal year 1997 FBIS reprogramming request to determine whether the request fits into the overall reengineering strategy. The Committee requests that it be kept fully and currently informed of the plans and implementation of the re-engineering effort. In addition, the Committee requests that the DCI submit a report on the FBIS re-engineering plan to the intelligence oversight Committees by 1 September 1997. The report should include the following information: What is the timeline for implementing the re- engineering plan? What is the mechanism for reviewing the progress and effects of the re-engineering plan? For what countries/regions/issues will FBIS reduce its coverage (collection, translation, analysis)? What countries/regions/issues will FBIS no longer cover? How will the "new way" of doing business be managed (i.e., telecommuting employees, regional hubs, etc.)? What disruptions in service are anticipated? and How will FBIS work with "customers" to ensure their requirements are being met?