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Dramatic Improvement in Intelligence Sharing Because of ISIS

Mar 16, 2015

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European countries are voluntarily providing the United States with large amounts of information about their citizens. Data transfers focus in particular on citizens attempting to travel overseas. This, according to the nation’s top counterterrorism official.

Compared to the summer of 2013, US intelligence professionals have seen a “pendulum swing” in the willingness of European law enforcement and intelligence bodies to share information with the United States on European citizens, said Nicholas J. Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, or NCTC.

Things have turned around since summer 2013, when NSA contractor Edward Snowden first disclosed some of the nation’s closely kept secrets on surveillance capabilities. Rasmussen told defenseone that “the politics are difficult for some of our European partners” but tracking Islamic State fighters, or ISIS, has become a priority.

Rasmussen spoke before the House Committee on Homeland Security and said that European partners continue to differ from US counterparts on the issue of bulk metadata collection.

Nevertheless, European reservations about data sharing in more targeted investigations had “seen a dramatic improvement,” particularly in populating the NCTC’s database, which is called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE. It is one of the key person-of-interest watch lists that the US and other countries use to track potential or suspected terrorists.

Thanks in part to better collaboration, he said, the Turkish government’s “banned from entry list” now includes 10,000 individuals who are primarily European citizens. Turkey is seen as the most direct route that foreign fighters in Europe use to join ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

According to numerous reports, more than 20,000 fighters have flocked to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS, including 3,400 from Western countries and 150 Americans. This, according to a previously-submitted written testimony from Rasmussen before the House, which was first obtained by the Associated Press.