Haft of the Spear

… progress on the sharing front will always be modest and incremental:

But the FBI, protective of turf and disdainful of local initiative, froze Kelly’s department out of two New York-related terrorism investigations, officials say. When more than 100 top police detectives joined the FBI’s joint terrorism task force, they were initially not permitted to read the bureau’s case files.

“People have information, and they want to control information,” Kelly said in an interview at police headquarters, just five blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood. “Controlling information is power, and they don’t want to let it go — it is as fundamental as that.”

More significantly, check out the entrepreneurial response and how they (apparently) have overcome the whole “can’t trust the foreign born” issue:

Working with detectives posted overseas, undercover officers in New York and informants, Cohen has identified towns in South Africa, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco that he wants NYPD officers to know. If they arrest anyone who has been to those towns, he wants to be told.

Cohen, the only person to have led the CIA’s clandestine service and its analytical division, still drinks coffee out of a CIA mug. He said his work with the NYPD has given him a sense of professional freedom and accomplishment that is hard to achieve in the bureaucratized intelligence world of Washington.

A fifth of Cohen’s staff was born overseas. He has 70 Arabic speakers working on counterterrorism cases, and lends some to the Defense Department and foreign intelligence agencies (emphasis mine).