A day that began as any normal day before it.  People going about their business living their day-to-day lives.  That sense of normalcy disappeared in an instant.  Lacking that “old normal” from September 10, 2001 represents the biggest change in the last decade.

The events that occurred on September 11 are the primary reason so many of us – the law enforcement and intelligence communities in particular – work so hard to enhance our security capabilities in preventing another attack.

As CEO of i2, I am always humbled by the commitment and dedication of our police officers, intelligence analysts and the men and women serving in uniform around the world.  Their sacrifices to make the world more secure never go unnoticed. I’m often asked if we’re safer today than we were on September 11. As a nation, we have come a long way in fixing some of the problems the 9/11 Commission highlighted in its report. For example:

• It is estimated that the amount of sensor level data has increased by as much as 1600 percent since 9/11.  At the same time, the capacity to capture and assimilate that data and make connections from non-obvious relationships has gotten much better.
• The notion of information sharing has migrated from an anomalistic approach to where it’s now the table stakes for any successful intelligence gathering endeavor.  Success has happened within agencies and has begun to take place across agencies and is beginning to take shape across borders.  It’s an evolutionary process.  Clearly, the OBL mission success on May 1 would not have been as seamless without information sharing.
• Part of what’s really helped is the umbrella of DHS which has enabled more sharing between ATF, Customs, Border Security and across to DoJ/FBI and the intelligence agencies.  At the state and local level, Joint Terrorism Task Forces and fusion centers, there are federal agents working off of state databases.
• Analysts have never been better trained.  The analysts of today grew up with technology.  As a result, they are able to take advantage of tools that analysts in earlier generations were not able to.  That along with the proliferation of data and data sources, and the need to assimilate all of it in one place to quickly create actionable intelligence has made the responsibility of the intelligence analyst role increase in responsibility and prominence.  Analysis – once perceived as a back room effort – has become central to intelligence operations.

As James Clapper, director of National Intelligence said recently in a Wall Street Journal op/ed, “We now collaborate on intelligence collection and analysis in ways that were unheard of 10 years ago. We’ve made significant progress in reducing the cultural, information technology and policy barriers to sharing information among agencies, and we continue to explore new strategies for integrating our intelligence efforts.”

So when people inevitably continue to ask my colleagues and me, “are we safer today?” I can undoubtedly say, yes. The strides the intelligence community has made – from technology advancements to the capture of key terrorists throughout the world – have been nothing short of remarkable – milestones for which we can be proud.