Linguists must use their judgment in filtering the information to ensure that information of potential intelligence value is passed along to agents or analysts. Linguists are the first line of analysis for information collected in a language other than English.
The FBI's linguists play a critical role in developing effective intelligence and counterterrorism information. As the FBI continues to focus its priorities on counterterrorism and counterintelligence, it must rely heavily on linguistic capabilities for interview support and surveillance activities. Prior reviews of the FBI's Foreign Language Program revealed severe shortages of linguists that resulted in the accumulation of thousands of hours of audio and videotapes and thousands of pages of text going unreviewed or untranslated. In this regard, the Foreign Language Program's support to the FBI's law enforcement function is substantial. Executive SummaryĬritical to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) success in protecting national security is its ability to prioritize, translate, and understand in a timely fashion the information to which it has access.
Because the FBI does not properly prioritize surveillance recordings, translators often tackle lower-value recordings even as some crucial ones are not translated.Īs these backlogs of translation mount up, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the professional organization of Middle East academics, has announced that it will not accept advertisements in its bulletin or journal from "defense and intelligence related agencies" -and this despite the MESA scholars' significant reliance on taxpayer funding.Įxcerpts follow from the redacted and unclassified version, dated July 2004, of the executive summary of the inspector general's report, including its original footnotes.-The Editors. Even with proper staffing, organizational impediments continue to handicap the counterterrorism process. Difficulties in hiring linguists continue with fewer than 10 percent of applicants ultimately hired. Although the FBI translates almost two-thirds of taped conversations between suspected Al-Qaeda members within twelve hours, over 20 percent of these take more than a week to be translated, and some sessions sit on the shelf for longer than a month. The Office of the Inspector General found that while the FBI has increased its linguist staff by more than 300 since September 11, 2001, 20 percent of all material gathered in surveillance operations is still not translated. This shortage has a direct impact on counterterrorism efforts." More than four years after the Bremer commission issued its recommendations-and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001-how much progress has been made in rectifying this broad and crosscutting translation problem? While congressmen, journalists, and pundits focused on The 9-11 Commission Report, the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General quietly released another report, portions of which are excerpted below, highlighting the FBI's continuing difficulties with speedy and tactically-effective foreign language translation. government agencies face a drastic shortage of linguists to translate raw data into useful information.
In its final report, the commission stated, "All U.S. In July 2000, the National Commission on Terrorism (the "Bremer commission") recognized that a shortage of trained linguists undercut U.S.