talk to us about nbic. >> yes, sir. well, we reported on it several times over the last decade, and what we found pretty consistently is they've struggled to meet their mandate of providing broad biosurveillance. part of that is they don't really have the access to the data they need, both the data at other federal agencies or down at the local level, to produce the real-time information you would need to make decisions. the other thing we heard from its partners, particularly at the federal level and state level, is that, you know, since they use a lot of publicly available information, and they do a pretty good job of synthesizing that information, it is not real new or that novel to the people that need to make decisions in this arena. so, you know, it's not what they produce has no value, but another concern i have is that, i mentioned this before, there were four different surveillance efforts across the four big departments. homeland security, defense, usda and hhs. all separate, all stovepipe, don't work together

talk to us about nbic. >> we have reported on it several times over the last decade and what we found significantly as they have struggled to meet their mandate providing broad surveillance. heart of that as they do not have access to the data they need to produce the kind of real-time information you would need to make decisions. the other thing we heard from as partners particularly at the federal level and state level since they use publicly available information is not new or novel to people that need to make decisions in this arena. another concern i have, there are four different surveillance efforts across the big departments, common security, defense, hhs, all separate, they do not work together. that shows you the lack of coordination across this enterprise. it is very difficult to make the decision of which one should go and which should stay because there was no one at a top level that can make that decision. >> i think this has been brought up by all three of you in one way or another that there is too much fragmentation and not enough accountability to have four agencies

in that information should be coming into a place and combined with information we are getting from nbic, cdc and so forth. that was the original vision. as chris said earlier the department does not have access to that information. the other side of that coin as far as this body is concerned is congress did not mandate that all other departments and agencies provide that information in the first place. this is going on the way it is. >> there are obviously two great opportunities here. one would be to require information to be consolidated in one place. the second is, and this was discussed earlier in terms of academic contribution here, that we have the capability to collect and assess data that we have never had before, we did not have frankly after anthrax and other biological threats that led us to come up with a national system. we have the capability that we have never had before and massive amounts of data being analyzed quickly and being able to produce something that is meaningful that can be disseminated to the appropriate agencies and departments. is that accurate? >> i think