DHS Special Report | Watch-list data converges at Terrorist Screening Center

TSC also maintains the government’s no-fly lists and is the key point of contact to determine whether someone applying for a visa could be a suspected terrorist.

Bucella, a prosecutor by trade, admits she does not give interviews often, but she spoke to GCN for a few minutes about the TSC’s creation, how it maintains the database, and plans for the database’s evolution.

GCN: How do you gather information and get agencies to work together?
BUCELLA: People sometimes think that you just have to go knock on the different agencies and say, “Give me your list, give me your list,” and it [would be] all nice and neat, formatted and everything else. [But] the information was all over the government. And I think through a real, genuine exercise, many different agencies in the intelligence community and law enforcement really did [take] a good look at what ... they had and what they needed.

It is sort of like, “What do you have, what do you need?” “Well, I don’t know what I need unless I see what you have.” And it is really getting many different cultures, both in the intelligence and law enforcement communities, to understand what the other is really saying.

We’ve operated in different worlds and different vocabularies, and used the same words with different meanings. Putting the law enforcement and intelligence communities in the same room, saying the same things, has been an interesting exercise.

GCN: How does the screening center interact with other screening and targeting initiatives such as the Homeland Security Department’s U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program?
BUCELLA: Well, U.S. Visit, when they stood up, [former program manager] Jim Williams and I talked a lot early on. But we were more interested in making sure those biometrics [collected by U.S. Visit] got into a system that was accessible to everybody, which it is. So while I may not have the U.S. Visit prints in my database, if they have the name and a print, I know where to go. Because of our borders, we have a very good relationship with DHS, its different agencies and programs. That relationship, because of the newness of everyone, gets solidified as we mature.

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