Not another intelligence agency

I thought one of the more legitimatesque aspects of the execrable Patriot act were the information sharing provisions by which the different arms of our intelligence community are able to consolidate what they know. So if fragmentation is the problem, why the hell are there intelligence agencies I've never heard of coming out of the woodwork?

CIFA is a three-year-old agency whose size and budget remain secret. It has grown from an agency that coordinated policy and oversaw the counterintelligence activities of units within the military services and Pentagon agencies to an analytic and operational organization with nine directorates and ever-widening authority.[snip]

A former senior Pentagon intelligence official, familiar with CIFA, said yesterday, "They started with force protection from terrorists, but when you go down that road, you soon are into everything . . . where terrorists get their money, who they see, who they deal with."

(Via Echidne)