Terrorism Early Warning Groups

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The Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group (also known as T.E.W, or T.E.W.G) was designed by LT John Sullivan. It provides local responders and community leaders with information on the current threat and future prevention.

TEW Mission

Terrorism Early Warning (TEW) Groups constitute a multilateral, multidisciplinary, networked effort. Each individual TEW shares the following attributes:

Serves as the focal point for analyzing the strategic and operational information needed to respond to terrorism and protect critical infrastructure;
Responsible for information sharing and intelligence fusion;
Performs net assessments to aid mission planning, decision-making, and allocation of resources in support of incident command during actual events.

Collectively individual TEWs form a node in the TEW network. The overaching mission for individual TEWs and the collective network follows:

Overarching TEW Mission

To develop operational intelligence for area of operations, and contribute to the co-production of intelligence across the TEW and intelligence fusion community in order to prevent, counter and respond to terrorism,violenceand social vices causing threats by conducting indications and warning and operational net assessment.

(Source: National TEW Resource Center, FEB 2006)

Sharing Intelligence

The 9/11 Commission Report illustrated some shortcomings in intelligence sharing. The TEW's are examples of state and local efforts that provide a mechanism for the collection, analysis and sharing of information. As the National Terrorism Early Warning Integration Center is being stood up in Los Angeles new ideas in intelligence collection analysis and sharing are being developed at the Federal level in the form of an Intellipedia, and at the local levels in their own wiki as well. The Wiki is the perfect platform, offering the tracking of information change, easy hyper liking and searching, document repository and retrieval and open access within the parameters set by the administration.

DHS Links

TEW BRIEF^{dead link} - “...The Department of Homeland Security will vigorously pursue our detection and prevention mission. . .Today we are significantly safer because, as a Nation, we are more aware of the threat of terrorism and more vigilant about confronting it.”

Secretary Tom Ridge Department of Homeland Security

Homeland Security Advisory Council and Lessons Learned