Government agencies like FBI, NSA and CIA had created walls around themselves. There were boundaries in the operations of each agency like the FBI was the only agency allowed to spy American soil. All this resulted to calls to and from terrorists were not monitored with the notion that the other party might be American. This policy beauraucracies posed a major challenge in anticipation of the attacks (Winkler, 2005).
Another complication came from executive failures. The laws used for counter terrorism before 9/11 were formulated for the 20th Century. Threats in the 20th Century were from nations and not organized groups like Al Qaeda. The legislative organs had not formulated a good balance between individual rights and law enforcement. Individuals were advantaged at the expense of law enforcement. For instance, one could not be arrested or tracked if he/she had not moved from advocating to activating a criminal plan. Congress also did too little to address weaknesses in institutions (Copeland, 2007). There was little effort made to form an integrated terrorism policy. Congress had not prioritized matters concerning terrorism. This went a long way in causing difficulty in anticipation of the attacks.
There was lack of inter and intra agency sharing of information. This lack of sharing of crucial information has been viewed as one of the most crucial failures that led to the attacks. Different agencies need to be coordinated properly to form a strong counter terrorism force. This problem was both horizontal and vertical. Information from different departments in the FBI failed to be shared as well as in different agencies. Agencies were thus unaware of the happening in other departments. This miscommunication made a total of three urgent pieces of information pass unnoticed before the 9/11 attacks. The lack of sharing of such crucial information further led to ill-preparedness for the attacks (Copeland, 2007).