BOSTON (AP) – Gov. Mitt Romney on Friday called for more organized collection and distribution of intelligence about terrorism threats, saying a fake tip that surfaced last month showed the need for better communication of terrorism-related information.

“There were so many failings all along the line that it’s impossible to point the finger at any one place,” Romney said, referring to last month’s dirty bomb scare in Boston.

Romney made his remarks to state, federal and Canadian homeland security officials and police during an address Friday morning to a meeting of the Northeast Regional Homeland Security Directors in Boston.

In his comments, Romney said intelligence gathering deserves “more focus, more energy, and more funding,” and discussed recent recommendations from a task force of the National Homeland Security Advisory Council, on which he serves.

Among its recommendations, the task force called for state “fusion centers” to collect anti-terrorist intelligence. The centers would collect and analyze information from local agencies, be they police, housing authorities or other entities.

The recommendations also called for a single line of communication between federal and state officials, so that law enforcement officials don’t get conflicting information about threats.

Information and analysis should flow in both directions, Romney said, so that states will know whether federal authorities consider threats credible or not, and whether the information should be passed on to the public.

“We’re all just sort of flying by the seat of our pants instead of having very carefully thought-through protocols: What information is communicated, who is it communicated to? How does it go from that to the next site, and who’s responsible?” he said.

Quebec’s Minister of Public Security, Jacques Chagnon, who was present for Romney’s comments, said that centralized intelligence sharing works, and is currently in place in Quebec and Ontario. Quebec also shares information with authorities in bordering U.S. states of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

“It’s something that we understand very well. We have worked very much on this question for the last two years,” he said. “It’s the best way to do things, by far.”

Last month, local, state and federal agencies mobilized – and Romney canceled his plans to attend President Bush’s inaugural – when a tip surfaced that a group of people who crossed over into the U.S. over the Mexico border planned to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in Boston.

That incident turned out to be a false alarm, apparently the result of a dispute involving the smuggling of illegal immigrants over the border.

Public Safety Secretary Ed Flynn agreed that better coordination of intelligence was needed, to avoid alarming the public and creating confusion among local responders.

“What he’s advocating for is some centralization of information, so that we’re all speaking with one voice and we’re calling our plays from the same play book,” he said.

A spokesman for the FBI, which did not have a representative at Friday’s meeting, declined to comment.

Juliette Kayyem, a homeland security expert at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said the bogus dirty bomb scare was a “disaster,” and demonstrates the need for reform of domestic intelligence gathering.

But the incident also begs the question of why, more than three years after Sept. 11, the country’s intelligence system remains rife with problems, she said.

“We are dealing with a country that still doesn’t have a single terrorism watch list,” she said. The task force recommendations are “certainly doable, but it begs a question of, why isn’t this getting done? That’s a bigger question.”

AP-ES-02-11-05 1755EST