Information technology solutions are likely to be the primary ingredient in nationwide efforts to let state and local authorities share police reports on activity judged to be suspicious and potentially linked to terrorism.
Authorities say local police efforts to record and share activities that could be related to terrorism are critical to the government’s counterterrorism effort. However, the specifics of how thousands of jurisdictions will record the reports and then share them through IT systems with federal counterterrorism officials remain open questions.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE) is leading the national Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) initiative. In January, the office released standards for SARs that are to be shared across the national Information Sharing Environment, or ISE-SARs.
An initial privacy and civil liberties analysis for the PM-ISE-led effort, released last month, provides detail of a yearlong evaluation project that will test various technologies and workflows for the ISE-SAR process at 12 sites nationwide.
According to the study, authorities are not trying to create a single system for accessing or storing ISE-SARs. Instead, they are taking a federated approach, allowing jurisdictions to operate their chosen systems. However, those systems must comply with an enterprise architecture and use common data standards to manage user access to the different systems.
State and local intelligence fusion centers and FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) will also play a role in determining whether information qualifies as an ISE-SAR. Establishing the needed policies to make the systems work together is a challenge for federal and local authorities.
The government is testing suspicious-activity reporting processes and measuring how the ISE-SAR standards further the government’s counterterrorism goals. The evaluation process, called the ISE-SAR Evaluation Environment, seeks to test various aspects and technologies in the ISE-SAR process. One concept under consideration is a PM-ISE project called Shared Spaces. Participants post ISE-SARs through a fusion center’s shared space so other authorities can view it.
Once the jurisdictions involved standardize access, system certification and accreditation rules and apply them to the system, users will have access to information across those shared spaces rather than having to use multiple systems.
Meanwhile, officials also will test SARs sharing by using the FBI’s eGuardian system, which is designed to enable state and local law enforcement authorities to share suspicious-activity reports with the FBI’s JTTF at a nonsecret level.
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
