Data sharing among local, state, and federal law enforcement grows

and terrorism is evolving faster than the public’s understanding or the laws intended to check government power and protect civil liberties, authorities said. Three decades ago, Congress imposed limits on domestic intelligence activity after revelations that the FBI, Army, local police, and others had misused their authority for years to build troves of personal dossiers and monitor political activists and other law-abiding Americans. Since those reforms, police and federal authorities have observed a wall between law enforcement information-gathering, relating to crimes and prosecutions, and more open-ended intelligence that relates to national security and counterterrorism. That wall is fast eroding following the passage of laws expanding surveillance authorities, the push for information-sharing networks, and the expectation that local and state police will play larger roles as national security sentinels.

Law enforcement and federal security authorities said these developments, along with a new willingness by police to share information, hold out the promise of fulfilling post-9/11 mandates to connect the dots and root out signs of threats before attacks can occur. “A guy that’s got a flat tire outside a nuclear facility in one location means nothing,” said Thomas Bush III, the FBI’s assistant director of the criminal justice information services division. “Run the guy and he’s had a flat tire outside of five nuclear facilities and you have a clue.” In a paper called “Intelligence-Led Policing: The New Intelligence Architecture,” law enforcement authorities working with the Justice Department said officers “‘on the beat’ are an excellent resource for gathering information on all kinds of potential threats and vulnerabilities. Despite the many definitions of ‘intelligence’ that have been promulgated over the years, the simplest and clearest of these is ‘information plus analysis equals intelligence,’” the paper said.

Efforts by federal authorities to create national networks have had mixed success to date. The federal government has long successfully operated programs such as the Regional Information Sharing System, which enables law enforcement agencies to communicate, and the National Crime Information Center, an index of criminal justice information that police across the country can access. Though successful, those systems offer a relatively limited look at existing records. A DHS project to expand sharing substantially, called the Information Network, has been plagued by cost overruns, poor planning and ambivalence on the part of local and state authorities, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Almost every state has established organizations known as intelligence fusion centers to