U.S. government to take counterterrorism local
The federal government says local police efforts to record and share activities that could be related to terrorism are critical to the government’s counterterrorism effort; the creation and coordination of a uniform system of reporting among thousands of jurisdictions is a problem, though
Information technology solutions will likely be the primary ingredient in nationwide efforts to let U.S. state and local authorities share police reports on activity judged to be suspicious and potentially linked to terrorism. FCW’s Ben Bain writes that authorities say local police efforts to record and share activities that could be related to terrorism are critical to the government’s counterterrorism effort. 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 twelve sites nationwide.
Bain says that 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. Those systems, however, 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.
