Last week, the White House issued a new directive providing instructions for standardizing the methods employed by federal agencies to collect, maintain and share biometric data such as fingerprints and other physiological or behavioral characteristics of suspected terrorists.

Essentially, the National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD-59) on “Biometrics for Identification and Screening to Enhance National Security” forces intelligence agencies to make their systems interoperable with one another.  The effort will enable all agencies to run analyses on all biometric data collected by any agency.      

“Many agencies already collect biographic and biometric information in their identification and screening processes...Through integrated processes and interoperable systems, agencies shall, to the fullest extent permitted by law, make available to other agencies all biometric and associated biographic and contextual information associated with persons for whom there is an articulable and reasonable basis for suspicion that they pose a threat to national security.”

Because each intelligence agency has its own networks and data repositories, intelligence officers often have a difficult time piecing together facts and suppositions from varying agencies that, in the aggregate, could provide clues as to the intentions of U.S. enemies. 

The new initiate, a positive step in eliminating technical hurdles and bureaucratic stovepiping within the intelligence community, will be executed and overseen by the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, in coordination with the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The inability or unwillingness to share information was recognized as an Intelligence Community weakness by both the 9/11 Commission and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Commission. Since then, initiatives that promote collaboration between security agencies over competition are becoming more the trend than the exception. 

In 2004, the President issued Executive Order 13356, Strengthening the Sharing of Terrorism Information to Protect Americans. The order directed agencies to give the "highest priority" to the prevention of terrorism and the "interchange of terrorism information [both] among agencies" and "between agencies and appropriate authorities of States and local governments."  Its guidance called for creating the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) - the primary organization in the United States Government (USG) for integrating, analyzing, and strategically planning all intelligence activities pertaining to terrorism and counterterrorism.

Later that year, Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA), which reorganized the Intelligence Community and established the position of Director of National Intelligence to serve as the President's Chief Intelligence Advisor and the head of the Intelligence Community.  

The bill also called for President to create the Information Sharing Environment (ISE), an organization whose sole purpose is to facilitate the sharing of terrorism, homeland security, and law enforcement information related to terrorism within and among all levels of governments and the private sector, and at all levels of security classifications.  

Breakthroughs in information sharing within the intelligence community have followed with the design and launch of the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM). The system was designed to resolve the issue of varying software systems being unable to talk to one another and share information. In essence, it is a go-between that enables agencies to keep the systems they have in place while also integrating them with the systems of outside agencies. 

First proposed by the U.S. Department of Justice, GJXDM was released in 2003. "By 2004, there were projects all across the country using it," said Paul Wormeli, executive director of the Integrated Justice Information System Institute, a public-private partnership that helped develop the standard.

The next innovation came from development of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), a database that facilitates data sharing beyond law enforcement to the areas of justice, public safety, intelligence, homeland security, and emergency and disaster management.  Like the GJXDM, the system synchronizes a common language between varying intelligence databases.

"The beauty of NIEM is that it preserves the legacy systems. We're building middleware,"  said Wormeli.

Computer World reports that the solutions provided by these technologies only meet half the needs.  The other hurdle to overcome stems from the inability of intelligence agencies to access incident reports.

"Agencies share information on criminals and arrest records with the FBI, but the incident reports, which detail the crimes, remain isolated in thousands of federal, state, county and local record management systems. Those records, consisting of structured and unstructured data, are the lifeblood of investigations, says Maj. Chris Brown of the Oregon State Police.

Although 75% of police agencies use automated systems to store those records, less than 25% of those systems are capable of sharing that information, says Dan Hawkins, director of public safety programs at Search, a national consortium of state agencies that promotes information sharing."

In March 2007, the Department of Justice and the FBI began creating a national data exchange network to centralize access to national, state, local, and tribal incident and case reports, as well as arrest, incarceration and parole records.  In the first and current phase of the $85 million project, the database will access about 100 million records, later expanding its capacity to 250 million records.  

While its clear huge strides have been made in making information universally accessible from and between intelligence and security organizations, there is clearly a long road of improvement ahead before all the cyber-fortresses established by decades of agency-centric policymaking are properly torn down.  As the computer architecture geniuses reconstruct this new digital security world, it's important to stop and recognize the success made thus far and the hard work of those who engineered the efforts.   

Hat tips:
 

Steve Aftergood at Secrecy News, a project of the Federation of American Scientists.