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GCN Home > 04/21/03 issue

Who has the information you need?

By Wilson P. Dizard III, GCN Staff

Homeland security effort sets stage for wide-ranging data exchange

Around the office, around the city, around the state, around the nation, around the globe—agencies have struggled to share information since, well, the country’s founding. Computers haven’t removed the hurdles, just changed the nature of the challenge.

But following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the government gave renewed emphasis to the sharing of information among the many agencies pitching in on domestic defense. Agencies had to exchange data—and they had to do so quickly, electronically and securely.

Data exchange poses thorny issues for government, policywise, technically and culturally.

In this and two subsequent articles, GCN analyzes how the government is revamping policies to encourage cooperation among agencies, how agencies are grappling with the technological challenges, and how culture shapes the collaborative environment. This first installment of the three-part series is an overview of the difficulties confronting officials.

For starters, forging an effective Homeland Security Department out of 170,000 employees and 22 agencies calls for an unprecedented overhaul of data-sharing policies and systems.

The complexity of the effort is magnified during wartime, as the military sectors of the intelligence community have worked to hone their data-sharing capabilities.

For example, the Defense Intelligence Agency last year established the Joint Intelligence Task Force–Combating Terrorism to improve analysis and production in worldwide counterterrorist projects. Task force analysts produce daily terror threat assessments for the Defense Department.

All together now

In crafting an information-sharing policy, Homeland Security faces several challenges. It must tie together its own disparate agencies in a unified network, and it must coordinate its relations with other federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies charged with gathering, analyzing and disseminating information about terrorism. Perhaps the new department’s most difficult task will be to create networks that share sensitive information with state and local agencies without jeopardizing intelligence sources.

Richard H. Ward III, deputy director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Assistance, cited the policy barriers to in-formation sharing as the most daunting problems in the field, even more challenging than technology issues.

More news on related topics: Defense IT, Enterprise Architecture, Management