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GCN Home > 09/25/06 issue

Intel leaders try to think alike on sharing

Plans include consolidating network links, filters and building data sharing into EAs

By Wilson P. Dizard III, GCN Staff

Intelligence community leaders recently unveiled new information-sharing technologies that promise to consolidate links among secret networks, co-opt IT projects into enterprise architecture and launch innovative knowledge distribution systems.

One sign of the cultural and technological shift is the recently established Cross Domain Management Office.

Dale Meyerrose, CIO for the Director of National Intelligence Office, said the new office would dramatically reduce the number of “trusted guard boxes,” or gates that filter information passing among classified networks and databases.

“These things are developed, but there are too many of them developed,” Meyerrose said in a recent meeting with reporters. “So many of them that we don’t have standards.”

The gates shunt and filter information across top secret, secret, unclassified, and international databases and networks, he noted. “There are over a thousand of these kind of things in all of our networks,” Meyerrose said.

Each of the gates sucks away resources, he said. They require version updates, vulnerability assessments and other types of maintenance.

Meyerrose and Pentagon CIO John Grimes jointly established, funded and staffed the new office, Meyerrose said. “The strategy is the following: Put sundown clauses on all but about 20 of these [hundreds of gates between classified systems]. Some of those sundown clauses will take effect in a few weeks, because we have a ready solution in the 20 that are left.” The gates each have an acronym and have all been designed independently, usually as hardware and software projects to shield information and restrict its transfer.

The next phase of the CDMO project could involve keeping the 20 gates, consolidating them to one system, or creating a “son or daughter” cross-domain solution set, Meyerrose said.

“Technology is going to change, so we are going to need something other than these 20, so, how do we adapt to that,” Meyerrose said. “That’s the strategy they are going to come up with. Then, there is a small [research and development] piece which looks to keep us on the leading edge of technological thinking about government information-sharing.”

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Content / Record Management, Knowledge Management, Management, IT Management



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