White House Weighs Proposals To Improve Info Sharing
The White House is seriously considering proposals by a bipartisan task force to prevent lapses in information sharing among agencies that have allowed some terrorist plots to go undetected, according to members of the nonprofit panel.
A task force assembled by the Markle Foundation, a New York-based think tank that studies health information technology and security issues, recommended last week that the government expand the deployment of technologies that make it easy to probe existing information in agency databases to preempt attacks such as the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airplane on Christmas Day, Nextgov.com reported.
The proposals, which are based on past reports by the Task Force on National Security in the Information Age, were submitted to the House Judiciary Committee on March 24. The panel held a hearing that day to discuss improving information-sharing to prevent attacks such as the Christmas Day incident and the mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, which killed 13 people. The bipartisan task force, which was established in 2002, includes information technology executives, policymakers, public interest advocates and specialists in privacy, intelligence and national security. It advises all levels of government on the use of terrorism-related information.
Markle recommended agencies use persistent queries, which remember users' search terms. They work something like cookies, which are common applications on Web sites that companies use to track and remember user preferences. For example, if a user in January typed "John Doe" to review his visa application, and, in June another user types "John Doe" to review the individual's status as a foreign student, the previous user would be alerted that the June inquiry was made. The awareness of a connection allows new information to be put in a context that may warrant action.
In a January memo President Obama ordered the intelligence community to repair systemic weaknesses identified after the failed Christmas Day bombing. He called on the director of national intelligence to immediately clarify the role of analytics in "synchronizing, correlating and analyzing all sources of intelligence related to terrorism" and to speed IT upgrades to improve "knowledge discovery, database integration, cross-database searches and the ability to correlate biographic information with terrorism-related intelligence."
To facilitate piecing together disparate information, the task force recommended data be tagged with standardized information that can be indexed and searched. Markle also proposed deploying an authorized use standard that would permit users to discover certain data exists without gaining access to its contents. The searcher could ask the appropriate owners of the data to investigate the contents. But a 2008 study that Congress requested determined this solution was not a viable option because it conflicted with privacy laws, regulations and executive orders. To read more, click here.
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