We see news headlines everyday in which law enforcement officers take down drug rings, capture violent criminals, and protect our communities. These news articles, however, don’t showcase the law enforcement analysts who toil tirelessly to gather and analyze the bits and pieces of information to support these criminal and homeland security investigation successes.
During the month of May, two of our important mission partners are commemorated during Military Appreciation Month and National Police Week. As the national office for responsible information sharing charged with supporting our Nation’s counterterrorism and homeland security missions, we at PM-ISE salute our nation’s law enforcement and military professionals and their families. National Police Week
When it comes to information sharing in the criminal justice domain, names can create confusion. This was especially true for what was the National Information Exchange Federation (NIEF).
As President of the National Fusion Center Association, I want to tell the nation about the hard work that our fusion centers do every day to protect citizens across the United States. Usually in the background, the dedicated men and women who work in fusion centers are always ready to surge to support a crisis. Last week reminded us all of the continued threats and need for fusion centers.
Since August 2012, the NIEM community has been working on NIEM Version 3.0—the next major release of the NIEM model. The last time we had a major new release was 2007! NIEM 3.0 is on schedule to launch in fall 2013! As a community-driven program, NIEM relies on its stakeholders to provide feedback on major developments such as Version 3.0. So…be sure to mark your calendars and tell your NIEM friends! The anticipated release of NIEM 3.0 Alpha 2 for broad public review is April 19—stay tuned!
We recently gathered with over 100 government, industry, and non-profit professionals to brainstorm and debate information sharing and safeguarding standards and frameworks at the Workshop for Information Sharing and Safeguarding Standards (WIS3). Below is a brief summary of some of the challenges and solutions that government and industry leaders discussed at WIS3. This is by no means comprehensive, though, and we plan to release more robust outlines of the challenges that our community faces and our plans for solutions soon.
At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we are committed to ensuring secure and timely access to information critical to our mission. To this end, we have updated our Information Sharing Segment Architecture (ISSA) to provide a roadmap that guides our implementation and investment efforts in information sharing, while developing the Information Sharing Environment (ISE) for the homeland security enterprise.
Our mission is to advance responsible information sharing–not by building a system or mandating policy, but by convening government agencies, engaging industry and other partners, and supporting their information sharing efforts. One of the main ways we do this is by promoting adoption of technical standards throughout government and industry so that more information sharing capabilities are built in to systems from the beginning.
We’d like to commend our many partners in OMB, DHS, GSA, DOD, NIST, and the White House who will be recognized tonight by Federal Computer Week for a Federal 100 Award: The Federal 100 Awards recognize government and industry leaders who have played pivotal roles in the federal government IT community—individuals who have gone above and beyond their daily responsibilities and have made a difference in the way technology has transformed their agency or accelerated their agency's mission.
Early last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and two other members of the intelligence community began a data exchange pilot program with support from the office of the Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment. The goal of the pilot was to not only develop a successful data exchange methodology for these agencies, but also to track best practices and lessons learned with the intent to share them with other federal agencies and ultimately expand responsible federal information sharing.
