Removing Barriers to Information Sharing

It's good to be back ...

Could not pass by a wonderfully written piece in the latest edition of Federal Computer Week: Alan Joch addresses several key challenges to effective information sharing in the intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security areas, as well as solutions to dealing with them.

A couple of noteworthy quotes:

Challenge: Inadequate vetting and feedback
Local law enforcement incident reports, quickly becoming the first line of defense against criminal activity, could distribute inaccuracies throughout data-sharing networks or, conversely, represent missed opportunities.

For example, a police officer might question a driver who has stopped his vehicle outside a nuclear facility, ostensibly to check a mechanical problem with his car. Even though no formal police action might be warranted, the officer describes the encounter and enters the driver’s name and license number in a field report. The incident could prove to be insignificant, or it might help reveal a pattern of suspicious activity if officers in other areas match it to similar activities at nearby power plants.

The above presents itself as a niche for the pattern recognition projects mentioned in my earlier posts.

Challenge: Protecting privacy
...
Questions can arise when agencies acquire aggregated information from commercial data brokers...

New distributed data management architectures might be better suited to the task of reducing privacy risks than older data-sharing approaches that rely on centralized data warehouses run by the government and fed by federal, local and state users.