At the same time, there are still many challenges to face before information sharing becomes de riguer across local, state, national and international boundaries. To better understand and communicate these issues, i2 hosted an information sharing panel at its Americas User Conference earlier this month.

Panelists included Kathleen O’Toole, the Chief Inspector of the Garda Síochána Inspectorate in Ireland, who was previously the Boston, Mass., Police Commissioner. During her time in Boston, she was critical to the founding of the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), one of the nation’s first fusion centers. Deputy Chief Troy Smith of the Grand Junction Police Department in Colorado also offered up his expertise gleaned from his department’s organization  in getting Colorado to be one of the states that has successfully established information sharing state-wide. Tim Riley, a current i2 SVP and former CIO for the Los Angeles Police Department, played a large role in establishing information sharing agreements between the LAPD, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and Orange County.  Chriss Knisley, the i2 Assistant Vice President for the COPLINK product line was also in attendance to discuss the technological standpoint of information sharing. i2’s Director of Corporate Communications Mitch Derman moderated the session.

While discussing the solutions to the major pain points in information sharing, the panellists touched on one basic requirement at all levels: the critical need for collaboration. Whether it be between operations and analysts or the federal government and local police departments, it is imperative that the primary goal must be to create a safe environment for citizens and law enforcement officers alike. Deputy Chief Smith and Riley agreed that the inroads that have already been taken toward information sharing are light years ahead of where things used to be earlier in their careers.  However until collaboration and a willingness to share becomes the norm, there are still challenges to tackle.

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of collaboration is the need to build relationships.  Chief Inspector O’Toole heartily stressed the importance of uniting operational sworn police officers with the more traditional back-office analysts. Regardless of the environment in which they interact, it is important to train analysts and sworn officers to work together, ask the right questions, and understand the value of using analysis in investigations. She believes that the best way to solve this problem is to bring the two sides together. O’Toole expressed that,  “At the end of the day, it’s all about relationships and co-locating people to the greatest extent possible in some of these centers to work on different operations together… the more time analysts spend with operations people the stronger the relationship and the more valuable the relationship becomes. The BRIC was my pet project, and I spent a lot of time there, and walking through it, one wouldn’t know who was sworn and who wasn’t sworn because analysts were valued as much as the sworn personnel.”

Deputy Chief Smith also emphasized the importance of communication, particularly within and across communities and organizations, to combat the stigma against sharing private information. The recent tragic shootings in Arizona provided a prime example of small pieces of information located in disparate sources that prevented the experts  from being able to access all the puzzle pieces to see the broader picture.  Deputy Chief Smith recognized this as an ongoing issue and organized a forum in Grand Junction, Colo., with public and private organizations to discuss how they could combat such a complicated scenario.  By instigating a collaboration of various members of the community, it not only brought awareness to both law enforcement officials but others such as schools and health center officials who are normally unable or unwilling to share information. Already Grand Junction has seen  noticeable results from their forum. Deputy Chief Smith remarked that “we’ve had some people at a mental health hospital notice certain behaviors, and they were capable of sharing that information in a way that didn’t violate their agreements. Previously they may not have known to call or that we would have been interested in that information.”

Fear of widespread access to private information is one of the largest inhibitors against the adoption of information sharing. Fortunately, through the creation of extensive audit trails and security protocols, Riley and Knisley believe this can be overcome. Records exist for every attempted access to private information to know who is accessing it and what exactly they are looking at. Knisley added that, “In regards to the effective use of information, people are going to think a little bit more about accessing information system that they know is logged. People are not going to log in and search for someone they might get in trouble for later if they know their name is attached to it.”

Your insights are welcome on this important topic.

i2 CEO Bob Griffin

With the nation’s debt ceiling looming, it has become clear that members of Congress on both sides of the aisle will not agree to new borrowing unless government spending cuts are included in that authorization. But when it comes to reducing outlays, the programs that make up the lion’s share of spending, and which are also the most contentious – nondiscretionary spending like entitlements and health care – are often put off for another day. If we’re going to have a meaningful, long-term impact on the fiscal well-being of our economy, this can’t continue. Fortunately, we have an option available that can make an immediate difference on one of the biggest budget busters, without eliminating any programs or forcing tough choices – tackling health care fraud by leveraging existing technologies.

Health care-related fraud, including fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid claims, costs taxpayers as much as $100 billion each year. Recently, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) charged 111 people in nine cities, including doctors and nurses, for more than $225 million in false billing. These fraudulent claims increase health care costs for all Americans.

One of the best strategies for fighting this drain may be a surprising one: taking existing technologies that are currently catching criminals, stopping terrorists, and mapping the intricacies of insurgent networks – and leverage them to combat health care fraud.

The challenge is the same for both types of criminal activity: processing and analyzing huge amounts of data to identify patterns, trends and individual criminals. In the case of Medicare and Medicaid, the trillions of transactions that happen every year are particularly ripe to be analyzed. This is because health care claims are essentially pieces of “structured data.” Each claim includes the same basic information, such as diagnosis and treatment, and this type of data lends itself especially well to analysis of fraud patterns.

But the power of these technologies really lies in their scale – identifying patterns based on large amounts of data. The impact and benefit could be exponentially bigger if there was a concerted effort, across agencies and organizations, to scale up the implementation of these tools.

If we cut even half of annual Medicaid and Medicare fraud, we’ll go a long way towards achieving Congress’ target reductions in spending. Moreover, this is a long-term fix, one that will continue to remove costs from the system for decades. 

Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, cutting-edge software and technologies are using data analysis to provide actionable intelligence that is protecting Americans from terrorism.  These technologies can, and should, be employed in a similar fashion to protect our health care system and our government’s fiscal stability for generations to come.

The article reads as if law enforcement agencies are now privy to entire new categories of information on citizens.  It seems like there is a deliberate assault on civil liberties.  In actuality, the only thing new is the speed and ease with which disparate pieces of potentially related data can be aggregated and fused.  Technology has enabled this to happen.  Simply put, law enforcement is more efficient.  This is not an issue of information access or gathering, but an issue of technology advancement and speed.

Case in point: the article describes how automatic license plate readers can lead to instant information at the fingertips of a cop on patrol.  But license plates are public information and police have always noted tag numbers.  At the same time, information linking the vehicle registrant to that plate number is available in a database.  And information on the vehicle registrant also resides in a database containing outstanding warrants.  All of this information has always been there.  With technology, police are now able to tie it all together instantly.  That’s effective and efficient law enforcement.  And the patrolman’s behavior is governed by strict requirements designed to protect civil liberties.  Cops, fusion center directors, and the FBI aren’t out to deprive citizens of their constitutional liberties.  They’re out to do their job – protecting citizens – which their bosses, policy makers, and communities all expect them to do well.   

Suspicious Activity Reporting can be considered in the same light.  SAR is another label for “tips” and “leads”.  As a concept there’s nothing really new about it.  Someone sees suspicious behavior and reports it to authorities (this happens all the time).  Sometimes the tip pans out and a crime is prevented.  And often the police have to contend with erroneous tips, false alarms and dead ends.  What has changed is the ease with which analysts and officers can discern fact from fiction.  Again, this is technology-enabled efficiency in law enforcement.  Relevant evidence is connected more easily, accurate leads are generated more quickly, and comprehensive information is funneled faster to the right analysts for further investigation. 

Law enforcement and intelligence personnel take an oath to support and defend the Constitution; this includes the protection of privacy and preservation of civil rights.  At the same time, these men and women are also entrusted with an obligation to protect American citizens – a job that increasingly involves complicated, multijurisdictional investigations and data-heavy analysis.  The ability to process the greatest amount of information and share it with the right people is critical to ensuring the pin-point accuracy that preserves the liberties of the innocent – and the protection of the public.

By Charlotte Davies, Intelligence Analyst, EIA

Recently, I was interested to read about a physicist named John Archibald Wheeler. One of Wheeler’s theories was (put very basically) that everything is information. Meaning, literally, everything is information – that the deepest foundations of the universe are ultimately made up of nuggets of information, corresponding to a vast chorus of “yes” or “no” binary choices, from which all physical existence flows.

So this word ‘information’ no longer merely suggests something like ‘facts’ or ‘knowledge’. As information philosophy explains it, the word has now expanded to mean something greater – something that can even be described in biological, metaphysical, even cosmological terms. It’s said we’re living in an information age. In recent times, the concept of information has mutated to symbolise and represent many different things, and come to guide us into myriad new ways of thinking and doing. Likewise, in the enforcement world, the understanding that information exists, that it can be captured, expanded and enhanced to enable appropriate responses to illegal activity has also undergone an expansion in recent years.

This blog shows you that EIA has many activities, works with many tools. The gathering, analysing and sharing of information to identify and combat environmental crime is one shade in its palette. In the enforcement world, these processes use raw information as the starting ingredient; they connect, unite and enhance pieces of information into a more cohesive whole, called intelligence. The result of these actions should be a picture or a portrait of crime; where it’s happening, due to whom – and how to combat it. Intelligence-led action relies on profiling, investigation and consideration of targets – not random or superficial activity that isn’t informed by the situation on the ground. As EIA’s work cross-cuts enforcement and conservation concerns, we believe that intelligence-led enforcement is one thing which will help to preserve endangered species.

By linking different pieces of intelligence, a web of associations springs up. This composite i2® chart shows trans-Himalayan connections in the skin trade, revealed through skin seizure events and telephone records. EIA has used this tool to show the transnational nature of the skin trade to campaign for greater enforcement and international cooperation. Copyright EIA.

Faced with a haemorrhage of species from some of the most biodiverse areas on earth, we ask enforcement agencies to develop their applications of intelligence. Because we have seen that borders pose few barriers to a sophisticated and organised global trade, we ask that enforcement agencies and governments communicate, and share their information to dig down to the roots of the illegal trade, to effect substantial and lasting change.

EIA’s own investigations have shown that those perpetuating the illegal trade operate within sophisticated and fluid networks. By necessity these are covert, shadowy, difficult to penetrate. Because EIA campaigns for change to protect the natural world from abuse perpetuated by networks such as these, we use i2® intelligence analysis software to depict the nature of criminal associations and transactions to governments and enforcement agencies.

It’s my hope that enforcement responses to environmental crime might reflect features that have been ascribed to the natural world. Vigour is needed, co-operation also. Some range states now have dedicated wildlife crime enforcement units; there are information sharing networks are operating. But species decline continues. The kingpins continue to operate undeterred. Traders tell us they anticipate increased demand for tiger skins in this, the Year of the Tiger.

The fabric of issues impacting upon environmental crime is complex. Decision makers need to dig deep into what causes and perpetuates these problems, and make real commitments to change. So in the Year of the Tiger and beyond, let information be transformed into intelligent enforcement.

i2 Booth at IACP 2010

While some policy and process hurdles remain to make information sharing a larger reality nationwide, the technology exists today to make it happen. 

“Using this technology is what our community expects of us,” said Irvine, Calif., Police Chief Dave Maggard.  “If we have the technology available to keep communities safer and catch more criminals, that’s what our mandate should be as law enforcement personnel and it’s something we can all rally around.”

Chief Maggard participated in an i2-sponsored information sharing panel discussion at the recent International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference.  Irvine is a key partner in Orange County’s information sharing system, which is managed by the Integrated Law and Justice Agency of Orange County (ILJAOC).  Built with i2’s COPLINK, it connects the County with Oregon, San Diego, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, Mesa, Ariz., Tucson, Ariz., Spokane, Wash., Sacramento, Calif., and Boston.  With almost a quarter billion records, it’s arguably the world’s largest law enforcement information sharing system.

“Information sharing is no longer a technology issue,” said Bob Griffin, i2 CEO.  “Those barriers have come down.  We’re seeing our customers make great strides in making sharing a reality.  It boils down to overcoming the cultural, political, protocol and process issues.”

The panelists stressed different ways to overcome the non-technology hurdles that still exist.  All agreed that technology is no longer the issue.  The keys to success revolve around people, resources and sustainability.  And it begins with engaging key stakeholders. 

“In Alaska, setting this up for success depended on strong advocates at all levels, including those that were persuasive and persistent throughout the process,” said Bob Griffiths, Executive Director of the Alaska Association of Chiefs of Police.

As the Director of the US DOJ, National Institute of Justice (NIJ), National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center in Alaska (NLECTC-AK), Griffiths was instrumental in helping implement Alaska’s Law Enforcement Information Sharing System (ALEISS) that includes 80 agencies.  Using COPLINK, it was the first statewide information sharing program.

Aligning the stakeholders can include experts you would not necessarily expect.  Chief Maggard and the ILJAOC involved city mangers, city attorneys, records personnel and even the public defender’s office.  The goal was complete transparency of the process.

“A major key to success is to identify the full scope up front and have a sustainability plan for information sharing projects,” said Tim Riley, former CIO of the Los Angeles Police Department and now a Senior Vice President at i2.

While with the LAPD, Riley played a pivotal role in implementing a sharing initiative within the Department that brought together four disparate records management systems and linking it with the ILJAOC. 

In Alaska, according to Griffiths, they were really smart about getting the technology up and running, but a “key lesson learned was the lack of a true sustainability plan to keep the system going well into the future as it is challenging to go back to the table and get the additional funding.  You want to do that up front.”  That said, Griffiths is confident that he and his peers can leverage the success they’ve had to keep the program intact.

And speaking of success, immediate ROI is achievable once the technology is up and running. Examples include:

• Alaska — One of the smaller agencies had a pawn shop report about two individuals that stole two rifles and disappeared.  There was limited information including a tattoo that said “Alaska.”  That information was entered into the COPLINK system and only two people came up, with one living nearby.  Since that person had an extensive record, officials were able to identify his associates easily.  The search only took four hours. 
• Los Angeles – There was a serial robbery case that became increasingly violent with every incident.  The only data had been a partial license plate that was inadvertently transcribed.  That information was put into COPLINK. Two of the plate letters – even though they had been transcribed incorrectly – led to identifying a suspect who was caught in the act.  Twenty robbery cases were closed that day and would have otherwise remained unsolved without information sharing in place.   
• Irvine – A donation box for a non-profit was stolen from a fast food restaurant.  CCTV footage caught a video of a suspect that had a tattoo.  A flyer was created based on the CCTV image.  A dispatcher taking initiative entered the distinctive tattoo information into COPLINK and found a match. 

“The great thing about sharing is that you can look at relationships between individuals who may have only spent a fraction of time together, but creates additional leads that you would never have had with a single or multiple record management systems,” said Griffiths.

The panel at IACP was moderated by Lauri Stevens, founder of LAwS Communications and the ConnectedCops blog.

For more information about i2, visit http://www.i2group.com/.

Initially, fusion centers were seen as a top-down approach where national-level intelligence was pushed down to the state level.  However, over the last five years, local and national law enforcement agencies have recognized the value that human sensor input can add to the intelligence mix.  For instance, state, local and tribal police collect information in the course of their normal work-day and enter it into the systems they use throughout the day.

Consider a simple hypothetical scenario. A local police officer tickets a man, parked where he shouldn’t be, who is taking photographs of an oil refinery (he says it’s for a school project). A couple of days later, on the other side of the facility in the adjacent jurisdiction, a state police officer encounters a different man in the same vehicle, also photographing the facility, but this time with a flat tire as an excuse for stopping where he shouldn’t.  Individually, these incidents would most likely be considered minor events. But if the two officers’ reports are pooled, with the right analytical tools, a fusion center analyst can be immediately alerted to uncover patterns, trends and connections between them that might otherwise remain hidden until too late.

While the above scenario is possible from a technology perspective, there are several obstacles that keep agencies and police departments from sharing information — whether it’s about protecting information, lacking technical knowhow or lacking the resources to do so.

“The reality is that local jurisdictions cannot wait for the Department of Homeland Security to inform them of suspicious activity in their area or for local police to request specific case assistance,” said Tim Riley, senior vice president of Business Development at i2.

Riley, former CIO of the Los Angeles Police Department led the deployment of one of the world’s largest information sharing initiatives in law enforcement.  Built with i2 products, the system contains more than 250 million records that are accessible within seconds to all officers in Los Angeles and Orange County, Calif.  He worked closely with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) in launching a centralized database that tied their various systems together that led to the development of the Regional Terrorism Information and Integration System (RTIIS).

A case study published on search.org notes that the RTIIS has helped solve cases across jurisdictions and even state lines, ranging from burglary to tracking down a gang member and providing the Las Vegas Police Department with vital information that helped them secure a warrant for a narcotics dealer.  Captain Scott Edson of the LASD credits this success not only to the sharing of data, but also to the sharing of data that is collected from all levels — a multi-directional information flow.

Fusion centers were created following the 9/11 attacks as a joint effort between the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to ensure and facilitate collaboration and information sharing between local agencies, across state lines, and between the state and federal levels, with a particular emphasis on preventing and responding to terrorist and criminal activities.

More than 50 percent of fusion centers across the U.S. rely on i2 to help prevent and disrupt terrorist and criminal activity — all designed with protections for civil liberties.  To download a copy of i2’s “Fusion Centers and the Sharing of Intelligence” white paper, visit the premium content section of i2’s Web site, provide a valid e-mail address and choose a password.

By combining key pieces of the i2 Intelligence-Led Operations Platform with components of the Digital Sandbox platform, fusion centers, police departments and federal agencies will be able to:

• Better identify and asses critical infrastructure for risks.
• Leverage the combination of “human sensor” data from law enforcement data collection with automated open source monitoring and prioritization to identify risks.
• Conduct all-source analysis to mitigate threats.

Information Flow Between the Components

This diagram illustrates the information flow between the components and how each system leverages the information power of the other components. The data stored in a COPLINK node provides valuable information for use in the assessment of risk to critical infrastructure components. Within Digital Sandbox Risk Analysis Center, this information is combined with open source and proprietary information in order to assess critical infrastructure risks. The identified critical infrastructure is then pushed back to the COPLINK Activity Correlation Technology (ACT) module for automating suspicious activity alerting and reporting.

Once critical infrastructure is identified in ACT and monitoring begins, all law enforcement information geolocated to buffer zones around the critical infrastructure is evaluated and can be automatically pushed to the RAC where it is combined with open source monitoring to identify potential threats.

As potential threats are identified, the law enforcement data and open source data are available to analysts using Analyst’s Notebook to analyze the information for further action.

I’m personally very excited about this partnership and look forward to further endeavors with Digital Sandbox.  Check out Digital Sandbox’s blog entry on the combined solution as well.

Analyst’s Notebook and iBase are now pre-loaded with World-Check’s extensive database of Politically Exposed Persons (PEP’s) and heightened risk individuals and organisations.  The combination prvovides analysts with immediate access to the world’s most widely adopted open source research and the powerful tools they need to analyse the research in the context of a particular project or investigation.

Read the full press release.

The article mentions four counties that serve as “nodes” for hosting data for surrounding municipalities.  The model is a hybrid warehouse/federated approach that optimizes resources and connectivity and should serve as a model for nationwide information sharing initiatives.  In this approach, local agencies warehouse their data in a single location, which enables data consolidation for speed of access and sophisticated analytics.  Then warehouses are connected using a federated search and consolidation approach, which enables users of one warehouse to automatically search any warehouse they are authorized to search.  This approach is already in use in multiple jurisdictions, including Colorado, San Diego (ARJIS, also mentioned in the article, is a COPLINK node) and Los Angeles.  To learn more about COPLINK and information sharing, check out the recent webcast about one of the ways Captain Scott Edson and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department use COPLINK in southern California.   They are doing some pretty exciting things with suspicious activity identification and alerting to participate in the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) initiative.

The challenges to nationwide information sharing are a combination of technical and policy questions.  This approach allows agencies to share the information they choose in the manner they choose, and enables regional information sharing initiatives that generally don’t have to overcome the same policy hurdles as larger scale initiatives.  As those agencies grow their regional initiative and see the value, they are able to expand to statewide or nationwide initiatives much more easily by addressing the policy concerns knowing the technology infrastructure is already in place.

This hybrid warehouse/federated approach is a very effective way to promote information sharing from the bottom-up, ensuring that local agencies participate and receive immediate value from the initiative – something that isn’t always the case with top-down approaches.  Check out the i2 website for more on COPLINK and COPLINK A3.

Indeed the U.S. Air Force recently inaugurated its first cyberspace-dedicated wing, the 24th Air Force. To earn their wings, these cyber security warriors will complete a challenging “X-Course” and be awarded Basic, Senior and Master Cyberspace Officer status.

In 2009, the intelligence center at Cheltenham in the UK formed a cyber security team similarly aimed at recruiting former “naughty boys”. “You need youngsters who are deep into this stuff…if they have been slightly naughty boys, very often they really enjoy stopping other naughty boys,” said Lord West, UK Minister for Cyber Security.