Showing posts with label ODNI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ODNI. Show all posts

February 15, 2013

The Counterterrorism Calendar


The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) "leads our nations efforts to combat terrorism at home and abroad by analyzing the threat, sharing that information with our partners, and integrating all instruments of national power to ensure unity of effort."  The NCTC is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). 

Not since the playing cards used in the 2003 Iraqi invasion with the most-wanted identified on the cards have I seen the employ of such a common tool for sharing such important information--until now with the development by the NCTC of a Counterterrorism Calendar

Typically, pin-up calendars have been devoted to beautiful models, Dilbert cartoons, and areas of personal interests and hobbies--such as cars, sports, aircraft, boats, or whatever.

I was impressed to see this concept used for sharing counterterrorism information; really, this is something that we should be mindful of every day--it's about our safety and national security.

The counterterrorism calendar has both a website and a PDF download

The website has an interactive timeline, map, and terrorist profiles--so you can learn about terrorism by time and space and those who commit the atrocities. 

Timeline--you can view by month and day the major terrorist acts that have occurred--and many days have more than one terrorist act associated with it--and only seven days out of the whole calendar year have no terrorist acts listed--so for those who are focused on just 9/11, there is a whole calendar waiting for you to view. 

Map--the map allows you to see the home base and geographical sphere of influence of many terrorist organizations--17 of them--along with a profile of each of those terrorist groups. There is also a button on the bottom of the page to see all the countries impacted with victims from 9/11--there are 91 countries shown with victims from this single catastrophic event alone.

Terrorists--the site has a list of terrorists with their profiles, identifying information, what they are wanted for, and amount of reward offered, or whether they have already been captured or killed. There is also a list of the 10 most wanted off to the right side of the page--with a rewards of $25 million listed for the #1 spot for Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The downloadable calendar has this information in a 160 page color-calendar--with a wealth of information for a calendar format like this--it is so large, I don't think you could actually hang this calendar because no regular push pins could actually hold it.

So if you can pull yourself away from the stereotypical Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar, then you may actually be able to learn a lot about what our counterterrorism efforts are all about. ;-)

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June 13, 2008

Preventing Another 9/11 and Enterprise Architecture

From the tragic events of 9/11 came the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act, the findings of the 9/11 Commission in 2004, and the Presidential memoranda in 2005 and 2007 to better share information.

ComputerWorld Magazine, 26 May 2008, reports that “nearly seven years after 9/11, information-sharing problems that hobble law enforcement are just beginning to be solved.”

What is the information sharing problem in law enforcement?

There are “20 federal agencies and 20,000 state, county, local, and tribal enforcement organizations nationwide.” The problem is how do you get this multitude of varied law enforcement organizations to share information to identify the bad guys?

While 75% of police agencies use automated systems to manage incident report data, only 25% of those systems are capable of sharing that information.

What’s being done to fix the problem?

First (not mentioned by ComputerWorld), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is establishing common terrorism information sharing standards (CTISS) to drive and enable information sharing among Law Enforcement, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Military, and Diplomatic information domains.

Additionally, the Department of Justice is developing a data dictionary/schema to establish a “common vocabulary and structure for the exchange of data.” First, this took the form of the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM) in 2003, and later took form in the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) in 2005 that extended the effort from “law enforcement to other areas of justice, public safety, intelligence, homeland security, and emergency and disaster management.” (Note: Defense and the Intelligence Community have a comparable data standard initiative called U-CORE.)

This past March, DOJ and the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Service (CJIS) division “began rolling out the National Data Exchange Initiative (N-DEx), a NIEM complaint database and data sharing network.” N-DEx provides “federated search capability across incident reports residing in state and local record management systems nationwide while allowing those records to be updated and maintained by their local owners.”

The goal is to have “the majority of the country participating” by 2009. The biggest obstacle is that many agencies’ systems have been so customized that integration is now challenging and expensive.

According to the FBI’s website, NDEx will be accessible via the internet and “includes several basic but vital capabilities, including searching and correlating incident/case report information and arrest data to help resolve entities (determining a person’s true identity despite different aliases, addresses, etc.). N-DEx will also create link analysis charts to assist in criminal investigations and identify potential terrorist activity.”

According to the NDEx brochure (available online at the FBI website), law enforcement agencies who participate in NDEX will:

  • “Sign an operational Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)
  • Identify and map incident/case data to the N-DEx Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD)
  • Obtain network connectivity through an existing CJIS Wide-Area Network (WAN) or connect over the Law Enforcement Online (LEO). “

The architecture concept here is summed up nicely by Linda Rosenberg, Director of the Pennsylvania Office of Criminal Justice: “Now you don’t have to go back and build these data warehouses and totally redo your entire infrastructure.”

Instead, you plug in to the NDEx and share information that’s been mapped to the common data standards. NDEx provides the target infrastructure, while NIEM provides the data exchange standards. Together, we can share information for better achieving our law enforcement mission—protecting the American people.


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