DoD & Spy Agencies to Improve Cross Domain Info Sharing

Via GCN.com -

The Defense Department and the intelligence community have worked during the past year through a newly unveiled organization to hone technologies for sharing classified data among various levels of secrecy, according to officials and public documents.

The Information Sharing Environment, an interagency program under the aegis of the Office of Director of National Intelligence, confirmed the existence of the organization in a November 2006 report.

The new office, since renamed the Unified Cross Domain Management Office, was created to “ensure that cross-domain solutions are available to meet IC and DOD needs at acceptable levels of cost, schedule and risk,” the report said.

“While this is a promising initiative, it must be expanded beyond DOD and IC to fully encompass the needs of all [Intelligence Sharing Environment] participants,” according to the report.

The ISE, which Congress established as part of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, has developed an architecture for interagency information transfer to help promote a “responsibility to share.”

ISE participants include dozens of federal, state, local and tribal intelligence and law enforcement agencies, as well as the dozens of information fusion centers they have established.

Intelligence officials, including associate director for national intelligence and CIO Dale Meyerrose, have described a general effort to consolidate dozens of cross-domain solutions informally over the past year.

Meyerrose said the CDS project would involve consolidating hundreds of the systems for shifting data across levels of classification into about 20 basic CDSes, making exceptions where necessary.

The November report from the information-sharing office called for improved data transfer links, noting that “CDSes are available today, but existing approaches have failed to keep pace with growing requirements and changing technology.”

The report added, “Based largely on searches of textual information, these [existing information sharing] solutions do not typically support a robust exchange of graphic or multimedia information, and almost always require human review as part of the high-low transfer process.”

The CIOs of the Pentagon and the DNI Office announced their fledgling organization for reforming CDS technology in a press statement issued on March 8.

The press release stated that the organization, based in Adelphi, Md., operates under a charter signed by Meyerrose and John Grimes, the Pentagon’s CIO and assistant secretary of Defense for networks and information integration, on March 1, 2007.

Intelligence community officials confirmed that the DNI Office had approved the release of the November 2006 report stating that the office had launched in March 2006.