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Ready for Prime Time: Putting the Byte on Crime and Terrorism January 2007
It's Tuesday night, 8 p.m. You're tuned to CBS-TV, watching the crime show "NCIS." An agent on the trail of the perpetrator of a Virginia Beach murder submits a computer query and immediately gets back scores of leads from 25 different agencies, plus a few mugshots. Can you place MITRE in this picture? The agent in the drama is most likely portraying use of a new database called LInX—Law Enforcement Information Exchange. That's what real-life agents use in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). And in real life, MITRE has a part in making the crime-fighting tool work. As a pilot program in October 2004, LInX allowed NCIS and 13 local and state agencies in the Seattle, Wash., region to share records. Now the Seattle project has grown to 70 agencies, and NCIS has set up several more sites. More than 200 law enforcement agencies are connected in five regions: Seattle, Wash., Hampton Roads, Va.; South Texas; Northeast Florida/Southeast Georgia; and Hawaii. Two more sites—New Mexico and the National Capital Region—are in the works, and Los Angeles officials are showing interest. Collectively, the first five LInX installations house millions of records. Real-time Case Cracking But criminals caught, not millions of records shared, is the metric that counts when LInX seeks to prove itself. And the good news is that information sharing in pursuit of crime is working. Back at NCIS headquarters at the Washington Navy Yard, Special Agent in Charge Michael Dorsey—head of the LInX program office—pushes papers aside on his desk until he pulls a file that describes a typical success: Poulsbo, WA, October 2005. The town police department got a call from the Jefferson County sheriff's office, looking for a suspect in an attempted murder. They had a name and an address in Poulsbo—but it was vacant. Querying LInX, the detective uncovered records on the suspect in other counties, along with other addresses. With those records, plus help from his counterparts, he made an arrest. A Counterterrorism Mission Because NCIS has dual law enforcement and counterterrorism missions, it can bridge the worlds of law enforcement and intelligence. "At the federal level, that's where we see the benefits," says Dorsey. As part of the Navy, NCIS first got the ear of the Department of Defense. But to build effective counterterrorism, it needed two more pillars: the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. "We recognize it's going to be a local police officer on the street or an immigration official who probably comes across a potential terrorist first," says Dorsey. "If we had intelligence about a potential terrorist attack or a name through the intelligence community, then ran a query through LInX and got a match back, that would certainly meet counterterrorism objectives." The nation took a big stride toward that vision when the Justice Department agreed to have its law enforcement arms tie into LInX-Seattle on a trial basis through the FBI's new Regional Data Exchange. Challenges and Keys to Success A TV crime show plays up the drama, but it misses the back story behind the success of LInX. Beyond the formidable technical challenges, LinX also faces the challenge of overcoming cultural barriers to information sharing. Before any IT work begins, the team reaches out to law enforcement executives—sheriffs, chiefs of police, special agents, U.S. attorneys—and creates a regional governance board. "The governance process brings chief executives to the table to help develop a crime prevention strategy in an area where crime transcends borders," says Dorsey. It gives each agency a say in the structure, rules of operation, and guidelines on access and use of the data. This deference to state and local ways is also the keystone for the IT structure, which is a central data warehouse built from off-the-shelf commercial products and other elements specifically developed for law enforcement. Each agency has a "front porch" where it uploads its records for migration to the central warehouse. The LInX office doesn't dictate how state and local agencies provide their data. Painstaking hours of manipulating the software are involved whenever a new agency is added so the local data matches the standard common format. The warehouse holds some 70 fields of structured data as well as narratives, including arrests, bookings, traffic citations, field interviews, incident reports, jail visitor reports, mugshots, pawnshop data, investigative reports, and witness statements. Only law enforcement data—not commercial data such as airline or credit bureau data—is captured, which eases privacy concerns. "Once that data is all normalized in the central data warehouse, all of the participating agencies can query each other's data," says Dorsey. "This hasn't been done anywhere else in law enforcement in the local environment." Stage Right: MITRE MITRE's role in LInX is to stand between the government and the contractors, making sure the project goes the right way. "MITRE's certainly helped us by providing some checks and balances and procedures on what is now a $50 million project," Dorsey says. Among our duties are independent validation and verification, including devising processes for testing each agency's data before it's moved into the system and helping to assemble documentation for the project. "Everybody believes in the project," says MITRE's Audra Herber, a senior information systems engineer formerly assigned to LInX. "Had it been easy, it would have been done a long time ago. To me, it's the most important thing that law enforcement can be doing right now." —by Shari DwyerRelated Information Articles and News Websites |
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