U.S. intelligence community faces info-sharing overhaul

Computerworld - The U.S. intelligence community knows it has to improve the efficiency of its information-sharing efforts. But the community's IT experts also know that massive change doesn't mean starting from scratch and giving everybody access to everything.

"We're trying to use the existing [IT] capabilities of the community," said Bill Dawson, the intelligence community's deputy CIO. That means leveraging the massive yet classified investment in IT systems and infrastructure that has taken place during the past decade, said Dawson and other top intelligence officials. Dawson's post lies within the CIA director's community management staff, which has oversight responsibilities for all 14 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community.

But homeland security information sharing poses unique security challenges that few people outside the intelligence community appreciate, Dawson said. For example, intelligence agencies are for the first time being asked to share information collected from highly sensitive sources with agencies that sit outside of the traditional boundaries of the intelligence community, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Agriculture, according to Dawson.

"You really shouldn't have EPA officials surfing through military order-of-battle information," said Dawson. "I can run a wire and give you information, but what do you want, what do you need, and what are you going to do with it?"

Those are questions senior intelligence officials are grappling with as they anticipate the likely creation of a Department of Homeland Security, which will need access to highly compartmented intelligence data. And despite high-profile data-sharing failures in the past few years—Sept. 11 being the worst—a master architecture plan has been in the works and is now getting the attention it deserves.

The centerpiece of that plan is the Intelligence Community System for Information Sharing (ICSIS). It's a Web-based system that comprises both the Top Secret Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System and the Secret Internet Protocol Routing Network, which the defense and intelligence communities have been using for years to share data. The difference now is that Dawson and others are working to build a browser-based front end that won't take users directly to these systems but rather to a role-based common virtual collaboration space.

Sharing Secrets

ICSIS will provide the controlled interfaces that will for the first time let the intelligence community automate the process of stripping out from classified documents top-secret sources and methods of intelligence collection. It will also automate the sharing of that intelligence with analysts and officials with "Secret" or lower security clearances.

Phase 1 of ICSIS development, which is now under way, involves various collaboration "enablers," such as public-key infrastructure encryption technology; a directory of intelligence analysts who can be contacted by means of encrypted community e-mail; a collaboration software tool suite; trusted interfaces for access to replicated data repositories at different security levels; and a metadata markup process to support data discovery.