DOMAIN EXPERTISE

DHS Science and Technology Directorate
Law Enforcement and Intelligence Information Sharing

BayFirst Solutions supports a range of law enforcement and intelligence information sharing programs within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate. These programs are focused on the coordinated research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) of new technologies to support secure methods for dissemination of threat information among federal, state, local, and tribal government entities responsible for securing the homeland. They support the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and over 200 state and local law enforcement organizations that participate in regional information sharing initiatives in California, Florida, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Oregon, and Arizona. Examples of these law enforcement and intelligence RDT&E programs include the following:

• Development and deployment of a wireless federated query application that enables law enforcement personnel to concurrently query a number of commonly used regional and national law enforcement databases from the field, including local records management and officer notification systems, booking photos, warrants, NCIC (for wanted persons, temporary restraining orders, and deported felon alerts), and the Department of Motor Vehicles (for registration, drivers license, and stolen vehicle information). The application is currently used by hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement officers from 15 different agencies and taskforces in southern California, including DHS ICE and CBP Special Agents.

• Development and testing of a knowledge discovery framework that ingests, analyzes, synthesizes, and visualizes massive amounts of information from multiple, distributed, and disparate data sources. This framework is a collection of software, hardware, and operational standards that are adapted and tailored to suit the specific needs of federal law enforcement and intelligence organizations. It is designed to allow interactions between text, image and voice readers, simulation and modeling tools, and databases that provide the raw material for a warning and alert systems.

• Evaluation of an Information Sharing Needs Analysis methodology and highly scalable peer-to-peer software solution for systematically determining what, when, why and how information should be shared across functional domains within the government (e.g., law enforcement, public health, transportation) during a terrorist threat or public safety situation.

• Expansion of the Florida Integrated Network for Data Exchange & Retrieval (FINDER) initiative across state lines by conducting an interstate data interoperability demonstration between FINDER and the Mississippi Automated Sharing Project (MASP), a statewide information sharing initiative in Mississippi. Designed and tested a non-proprietary, standards-based technical architecture for interstate data exchange that fully addressed the interstate statutory requirements that pertain to information security and composition.

• Comprehensive evaluation of Mutual Information and its effectiveness as an association analysis technique for identifying illegal smuggling vehicles of interest to local police departments. Applied the technique to overlapping data sets from CBP’s License Plate Reader System and Tucson Police Department’s Records Management System to produce an operational implementation for ongoing utilization by officers and crime analysts.

• Expanded prototype demonstration and evaluation of the State, Regional, and Federal Enterprise Retrieval System with four multi-jurisdictional justice systems throughout the United States. SRFERS is an interstate information sharing initiative developed to increase the effectiveness of public safety and homeland security agencies. It demonstrates the ability to share justice information utilizing the National Criminal Justice Intelligence Sharing Plan; the Global Justice XML Data Model; and the infrastructure and resources of existing multi-jurisdictional justice systems.

• Development and coordination of an Information Sharing Capstone Integrated Product Team (IPT) to define a multi-year research and development portfolio focused on the information sharing technology gaps of DHS. Facilitated communications among representatives from DHS operational components across to identify a set of eleven high-priority capability gaps where extensive S&T resources should be directed – topics included information fusion and visualization to support the common operating picture, network identity management, and cross agency information sharing.

• Development and deployment of a spatial temporal and criminal activity network visualization toolset for law enforcement organizations. The toolset was used to identify 35 high-frequency border crossing vehicles with known associations to local Tucson, AZ crime networks, which were referred to CBP for alert status.

• Deployment of a commercial law enforcement information and knowledge management system to consolidate records management data from 18 southern California jurisdictions. A data sharing protocol and virtual private network were also implemented to allow data sharing across law enforcement organizations throughout the California, Arizona, and Nevada.

• Development of digital image exchange specifications and a pilot software interface to enable state and local law enforcement personnel to query and retrieve driver’s license photos across state lines via the International Justice and Public Safety Information Sharing Network (NLETS).

• Test and evaluation of a variety of handheld devices, commercial services, and wireless information sharing applications (e.g., situational awareness, field interview, GPS assisted alerts and notifications, real-time computer aided dispatch, and biometrics) for use by federal, state and local law enforcement personnel in California and Arizona.

• Rapid prototyping, experimentation, and technical demonstrations in support of DHS mandated activities for Phase 1 and 2 implementation of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Information Sharing Environment initiative, including coordination and implementation of the ISE Enterprise Architecture (ISEEA) Framework and Common Terrorism Information Sharing Standards (CTISS) into state-sponsored fusion centers.

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