DHS wants a better info-sharing plan

It looks like DHS secretary Janet Napolitano is running a 24/7 shop. In her latest announcement, she and Attorney General Eric Holder released a report by the Presidential Interagency Task Force on Controlled Unclassified Information, recommending a "single, standardized framework for making, safeguarding and disseminating sensitive but unclassified information."

This would expand the existing framework established in 2008 for the sharing of only terrorism-related information. More importantly, it will move federal agencies to share information among federal, state, local and tribal agencies and the private sector in the event of a terrorist threat.

The history of this is well known in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. On that day, there was no centralized way to gather and disseminate information. A variety of communications systems--including land lines and cell phones--were not working. And the federal government had no real way to coordinate a response.

In studying these issues, the task force concluded that "Executive Branch performance suffers immensely from interagency inconsistency in policies, frequent uncertainty as to exactly what policies apply, and the inconsistent application of similar policies across agencies."

The absence of effective training, oversight, and accountability at many agencies also results in a tendency to over protect information, greatly diminishing government transparency, the report said.

The task force proposed a list of recommendations to "enhance standardization, information sharing, government transparency, and the protection of information only where there is a compelling requirement to do so."

For more on this task force report:
see this nextgov.com article

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