The federal government has utilized since late 2009 a National Information Exchange Model-compliant XML schema standard to daily distribute airplane passenger screening information to the Transportation Security Administration's Secure Flight program, according to a new annual report from the Information Sharing Environment program manager.

The ISE is an effort of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and is meant to accomplish what its name suggests; the current ISE program manager is Kshemendra Paul. Secure Flight is the TSA program that matches passenger manifests against a federal passenger blacklist. TSA began screening all U.S. domestic flight passengers starting in June of this year and requires that foreign air carriers implement the program's requirements by the end of 2010.

The XML schema used to distribute No Fly and Known or Suspected Terrorists information from the Justice Department's Terrorist Screening Center to TSA for the screening of airline passengers is called the "Terrorist Watchlist Person Data Exchange Standard," the annual ISE report states.

TWPDES is now available as an unclassified XML standard; in addition to complying with NIEM standards, it also complies with American National Standards Institute and National Institute for Standards and Technology standards, the report states. Federally recognized data fusion centers also utilize TWPDES to share data of encounters with known or suspected terrorists, the report states.

NIEM uses XML schemas to standardize core data components for exchange and allows other communities of interest to create mutually-intelligible data components specific to their communities. Paul is a past NIEM program manager.

Among the planned upgrades to TWPDES is a State Department upgrade this fall that will "provide all the necessary data for biometric and biographic screening" of known or suspected terrorists, the report states.

Overall information sharing still falls short of the desired state, the report states. Of the fourteen goals used to measure progress toward institutionalized information sharing, the federal government has managed to merely move from an ad hoc to a "defined" stage in eight of them.

For more:
- download the ISE annual 2010 report (.pdf)
- go to the TWPDES standard

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