FISMA Focus/Regulatory Cybersecurity Editor’s Note: Cross-posted from the Counterfeit Cigarettes Enforcement Forum.
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from The Fusion Centers Guidelines prepared by United States Department of Justice | Office of Justice Programs “in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.” The complete Guidelines document is attached here. The Executive Summary is attached here.
Fusion Center Guidelines—Developing and Sharing Information in a New Era, Guidelines for Establishing and Operating Fusion Centers at the Local, State, and Federal Levels, Law Enforcement Intelligence, Public Safety, and the Private Sector
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Guideline 4 Collaboration
Guideline 4, “Create a collaborative environment for the sharing of intelligence and information among local, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies, public safety, and the private sector.”
Collaboration
Justification
To maximize intelligence sharing, all levels of law enforcement and public safety agencies and the private sector must communicate and collaborate. The objective is to leverage resources and expertise while improving the ability to detect, prevent, and apprehend terrorists and other criminals. Fostering a collaborative environment builds trust among participating entities, strengthens partnerships, and provides individual as well as a collective ownership in the mission and goals of the center. The National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan speaks to this as well: “Sharing is founded upon trust between the information provider and the intelligence consumer. Such trust is most often fostered on an interpersonal basis; therefore, law enforcement task forces and other joint work endeavors succeed where colocated, interspersed personnel from different agencies and job types convene for a common purpose.”37
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Successful collaboration is contingent upon a trusting environment. Fusion centers should seek to establish an information sharing system that aids in collaboration, while ensuring the security of the information within the system and the system itself. This environment should also be equipped to handle various types of information that public safety and the private sector submit, including public, sensitive, proprietary, and secret information. This environment may include e-mail, a virtual private network, a secured Internet site, listservs, or face-to-face meetings. Collaboration begins with interpersonal relationships, and fusion centers should institutionalize these relationships through ongoing dialogue and information sharing. Issue-based collaborative techniques may be utilized by the fusion center when a specific threat is identified. These techniques allow the private sector to change its participation within the fusion center, based on the identified threat. For example, a transportation entity may have a liaison in the fusion center, but if a threat is identified that affects transportation, that organization may provide full-time participation until the threat is neutralized.
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