Prototyping Fusion Center information sharing; implementing policy reasoning over cross-jurisdictional data transactions occurring in a decentralized environment

Abstract

In 2004, the White House and then Congress determined there should be an “Information Sharing Environment” that facilitates the flow of critical information for counterterrorism, related law enforcement, and disaster management activities. That work has been progressing but a major challenge is how to create technologies that: ensure compliance with laws and policies of the federal government, 50 states, and individual agencies; convey appropriate data that would support access control and privilege decisions in different jurisdictions; and achieve accountability and transparency for this activity. We have built a prototype of Fusion Center information sharing that shows significant progress in the representation of law in a policy language, the reasoning of that law over data transactions occurring in a web environment (internet or intranet), acquiring necessary information from authoritative sources wherever they reside in the decentralized environment, and providing both a binary response suitable for automated workflow implementation and a detailed justification suitable for human validation of the conclusion. In this paper, we briefly describe the technologies employed for serializing the data and policy, reasoning over the rules contained in the policy, and displaying the results to users. These combine to provide a powerful tool supporting a range of necessary governmental functions including access control, privilege management, audit, periodic reporting, and risk modeling.