Justice Department plans to expand cops’ access to data

Ben Bain reports:

The Justice Department plans to have a nationwide program to allow law enforcement officials from participating agencies to access data on each other’s unclassified systems, a senior department technology official said today.

Jeremy Warren, Justice’s chief technology officer, said the program would use a federated identity management approach to let officials use a single sign-on capability to access data from other participating organizations. Warren said a multiyear test for the program has been successful and the department plans to take it nationwide by the end of this year.

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Justice has been working with the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services to expand the system nationally, Warren said. The policies for the federated system are being determined by law enforcement officials from different levels of government that participate in CJIS’ Advisory Policy Board, he added. CJIS will then serve as the executive for the program and broker the technology for it.