Furthermore, the center increased its ability to store, compare, match and export biometrics such as fingerprint, facial images, and iris scans, he said. He added that the center continues to honor all civil and privacy protections.It's one thing to install a biometric system in a single location. It's quite another to tie together several geographically dispersed systems that use different biometric modalities and the offerings of many different biometrics providers.
Before December 2009, analysts at the center worked manually to search and integrate information residing on various databases. Now the center is working to bring those databases together into the Counterterrorism Data Layer, a single environment in which data can be searched and analyzed.
“For the first time, NCTC analysts can search across key homeland security and intelligence information and get back a single list of relevant results,” Olsen said.
There are technical integration challenges. Security challenges involving the security of the data as it moves from node to node as well as logical access control at legitimate nodes.
As daunting as the technological challenges are, the human challenges may be more significant. Getting different bureaucracies to cooperate in this manner is a very difficult management task.
The government case is instructive because if a given organization is large enough to profit from an integration effort, it will confront these issues.
