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GCN Home > 10/13/03 issue

All-points bulletins: FBI and Justice link, get the word out

By Wilson P. Dizard III, GCN Staff

The FBI and Justice Department have supercharged law enforcement communications by weaving together disparate networks and creating technology to push alerts to officers nationwide.

The FBI’s Law Enforcement Online Unit and Justice’s Counterdrug Intelligence Executive Secretariet (CDX) linked six networks to create a supernetwork. LEO, which began as an FBI network, now serves about 100,000 law enforcement officers around the world.

The six sensitive but unclassified networks that now comprise LEO are:
  • The original FBI-only LEO
  • The Regional Information Sharing System Network (riss.net), funded by Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance
  • The National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (NLETS), run jointly by several state agencies
  • The Anti-Drug Network-Unclassified, run by the Defense Department
  • The Open Source Information System, run by the CIA’s intelligence community CIO organization
  • OpenNet Plus, provided by the State Department to about 40 federal agencies operating at about 250 missions worldwide and in Washington.
“We have added every secure law enforcement Internet system that has national reach,” said M. Miles Matthews, senior management counsel and executive officer of CDX.

“I have been an agent for 17 years, and this is something we should have done 17 years ago,” said Craig Sorum, supervisory special agent for the LEO Unit.

Before LEO came into being in 1995, law enforcement agencies relied on the NLETS, an organization-to-organization network similar to teletype.

“Because NLETS is organization-to-organization, it doesn’t allow me to get a message to you and authenticate it to you,” Matthews said. “I could just get a message to your department and hope you went by the inbox.”

Surviving in the jungle

In 2001, the LEO team implemented a virtual private network that provides encrypted channels between users and the LEO network. Users install the LEO software on any Internet-ready computer and can log on to the VPN using an account and password provided by the FBI as well as standard browser and e-mail programs.

V-One Corp. of Germantown, Md., provides the SmartGate application level security technology for LEO and the linked riss.net.

More news on related topics: IT in Action, The Community