IJIS Institute Educates Industry on Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative

Aug. 25, 2010 - PRLog -- The IJIS Institute, a nonprofit organization that focuses on mission-critical information sharing for justice, public safety, and homeland security, conducted the first ever Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative (NSI) Industry Day on July 31, 2010. This event was held in conjunction with the NSI Program Management Office (PMO), and nearly 200 technology industry participants convened in Fort Myers, Florida, to learn about the purpose and progress of the NSI. The educational event was co-located with the 2010 IJIS Institute Summer Industry Briefing, and provided attendees with a comprehensive update on the NSI and related technology activities.

The NSI is a partnership among local, state, tribal, and federal agencies to establish a unified process for reporting, tracking, and accessing SARs in a manner that rigorously protects the privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties of Americans, as called for in the 2007 National Strategy for Information Sharing. The SAR process focuses on what law enforcement has been doing for years—gathering information regarding behaviors and incidents associated with crime and establishing a process to share information to detect and prevent criminal activity, including crime associated with domestic and international terrorism. The NSI strategy is to develop, evaluate, and implement common processes and policies for gathering, documenting, processing, analyzing, and sharing information about terrorism-related suspicious activities. The long-term goal is for state, local, tribal, and federal law enforcement organizations, as well as private sector entities, to participate in the NSI, allowing them to share information about suspicious activity.

The NSI Industry Day agenda addressed three discrete aspects of the NSI program and supporting technologies and began with an overview of the NSI. The event continued with presentations that reviewed NSI Fusion Center Technology. (Fusion centers offer analysis and information sharing capabilities that assist law enforcement and homeland security partners in preventing and investigating crime and terrorism. Fusion centers are owned and operated by state and local governments with support from federal partners in the form of deployed personnel, training, and technology.) The NSI Industry Day also focused on the newly-created Submit Suspicious Activity Service Specification, a technology process based on the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative’s Justice Reference Architecture (JRA). The day opened with a presentation of the NSI program by Tom O’Reilly, the director of the NSI PMO, and included presentations by IJIS Institute and industry representatives knowledgeable about NSI technologies.

Paul Wormeli, executive director of the IJIS Institute, stated that, “The IJIS Institute has been an integral part of the NSI and we have brought industry together with government to make great strides in technology and business process advancements. It was only natural for us to be the ones to educate industry on the NSI, and I am pleased at the success of this year’s event and I look forward to hosting many more.”

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The IJIS Institute is a nonprofit organization that serves as the voice of industry, uniting the private and public sectors to improve mission-critical information sharing for those who protect and serve our communities. Find out more at www.ijis.org.