Contemporary Threats and Sharing of Information

¶ … Threats and Sharing of Information

Unified Intelligence

In many respects, the amount of danger posed by contemporary threats to public safety has rarely been greater in this country's history. This fact can largely be attributed to the degree of organization and the sharing of information via technological advances with which various factions have at their disposal to effectively terrorize parts of the United States, as well as to the somewhat imperialist tendencies of America's current foreign policy, which people in many parts of the world view as aggressive. One of the most significant offensives launched against the U.S. -- and on its own soil, at that -- was the toppling of the world trade center in 2001. Reports of other so-called terrorist activity (such as the young man from Africa who attempted to detonate a bomb on an airplane above Michigan who was linked to Al Qaeda) (Temple-Raston, 2010) have substantially multiplied since the devastation that served as the impetus for the War On Terror. With both foreign as well as domestic threats (from organized groups as well as from average antisocial Americans) walking about, the need to disseminate information between disparate levels of law enforcement -- from federal, state, and municipal levels of government -- is fairly imminent.

Traditionally, U.S. domestic policy widely discouraged the sharing of intelligence between these three fundamental levels of government due to concerns of sensitivity. In the context of national security, sensitivity is the measure of how risky it is to disclose information to anyone, including law enforcement officials at various stages of federal, state and municipal levels, out of the belief that doing so could present a greater threat to the country as a form of vulnerability. Most often, this belief was fueled by the notion that disclosing such information would fuel a tide of panic among people, as well as alert whichever threat was relevant at the time of the government's cognizance of such a situation.

While this consideration is definitely valid in a number of instances, domestic policy in the U.S. has inexorably shifted away from this line of thinking to the encouragement of sharing of information at all levels of law enforcement. One of the most significant steps towards the cooperative movement of intelligence was the formation and implementation of the United States Department of Homeland Security, which was largely created as a model of intelligence sharing. According to the 2005 monograph Assessing and Managing the Terrorism Threat, which was made available in 2005 and was authored by representatives of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Homeland Security department has "expanded its computer-based counter-terrorism system to all 50 states, 5 territories, the District of Columbia, and 50 major urban areas to improve the flow of threat information" (Leson, 2005, 1). This movement towards the integration of intelligence among disparate levels of law enforcement is far from surprising, particularly in light of the fact that a dearth of the ability to do so before the World Trade Center was targeted may have aided the September 11 attack of 2001 (cite).