The Secure Homeland Access and Reporting Environment (SHARE) is a system that was funded by the US Department of Homeland Security (USDHS) as part of their Information Technology Evaluation Program (ITEP). It was one of 12 proposals funded nationally out of 113 proposals received.
SHARE has been designed to collect data that can provide critical information in the prevention of a terrorist attack. It also has components that can be extremely useful to a command center in providing protection, response and recovery. Its major goal is to establish the critical missing link between State/Federal homeland security officials and field officers.
SHARE is an overarching web portal that enables Fusion Center personnel from all of the participating agencies (Federal, State and local) to be fully informed of all suspicious activity reports within their purview. SHARE provides a virtual office that not only connects those participating within the physical location of the Fusion Center, but also allows agents throughout the state and region to be fully connected and integrated with access to all of its communication, information and case management capabilities. SHARE is unique in that it not only connects Fusion Center personnel with each other, but also connects them to over 10,000 field officers. Field officers are defined here to be not only law enforcement officers at all levels, but also private security, first responders, and other non-sworn public officials. While Field Officers do not have read access to SHARE (which is accessible only to Fusion Center agents), they do have the ability to provide input to and communicate with the Fusion Center through SHARE’s capabilities.
Figure 1 below presents an overview of the SHARE data capture and information generation capabilities. The following describes the major SHARE modules in terms of their data/information flows:
- Suspicious Activity Report Module (SARM) enables field officers to report identified homeland security incidents within their LETS system. Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are analyzed within the SHARE case management system and forwarded appropriately. All SARs go into a database and can form the basis for an electronic case file. There are two input mechanisms to SHARE for SARs:
- AlaCOP-LETS – this is the general purpose information and communication portal that ACJIC has established for all law enforcement within Alabama (currently about 10,000 law enforcement officers use AlaCOP-LETS, and its use is expected to be practically universal by the end of 2007.)
- Portal for Upholding a Secure Homeland (PUSH) – this is the private sector security counterpart of AlaCOP-LETS for private sector security personnel and non-sworn public officials (e.g., first responders). It not only allows them to submit SARs to the exact same receipt mechanism as AlaCOP-LETS, but also pushes to them information that is not law enforcement sensitive.
- SHARE Information Acquisition Components – information sources are added to SHARE as they become accessible, and this is an ongoing and dynamic process. In addition to SARs, SHARE also accepts information from several other sources, including but not limited to:
- Incident/Offense Reports – SHARE has direct access to the ACJIC ULTRA system, which enables searches on any subset of Incident, Offense or Arrest reports. In particular, there is a terrorism related component to the Incident/Offense report that triggers the report to be automatically forwarded to SHARE.
- eCitation – this is the electronic citation system that is being rolled out to the Department of Public Safety and many local police agencies; it makes traffic citations generated by it accessible to the Fusion Center within minutes of their being written by the law enforcement officer.
- Name Master – this is a system that essentially keeps track of all individuals who touch the criminal justice system within Alabama. It contains links to the actual case records and criminal histories, and flags that, for example, indicate if the individual is a sex offender, has committed crimes using a gun or is subject to federal “Isolating the Criminal Element” (ICE) conditions.
- Pernosco (Greek – to know thoroughly) – this tool enables a quick meta-search using all of the most prominent Internet search engines to locate individuals by name, company or phone number.
- Tag Readers (Automated License Plate Readers) – this provides access to logs of license plate reader information to locate individuals whose vehicles have been read by automated tag readers in the field.
- SHARE-AlaCOP Message Center – this module enables Fusion Center personnel direct and identical access to the AlaCOP Message Center (MC) as is now obtained by all law enforcement officers. By having the Fusion Center wired into the law enforcement message center, several assets are generated:
- They can instantly launch messages to any individual, any subset, or all of the law enforcement and criminal justice communities. In other words, they have the entire law enforcement community at their fingertips.
- They can create groups of two types: open and closed. Open groups allow any interested member of the MC to join and participate in discussions, obtain and give information. Closed groups are for confidential investigations and the membership is totally controlled by the moderator (i.e., the member of the MC who set up the closed group). These capabilities enable the sharing of information in an optimal way, depending on its confidentiality.
- They can “listen in” on open groups. Fusion Center personnel are free to either create or access open groups. Often police officers are reluctant to submit SARs but will have no problem in expressing their experiences on a discussion group. This is an invaluable source of intelligence in that often law enforcement officials do not see the terrorist connection, e.g., when terrorist are using illegal operations to finance their activities.
Examples of messages that have been posted having potential terrorist implications included discussions of the following:
- The theft of a large number of propane canisters;
- The thefts of large quantities of copper in several diverse locations throughout the state
- Reports of large purchases of cell phones.
In all cases appropriate information on these subjects from all sources was posted to AlaCOP (for sworn law enforcement) and to PUSH (for private sector security and non-sworn public officials).
The various SHARE components have been prototyped as Microsoft .NET modules that link a variety of other software applications together, while integrating innovative hardware components; such are license tag readers and drivers license scanners.
The amount of criminal justice and related data that exists in all states is enormous – much more than is used effectively in criminal apprehension. Major efforts are being made in the name of “data integration,” i.e., turning this myriad of raw numbers and text into useful information that can be employed to support decision-making. The SARM and its companion data generation components will create even more data, so it is imperative that they be integrated into an effective information-generation process so that it can be used effectively for intelligence and situation awareness.
LETS itself is an information generator, and will solve those problems that can be addressed by specific user-defined queries. As stated above, LETS is a well-established web-based portal for obtaining information on persons, vehicles and events (e.g., incident/offenses, arrests, etc.). While this serves an essential investigatory function, three other capabilities further enhance the Fusion Center’s capabilities:
- Record Differentiation and Forwarding (RDF), a case management system that intercepts time-critical SAR records as they are being added to the database, and forwards the information in them to the appropriate agents as determined by the Fusion Center agents assigned to this task;
- The Critical Analysis Reporting Environment (CARE), a well established, award-winning information discovery engine that automatically detects data subset over-representations;
- A Geographical Information Systems Portal (GISP), that has been built upon the established GIS data capabilities that exist at the Alabama Emergency Management Agency (AEMA).
Click here to view screen shots of the SHARE website