Law Enforcement Information Sharing Report

The Department of Justice has a long history of enforcing the law and defending the interests of the United State. Starting out as the Office of the Attorney General in 1789, the one person position was responsible for prosecuting and conducting all suits brought to the Supreme Court and giving advice and opinions on all questions of the law (“About DOJ”, n.d.). When the work became too much for one person, Congress passed an act to establish the Department of Justice in 1870. Increasing litigation prompted the hiring of more private attorneys to handle all criminal prosecutions and civil suits with the Attorney General as the head of the agency (“About DOJ”, n.d.). Today, the agency is comprised of 42 separate components including U.S. Attorneys

Long before 9/11, law enforcement agencies had been sharing “actionable” information that supported their missions and objectives at all levels. The FBI, for example, operated the Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS) that provided law enforcement with information relating to criminal histories, uniform crime reporting, and fingerprinting identification (“LEISP”, 2005). Despite the success of this shared management approach, rapidly evolving terrorist and criminal activities threatened the nation’s security necessitating dramatic and lasting improvements to information sharing (“LEISP”, 2005). Faced with new challenges, the DOJ was determined to create a plan that could withstand new threat environment. It adopted an entirely new paradigm for information sharing. The LEISP created information sharing policies and standard business practices as well as a unified, Department-wide technology architecture intended to position the agency as a committed partner in an information sharing environment of federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies (“LEISP”,

The LEISP guiding principles are (1) All DOJ components will share information as a standard practice (2) DOJ will present all department components as a single information sharing entity (3) DOJ will protect privacy and ensure security in implementing LEISP (4) DOJ and its partners will establish trust through organizational accountability and (5) DOJ will participate in local and regional sharing initiatives (“LEISP”, 2005). The first three principles are the core of OneDOJ, the Department’s internal initiative to organize its own information sharing activities. Through this initiative, the Department will share information among its components while presenting itself to law enforcement partners as a single entity for information exchange (“Law Enforcement”, n.d.). It allows the DOJ to present information to decision and policy makers as one entity instead of presenting information from dozens of different sources and ensures that information is available to all levels of government. The last two principles focus on protecting privacy and establishing an environment of trust and partnership vital to creating a national information sharing capability (“LEISP”,