Justice moves closer to secure sharing

Soon user names and passwords will no longer be necessary for law enforcement officials across the country to access federal information.

The Justice Department is expanding a pilot program nationwide to implement federated identity management capabilities for popular databases such as the Law Enforcement Online (LEO), the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN) and Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS). "Federated identity management is about leveraging identity management work being done by individual organizations so they can be used elsewhere," says Jeremy Warren, Justice's chief technology officer. "If you are a detective and you are trying to access some system at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement or DoJ or the Chicago Police, then those organizations are going to need to look you up, verify your identity and decide if you are trustworthy. They will have to give you a user name and password and it's very wasteful. It takes a lot of time and wastes a lot of money."