Last month the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released an update on “High-Risk Programs”—programs “that are at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement, or in need of broad reform.” The GAO, which releases its high risk updates every two years, has included information sharing on its list of high risk programs since 2005, essentially since the first information sharing procedures were instituted.
In this most recent report, the GAO found that, “the government has continued to make progress during the past two years in sharing terrorism-related information among its many security partners, but does not yet have a fully-functioning Information Sharing Environment in place.” (GAO, High Risk Series: an Update, February 2011, p 96.) The Information Sharing Environment, when fully functional, is a collaborative network intended to provide security professionals with the information crucial to protecting the US.
Since 2002, the Markle Task Force on National Security in the Information Age has provided recommendations to the US government in order to help create an information sharing environment that ensures that critical counter-terrorism information gets to those who need it to fulfill their mission. The Markle Task Force’s 2009 report Nation at Risk: Policymakers Need Better Information to Protect the Country provides a roadmap to the government for building upon the work that has already been done in information sharing to better enable sharing among those who protect us.
We invite you to learn more about Markle’s work on information sharing.
