utilizing information sharing to combat terrorism

utilizing information sharing to combat terrorism What steps are needed for a nation to prevent terrorist threats being carried out ? No doubt that sharing information will at the very least minimize terrorism . In a recent article by a few of DARPA 's (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ) managers , that answer is using IT (Information Technology . Robert Popp , Thomas Armour , Ted Senator , and Kristen Numrych state that the DARPA 's goal is to "empower users within the foreign intelligence and counterterrorism communities with IT " so that the decision makers can make informed choices . The need

for this information to be 100 accurate is vital not only for the United States national security but for the integrity of our government DARPA is a United States Military program that pursues high payoff research that can be applied to government policies . They continuously research advanced technologies with a high enthusiasm from each of their department managers . They encourage these radical innovations by steadily rotating their managers in and out of the company every 4 years thereby injecting a great amount of energy into their programs . New people come in with fresh ideas and are able to quickly start them with an extremely large budget (2004 annual budget of 2 .9 billion . They are also able to sponsor far reaching technology explorations through other organizations . They just recently sponsored the DARPA Challenge in April , 2004 in which contestants were challenged to manufacture a fully automated vehicles that could travel from Los Angeles to Las Vegas with no help from their human creators for a 1 ,000 ,000 prize . Although 15 teams qualified for this race , no team finished and the farthest a vehicle was able to travel was 7 .4 miles . This is a prime example of the spirit this agency is able to generate not only within the company but outside it as well Harnessing DARPA 's leadership to tackle the "War on Terrorism " has generated new strategies for identifying potentially dangerous information though the use of IT . The results of the September 11th attacks by Al Qaida terrorist network have amplified the importance of information awareness and information sharing . There were many reports saying that there was sufficient information present from foreign intelligence that the terrorist attacks could have been identified and neutralized There is a gigantic amount of data that generated each and every day One of DARPA 's goals is have an information system that can effectively monitor this data and alert proper authorities to defuse violence when detected . The ability to associate embedded information in one report to another piece of embedded information and realize their relevance is the significant road block in this awareness objective . The tools developed by DARPA focused on the three main areas of IT

1 . Peer-to-Peer tools that sync multiple databases

2 . Structured tools for pattern analysis

3 . Language translations

The peer-to-peer tools work in a partnership with a wide variety of departments to enable quick searches of multiple databases for information . As an example...