FBI Announces Operational Status of Its National Information Sharing System

The FBI announced today further implementation of the National Information Sharing Strategy (NISS). Within the NISS framework, the first Regional Data Exchange, or R-DEx, became operational in St. Louis during the last week of February, 2005. Late this summer, R-DEx will link with the Naval Criminal Investigative Services' Law Enforcement Information Exchange (LInX), which serves as the Seattle region's NCIS and local and regional law enforcement sharing system.

The FBI plans to further enhance R-DEx through the addition of DEA, ATF, U.S. Marshals, and Bureau of Prison investigative data. R-DEx will serve as the first of several systems contributing Department of Justice's Law Enforcement Information Sharing Program (LEISP). R-DEx will give state, local, and tribal law enforcement appropriate access to federal investigative and intelligence information that is critical to protecting our nation. R-DEx provides detectives, investigators, and analysts the ability to view the linkage across multiple cases and their jurisdictions. These links include individuals, vehicles, weapons, addresses, phone numbers, or other types of links. The new program also allows cases to be plotted on to maps in order to identify geographical patterns or links.

FBI Chief Information Officer Zalmai Azmi stated: "One of the strongest defenses the United States has in our efforts against terrorism is to ensure that law enforcement agencies have the information they need to detect and prevent possible threats. R-DEx is a major step towards the goal of open information sharing between law enforcement agencies across the country. The FBI will continue to increase access between R-DEx and other regional state, local, and tribal law enforcement systems."

The R-DEx system greatly enhances law enforcement's information sharing initiatives. One example of this sharing, from the St. Louis system, is that the FBI, the Illinois State Police, the Missouri State Highway Patrol, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police, the St. Louis County Police and the St. Clair County ( Illinois) Sheriff's Department are able to research each others case information. The program also allows users to update their law enforcement data as frequently as desired.

R-DEx supports FBI Director Mueller's vision and the national mandate to increase information sharing. The Department of Justice will continue to establish data sharing agreements and expand the deployment of the R-DEx capability.