Information sharing has long been a goal of all federal, state, local, and tribal agencies. NASCIO has been advocate of government information sharing and active member of the GLOBAL Justice Information Sharing Initiative (GLOBAL) and Global Advisory Committee for more than a decade. In 2005, an authentication program to support information sharing was initiated by GLOBAL - the Global Federated Identity Privileged Management (GFIPM) Demonstration Project and funded by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), & the Office of the Program Manager of the Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE).
The GFPIM demonstration project participants represented local, state and federal agencies and proved that criminal justice agencies could securely share critical information across domains and jurisdictions through the controlled sharing of identity information. Information sharing has become geographically distributed and increasingly mobile. Sharing information across jurisdictional boundaries is fraught with practical challenges at many levels, including both policy and technology. The National Information Exchange Federation (NIEF) seeks to address this problem. NIEF is the first operational information-sharing identity federation based upon all of the approved GFIPM standards.
On February 28, 2013 at 3:00 pm ET, the Georgia Tech Research Institute and the Department of Homeland Security Information Network have been invited by NASCIO to present an overview of GFPIM and the NIEF Federation (i.e., benefits, values of joining a trust framework) to the State Digital identity Working Group. I would like to extend an invitation to those who like to join the State Digital Identity Work Group to collaborate on federated identity management initiatives. For those interested, please contact Chad Grant, NASCIO Senior Policy Analyst at cgrant@amrms.com for more details.
By providing participating organizations and systems with a means of sharing and enforcing their local access and authentication rules, we build a trusted environment in which broader information sharing is possible. Achieving information sharing objectives requires that partners establish wide-scale electronic trust among the caretakers of critical information and those who need and are authorized to use that information. The information is sensitive-inappropriate sharing is just as dangerous to states as lack of sharing. That is where a new and rapidly maturing technology called federated identity comes in. Federated identity allows a user's roles, rights, and privileges to be communicated securely.
When local or state organizations join NIEF, they become a partner in an established federation that already has the necessary governance, administrative policies and procedures, and administrative and management staff in place to support the federation. Instead of creating these services from scratch, or even creating a new federation using the standard set of approved GFIPM documentation, the local or state organization simply completes the application and onboarding process and you can start sharing information.