DHS

Tax evasion or illegal drug smuggling are often not observable events for federal law enforcement officials. But to effectively manage federal law enforcement activities, officials and policy-makers in charge must have an idea of what is happening.

The challenge of how to measure the unobserved events is one faced by many federal leaders. But there are actually five methods that can assist government performance analysts in estimating basic information on unobserved events.
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This article originally appeared as part of a new report from the IBM Center for the Business of Government, “Five Methods for Measuring Unobserved Events: A Case Study of Federal Law Enforcement,” by John Whitley.

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The Need for a Statistical Framework

Law enforcement can face tough measurement challenges, but the fields of statistics and econometrics have developed a framework for dealing with them and it is useful to begin this part with a brief overview of that framework. All violations of a federal law can be thought of as elements of a prospective data population.

The scope of the population can be defined in various ways — e.g., immigrants illegally entering the United States in a calendar year, or the illegal drugs smuggled across the southwest land border between the United States and Mexico.

To effectively manage their operations, federal law enforcement officials need insight into these unobserved violations; i.e., they need to know the properties or parameters of this population of data, such as its size and distribution

Law enforcement officials are generally able to observe subsets, or samples, of this population. The most obvious is the subset of violators apprehended or arrested. Detailed documentation of apprehensions or arrests is generally retained in administrative records. In addition, there may be other available sources of data, often partial and incomplete, that shed light on various aspects of the population, e.g., survey data on drug usage or the footprints in the desert of illegal border-crossers.

Actions can also be taken to increase the available data, such as increasing the size of the observable subset, drawing additional samples from the population, or generating a sample of new data that mimics the characteristics of the population of interest. The methods described here use such samples to make estimates of the total population.

When using a sample to estimate parameters of the underlying (unobserved) population, an important statistical property is whether the estimate is biased. Bias occurs when the estimate systematically diverges from the true value of the population parameter being estimated.

An unbiased and therefore preferred estimate does not systematically diverge from the true value. One primary cause of bias is a poor sample that is not randomly selected. A sample is random when every element of the population has an equal probability of being included. Examples of non-random samples may include:

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The Obama administration is getting ready to change the way the government handles cybersecurity.

The White House has drafted an executive order, a draft of which is currently circulating among federal agencies for approval, mirroring cyber legislation that recently failed to get through a Senate vote. Among other things, the order shunts much of the enforcement and management of cybersecurity issues to federal agencies. We understand that, contrary to some earlier news reports, the classified portion of the order does not contain significant new authorities but details those already existing. Keep reading →

Procurement is emerging as one of the most significant issues facing federal information technology leaders as the Obama administration begins its second term, a top ranking government IT official said this week.

More and more federal agencies are making the leap to cloud computing, adopting mobile technologies and developing APIs to share information. But agency IT leaders remain hampered from moving faster by contracting constraints that make it hard to make cross-agency buys, said Richard Spires, chief information officer for the Department of Homeland Security and vice chairman of the Federal CIO Council. Keep reading →

The nation’s top military cyber commander offered his version of how government and military agencies are likely to work together when America suffers cyber attacks, and warned that industry needs to take a greater role.

“We have laid out lanes of the road,” Gen. Keith Alexander, commander of Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency said, sketching them out in broad terms for an audience of security professionals yesterday at a symposium in Washington sponsored by Symantec. Keep reading →

Like the rest of the federal government, the Department of Homeland Security is facing a future of tighter budgets while trying to modernize its IT systems. As the third largest cabinet department, the DHS has struggled since its inception to seamlessly tie together the computer systems of all of its constituent agencies.

But recently, DHS has made some headway in streamlining its infrastructure through the use of enterprise-wide service bundles, trimming data centers and launching a host of pilot programs aimed at getting more bang for the buck. Keep reading →


The DHS Task Force on Cyber Skills released a much-anticipated report last month on the state of the cyber workforce within the Department of Homeland Security.

Commissioned in June 2012 by Secretary Janet Napolitano, a group of government and industry leaders was tasked with “identifying the best ways DHS can foster the development of a national security workforce capable of meeting current and future cybersecurity challenges.” The group was also charged with “outlining how DHS can improve its capability to recruit and retain that sophisticated cybersecurity talent.” Keep reading →


The Department of Homeland Security continues to deliver more services via cloud computing in an innovative hybrid model to leverage big data and further integrate its 22 organizations.

Greg Capella, Deputy Executive Director, Enterprise Systems Development Office in the DHS Office of the CIO, offered an update on the cloud efforts and advice for other agencies at a conference Tuesday in Washington, D.C. Keep reading →

The recent GFIRST Conference – a forum for incident response and security teams – covered the gamut of security topics with a surprisingly colorful and entertaining array of session titles. While my session title, “Continuous Monitoring 2.0” , may have lacked the bedazzle factor of “Hack the database…and other cocktail party tricks”, “Bad Karma Chameleon”, “Welcome to McSecurity, would you like fries with your scan?”, it did capture audience sentiment about the government’s CyberScope initiative and the push for continuous network monitoring.

So what’s causing the angst among federal IT security managers about CyberScope’s current state of play? Keep reading →

When the Department of Homeland Security hired Chief Information Officer Richard Spires three years ago, he became the seventh CIO in eight years tasked with bringing rationality to DHS‘s unwieldy IT fiefdoms – and delivering on a mandate for sharing information across the department.

Spires, a former IRS deputy commissioner in charge of operations, quickly set his sights beyond technology matters, persuading the department’s top officials that to succeed, it would take a functioning governance board and the commitment of top leadership to support that governance if DHS was to achieve those goals.

That effort, followed by a systematic portfolio review of every major IT program across the DHS, is clearly paying off, according to a Congressional report from the Government Accountability Office. The report, issued Sept. 18, generally praised the Department of Homeland Security for making progress in achieving its information-sharing mission. But it also cautioned DHS that further steps should be taken to continue that progress and improve its efforts.

The GAO auditors reviewed information obtained from customers of DHS’s information sharing efforts, including 10 of 77 fusion centers, where states and major urban areas collaborate with federal agencies to improve information sharing; 1 of 7 DHS operational components who participate in the DHS Intelligence Enterprise, ICE; and 2 of DHS’s 16 intelligence community customers, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Investigators concluded DHS’s governance board is proving effective in enhancing collaboration among DHS components. The board has also developed and documented a process to prioritize some of the initiatives for additional oversight and support.

However, GAO said DHS needs to do more to sustain its progress: specifically updating its processes for identifying information-sharing gaps and the results; and analyzing root causes of those gaps. It also said DHS lacks an institutional record that would help it replicate and sustain

those information-sharing efforts.

The report also noted that funding constraints appear to be having a significant impact on DHS’s key information-sharing initiatives.

“Progress has slowed for half of the 18 key initiatives, in part because of funding constraints,” the investigation found, noting five of DHS’s top eight priority information-sharing initiatives

currently face funding shortfalls.

The governance board has not been able to secure additional funds for these initiatives because they ultimately compete for funding within the budgets of individual components, although the board’s involvement has kept some initiatives from experiencing funding cuts, according to DHS officials.

DHS’s eight priority information-sharing initiatives, as of September 2012, include:

  • Controlled Homeland Information Sharing Environment
  • Information Sharing Segment Architecture Transition
  • Law Enforcement Information Sharing Initiative
  • Common Operating Picture/User-Defined Operation Picture
  • Traveler Enforcement Compliance System Modernization
  • Private Sector Information Sharing Work Plan
  • Homeland Secure Data Network
  • Homeland Security Information Network
However, GAO also noted that “DHS has not yet determined the specific capabilities each particular program must implement for DHS to conclude that it has improved information sharing enough to achieve its information-sharing vision for 2015.”

Establishing the level of capabilities programs must implement could help DHS prioritize programs, and track and assess progress toward its vision, the report said.

DHS responded to GAO’s report, saying department officials concurred with GAO’s recommendations.

We’re down to the last few agencies making the move from our Federal Telecommunications Service 2001 (FTS 2001) contract to the Networx contracts and I am proud of the work we’ve done with our agency partners and OMB to make Networx a success.

As many of you know, the Networx transition has not been easy. While the adoption has experienced challenges, we continue to work with agencies and industry to improve the offering, ease the transition, and highlight its benefits. In fact, we are applying the lessons learned from this effort to ensure our future program and offerings are an unqualified success. Keep reading →

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