¶ … Threats and Sharing of Information
Unified Intelligence
In many respects, the amount of danger posed by contemporary threats to public safety has rarely been greater in this country's history. This fact can largely be attributed to the degree of organization and the sharing of information via technological advances with which various factions have at their disposal to effectively terrorize parts of the United States, as well as to the somewhat imperialist tendencies of America's current foreign policy, which people in many parts of the world view as aggressive. One of the most significant offensives launched against the U.S. -- and on its own soil, at that -- was the toppling of the world trade center in 2001. Reports of other so-called terrorist activity (such as the young man from Africa who attempted to detonate a bomb on an airplane above Michigan who was linked to Al Qaeda) (Temple-Raston, 2010) have substantially multiplied since the devastation that served...
With both foreign as well as domestic threats (from organized groups as well as from average antisocial Americans) walking about, the need to disseminate information between disparate levels of law enforcement -- from federal, state, and municipal levels of government -- is fairly imminent.
Traditionally, U.S. domestic policy widely discouraged the sharing of intelligence between these three fundamental levels of government due to concerns of sensitivity. In the context of national security, sensitivity is the measure of how risky it is to disclose information to anyone, including law enforcement officials at various stages of federal, state and municipal levels, out of the belief that doing so could present a greater threat to the country as a form of vulnerability. Most often, this belief was fueled by the notion that disclosing such information would fuel a tide of panic among people, as well as alert whichever threat was relevant at…
