Terrorist threat not enough to get US government sharing information

US government departments are stalling the roll-out of data-sharing systems because they don't want to release prized information to rival agencies.

The White House has increased pressure on government groups to share information across department boundaries in an attempt to combat terrorism in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks.

But government policy advisors say inter-department rivalry has hindered the required IT implementation.

Henry Gibson, bank secrecy act compliance officer with the US Postal Service, said: "Departments are very territorial, internally, and with other law enforcement agencies.

"If you have data that can help catch the bad guys you don't want to share it with other law enforcers for fear they will grab the low hanging fruit and catch them first," he said.

The US Postal Service built a business intelligence system to root out cases of money laundering, but only after the Department of the Treasury threatened to take the postmaster general to court unless the organisation improved monitoring of suspicious activity.

With one million money orders processed every day, the compliance office was eager to access information from other departments within the Postal Service, but co-operation was not easy to get.

Gibson said: "I've seen it before. We'll already have something and we know that you don't, but we'll just close the door because we don't want to share it with you."

Gibson said it was an ongoing problem. Norman Reid, a policy analyst with the US Department of Agriculture, agreed.

He ran into similar problems when implementing an IT system that would allow his department division to track loans and grants given to farmers.

He said: "We not only had problems getting other parts of the department to share information, we had trouble getting data from our own part of the department. We made formal requests and there were indeterminable delays. We finally cracked the system, we broke into it."

Despite the increased emphasis on data sharing across departments, and the establishment of the Homeland Security Advisory System - a post-11 September government initiative aimed at improving the dissemination of electronic information on suspected terrorists - there has been little change in mindset.

Reid said: "Sharing information is not a technical problem. We know we've got the systems. It's about building relationships between organisations that are not used to co-operating."