The Department of Justice (DOJ) established the Law Enforcement Information Sharing Program (LEISP) to achieve the Department’s vision of creating relationships and methods for sharing criminal information routinely and securely across jurisdictional boundaries. A wide reaching information sharing program is necessary to deter terrorism and increase the amount of information available to investigate and prosecute criminal activity. LEISP is the Department’s contribution to achieving compliance with the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA) and the Information Sharing Environment (ISE) initiatives as mandated by the Attorney General.

Two initiatives within the LEISP are the systems known as OneDOJ (formerly named the Regional Data Exchange or R-DEx) and the National Data Exchange or N-DEx.

OneDOJ operates with two primary objectives:

• to serve as DOJ’s system to share criminal law enforcement information internally across investigative components
• to provide regional criminal law enforcement connectivity for authorized users to conduct federated searches of OneDOJ information. This connectivity will also provide authorized DOJ users the means to query partner law enforcement information as governed by the respective Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

N-DEx is a system currently in development by the Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). N-DEx is designed to be a national criminal law enforcement information sharing system governed by the FBI’s CJIS Advisory Policy Board (APB) and available to the entire law enforcement community. N-DEx will serve as a repository of information contributed by local, state, tribal, and federal Law Enforcement Agencies, including DOJ. Initially, the data contributed to N-DEx will be predominantly incident and arrest reports. Eventually booking, incarceration, parole, probation, and other information will be included. Through N-DEx, any agency can contribute and share law enforcement information with any other agency. The system will provide powerful analytical and correlation capabilities to the users.

Over the course of the following two years, LEISP and CJIS are planning to converge the capabilities delivered by OneDOJ and N-DEx. By February 2010, the integration will enable users to experience the best aspects of both systems. Law enforcement agency (LEA) users will be able to use existing applications or tools to access national law enforcement data and advanced operational functions of N-DEx. N-DEx will provide the ability to search and correlate data from multiple sources.