Harnessing Data for National Security

Since 9/11, the U.S. government has initiated efforts to enhance its information-sharing capabilities and doubled its investment in counterterrorism, spending nearly $80 billion. Sharing data and conducting analyses across the government’s legacy stovepipes of information is challenging but mandatory to reduce redundancy, increase cost efficiency, and improve national security mission performance. The challenges involved in harnessing big data analytics for a more enlightened approach to national security center on striking the optimal balance between complex opposing forces—opportunity versus risk, collective security versus individual privacy, and innovation versus protection. While the government has made progress in identifying existing data sources and sharing high-level metadata, it is still in the early phases of the maturity curve in terms of enabling access across the federal ecosystem to leverage the valuable analytics that inform evidence-driven decision-making. This paper explores the strategies and frameworks to expedite effectively analyzing and using data to drive national security activities.