Agencies 'should share details'
19380
Information about potentially dangerous people should be shared among those who protect the public, Acpo says.
430247
Customers share what's working for them, and analysts weigh in about best practices.
220128
Freedom of information campaigners warn PM he must follow through on  promise of greater access.
397404
Poor information-sharing both inside and outside government is threatening homeland security, congressional investigators said Tuesday.
486335
Scotland's local authorities are to learn details of their budgets for the next three years.
313517
(InfoWorld) - Fraud investigators are struggling to cope with vast quantities of data sent to them by financial institutions, meaning some crimes may go uninvestigated or even unnoticed, experts said on Wednesday. The issue is prompting banks and other financial institutions to ask law enforcement and regulators to share with them more of the data they have aboutÂ suspicious transactions, in order to better combat fraud. Banks and transfer agencies are required by regulators in the U.S. and the U.K. to file reports when they detect a potentially illegal transaction, said Olga Maitland, head of the International Association of Money Transfer Networks, at the Fraud World 2007 conference in London. Up to 300,000 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are filed per month in the U.S., and up to 200,000 a year in the U.K., but most of those reports "disappear into a black hole" because law enforcement agencies don't have the resources to investigate each one, she said. If another financial institution is mentioned in a report, it may not even know about the suspicious activity if the report is filed by a different institution. "If there is indeed a crime taking place, then that is carrying on undetected," Maitland said. Colin Woodcock, head of the fraud section for the U.K.'s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), said the SARs program has resulted in "huge amounts of information ... which it was difficult to do anything with." "Let's not forget they are suspicious activity reports," Woodcock said during a panel discussion. "Now, if the police or anybody really were expected to act on everything that is suspicious, we would be bogged down in the first five seconds of operation." The quantity of reports has also created a need for greater computing power, he said. The U.K. has made some progress, according to Woodcock, and opened up access to the SARs database to other police forces such as HM Revenue and Customs, the U.K.'s tax authority, which can use it for their own investigations, he said. But sharing the SARs data with financial institutions raises huge concerns around confidentiality and privacy, Woodcock said. It could mean the disclosure of "very embarrassing" information about banks, he said. SARs were "given to us by industry to make the best use law enforcement can make of it, not to go and share it with everybody and say 'Look at what NatWest just told us," he said. "There are huge problems there." (NatWest is a major U.K. bank.) SOCA has started issuing alerts about problem trends, Woodcock said, but Maitland countered that the information is not in-depth. Money transfer networks have blossomed into a trillian-dollar industry. If SOCA can share its information more, by being "less restrictive, less confidential," it would lead to a greater reduction in fraud, Maitland said.
688903
Communicating can be tricky when a company or a government agency has workers in different locations and even different time zones.
292434
EMC, Microsoft and Cisco unveiled plans to create a standard for the sharing of sensitive information among government agencies and their vendors.
342844
Threatens Data Protection Act? The government has set out its "vision" for helping the disadvantaged of British society by sharing intelligence about them across the public sector.â¦
640827
The government needs to ensure greater protection for people's personal information, a think-tank  warns.
634342
Description: The Department of Homeland Security has been the target of criticism since its establishment two years ago. One of the priorities for Bernard Kerik as its new chief would be to facilitate the process of information sharing among agencies.
430515
Ford, as well as G.M. and Delphi, also said today they had been asked to provide the S.E.C. with information regarding practices related to pension and healthcare expenses.
403877
The White House on Wednesday told 15 federal agencies to better share scientific data about the Earth among themselves and with other nations.
152606
The Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday proposed that stock markets disclose more information about their operations, including executive pay and regulatory programs.
612836
WASHINGTON - U.S. government agencies need to better understand the vulnerabilties of the software they're buying, said IT workers from several government agencies during a software assurance forum in Washington, D.C., this week.
375795
The growth of government databases on children can split families, says a report for the Information Commissioner.
179192
Census officials sought to reassure minority and civil rights groups Tuesday that the agency keeps names, addresses and other personal information confidential from other government departments. Some critics remained skeptical.