Moderator: Interagency and intergovernmental information sharing was crucial to the response and recovery efforts following 9/11, yet it remains a very difficult challenge throughout government. What are the key barriers? Will our recent experiences help break them down? Would new information policies make a difference?

Alex Roberts: From our perspective in Criminal Justice I think the barriers are the same in all areas of society. They all go back to the most basic thing -- we have to speak the same language. This is true whether it's two human beings that have to communicate or whether it's computerized systems. We need protocols for communication and standards for passing information to be able to interface our systems today. Data standards and open protocols are not particularly the first things people in technology want to work on, but they are critical.

The data that is passing between connected information systems has to follow the same standards all the way back to wherever it's collected manually. All the information, let's say on an arrest fingerprint card, has to use the same data elements all across the state, all the way through the system. This is critical now that we are starting to tie systems in different parts of society together. On 9/11 it wasn't only criminal justice that had to respond. The health system and the social services systems also had to relay information to get the job done.

Up to now there have been half-hearted and partial attempts to create standards that cross all of these boundaries, but they have not been fully successful. I believe government will have to work harder at this -- all areas of government, federal, state, and local. It can only be done collaboratively. It's never worked by dictating from the top down because people just don't accept that.

John Sennett: At the present time the major threat to the security of the United States and its people is international terrorism. In the world that we would prefer to work and live in as American citizens, when a trooper on the Northway in the middle of the night pulls over a car and says "License and registration, please," he should be able to look at the driver's license and be able to say, "I see that you're a foreign national, and according to this license your visa has expired. You're going to have to come with me." Not because he was going five miles over the speed limit and not because his taillight was out, but because he was in the United States illegally. That is not a trivial offense anymore.

The only way that trooper can know that the driver is in the country illegally is if the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) shares its data with the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles and that's never been done before and it's not going to get done tomorrow unless we have the political will.

Alex Roberts: We have also approached these problems of information sharing through the Legislature. For example, they took up the question as to whether it is appropriate to share information about juvenile offenders. So I'm sure the Legislature will be considering the issue of whether or not it would be appropriate to share our criminal history information with the INS or vice versa.

Debra Cohn: There are also turf battles with sharing of information from government agencies. Calling it turf may sound pejorative, but there's a great deal of pride in creating a database and in making sure it meets certain standards. The collaborative process is not just coming up with shared standards, but also trust in the different people who share the databases and apply the standards.