The Department of Defense has announced it will use the FBI-owned and maintained eGuardian suspicious-activity reporting system to ensure access to appropriate law enforcement-related threat information in support of the department’s missions.The announcement follows two years of analysis and a six-month pilot program designed to find the best replacement for the Threat and Location Observation Notice reporting system, which was terminated in 2007. Implementation of eGuardian also follows recommendation by the DoD Independent Review related to the Fort Hood shootings that DoD “adopt a common force protection threat reporting system for documenting, storing, and exchanging threat information related to DoD personnel, facilities, and forces in transit.”
Only authorized, fully trained personnel will input data into eGuardian, and all data will be reviewed to make sure that information based solely on the ethnicity, race or religion of an individual, or solely on the exercise of rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, is not entered into the system.
The FBI developed eGuardian in 2008 to provide the law-enforcement community an unclassified near real-time information-sharing and threat-tracking system. DoD law enforcement and security personnel will be able to share potential terrorist threats, terrorist events and suspicious-activity information with other state, local, tribal, federal law enforcement agencies, state fusion centers and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Department of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates directed that the under secretary of defense for policy establish a plan and issue policy and procedures for the adoption of the eGuardian system as DoD’s unclassified suspicious-activity reporting system no later than June 30, 2010.
