With its more than 41 million transmissions per month encrypted end-to-end across the infrastructure, Nlets now meets and exceeds the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) mandate for improved security while supporting rapid message exchange, according to Cisco.
Nlets, the nation's primary interstate law enforcement network, interconnects 18,000 local, state and federal law enforcement and public safety agencies. Any time one of these agencies needs information from another, the inquiry travels over the Nlets network. Nlets users can query out-of-state databases for motor-vehicle and driver data, criminal histories, Canadian "hot file" records, U.S. citizenship and immigration services records and aircraft-tracking and registration information. Nlets also routes homeland security messages and Amber alerts of missing children.
"Both citizen and first-responder safety is at stake with the communications over Nlets, so it's critical that we deploy the highest performance, most secure and reliable capabilities available," said Steve Correll, executive director of Nlets. "We simply must work to ensure that Nlets is never compromised or out of service in any way. Public safety agencies rely on the information that travels over the network to make decisions, and some critical information -- such as, 'Is this person armed and dangerous?' -- must be determined in seconds."
"For instance, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Nlets' network provided the means for public safety and law enforcement first responders in the affected areas to communicate among themselves and outside the area," said Correll. "While we had one outage at the user end when systems were wiped out, we were able to keep continuous contact in most areas at lightning speeds, due to our state-of-the art system. Undoubtedly, some lives were saved as a result of the information sharing capabilities that has been a priority for the 18,000 agencies we serve throughout the nation."
Nlets, owned jointly by the 50 U.S. states and territories, was established nearly 40 years ago. In addition, all federal agencies involved in criminal justice and public safety subscribe to the network.
In 2000, after the FBI Advisory Policy Board passed a motion requiring public safety agencies to encrypt data end-to-end by 2005, Nlets administrators decided to upgrade the frame relay infrastructure to an IP-based foundation. With routers deployed at each of the member agencies, Nlets now performs the required, end-to-end encryption.
"Even if an intruder were able to intercept a message sent across Nlets, the message could not be read or altered," said Morgan Wright, global industry solution manager for justice and public safety, with Cisco Systems. "Plus, this enhanced level of security comes at no cost to network performance. With all the advanced capabilities and scalability of an IP-based network, Nlets continues to provide the same fast message transmission, in one second or less, as the less robust, less capable network that it replaced."
