The Obama administration will announce today that it plans to make it easier for local, state, and federal authorities to share clues that could thwart potential terrorist attacks, reports the Wall Street Journal. At issue are reams of reports, guidelines, and advisories produced by the federal government every day that aren’t sensitive enough to get classifications such as “top secret,” but are too sensitive to make immediately available to the public.
Now, government agencies use a tangle of more than 100 categories for this sort of sensitive information. President Barack Obama ordered his staff to craft an executive order to consolidate those categories down to one, “Controlled Unclassified Information.” The administration will expand a program that collects and analyzes potential terrorism tips from local police officers, so that, by 2014, all states will have the capability to analyze that data and share it with other states and the federal government.