When crisis strikes, new FBI technology is ready to help

25 September 2008

With terrorist strikes becoming a near common-place around the world, and increasingly engulfing larger sections of a populace, either as victims, or as the mass from which the perpetrators have to be sniffed out, FBI's proffered tool has wide ramifications for security services.

After all, as an organisation FBI has vast experience handling terror strikes - domestically and internationally.

On the morning of October 3, 2002, four people were murdered outside the nation's capital. It was the start of a shooting spree in the region that resulted in 10 deaths and sparked a massive hunt for the killers.

The so-called Beltway snipers were caught three weeks later, but the challenges posed by the case-multiple shootings in different locations, several investigative command centers in different jurisdictions, tens of thousands of phone and e-mail tips streaming in (so many that at one point they had to be collected in boxes and driven to the primary command center every four hours), and difficulty sharing information with our law enforcement partners at lightning speed-underscored the fact that our crisis management software systems needed an upgrade, especially in the post-9/11 era.

Now we have such a tool, a next-generation system built from the ground up by our investigators and technology experts. We call it ORION-the Operational Response and Investigative Online Network.

ORION gives the FBI and its partners a real-time, online network to quickly and effectively coordinate efforts in crisis situations, no matter how many law enforcement personnel are involved…where they might be located…or how big the case.