NSA, Swan Island team on info-sharing initiative

The National Security Agency has signed a cooperative agreement with Swan Island Networks Inc. to develop a secure information-sharing solution for the intelligence agency.

The information assurance directorate signed the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with Swan Island of Portland, Ore., the company said. The associate director and chief information officer, reporting to Office of National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, is sponsoring it.

"The bulk of the IT infrastructure across which the business of government, of industry and the military is conducted belongs to the private sector, and those networks were never designed with the levels of assurance in mind that those institutions demand," Dick Schaeffer, NSA information assurance director, said in a news release.

"NSA depends on commercial innovation to meet the future operational needs of our government customers, and we work hand in hand with the industry through technology transfer initiatives of this sort," he said.

The arrangement will focus on so-called Last Mile intelligence techniques, which refer to management of service, caches and other needs at the outlying nodes of an IT network, the company said.

Swan Island's IT architectures are used in Oregon to link more than 250 public safety agencies, including first responders, schools and hospitals. Its Trusted Information Exchange Service also has been launched in the Washington, D.C., area.

The cooperative agreement is authorized under the Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986 for broadening the U.S. technology base.