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www.seadiscovery.com Marine Technology Reporter 15 “Our strategy is about establishing trust and sharing in a region. I don’t have to have all the information from a regional partnership led by a foreign country in their region, but I do want to know when they discover an issue of concern to the United States. I don’t have to suck up the data and process the data myself. The fact is you’re not going to make much progress trying to estab- lish that level of data ingest and processing to get the answer. So, within these regional partnerships, there is processing and alerting based on criteria they’re looking for. It varies by region and by threat. It varies if you are a Customs and Border Patrol or the United States Coast

Guard. You’ve got different criteria you’re looking for.

And, certainly, the Navy has different things that it looks as do our foreign partners. The important point is that the alerts and the issues of interest are shared across these networks,” Andress says. “And by establishing these sharing networks, you’re also better able to respond at times of crisis. You’ve got a known group of people that you can reach out to for other information. Oftentimes, those barriers to sharing information may exist on a day to day basis, but during crisis these barriers suddenly shift, and information starts pouring more freely to help address a certain issue.” “If all of that information was available, all the time, then I could connect the known terrorist watch list to the ship that is loading a passenger in Romania, for example, and I could act. But there are a million and one obstacles between connecting that all together. The biggest obstacle is trust.” “The end state we are striving for is the creation of a cooperative network of regionally focused information sharing exchanges that are able to connect the dots of potential threats from the maritime domain and rapidly respond in times of crisis,” he says. “The Navy’s future is in information and we can better integrate it, better process it for understanding, and how to better partner and share it in order to better protect the United States and its maritime industry,” Andress says.

Capt. Edward Lundquist, USN (Ret.), is a senior science writer for MCR LLC.