The Pegasus Program, Linn County, Iowa Sheriff Donald Zeller, BIO-key International Inc., and the Linn County Sheriff’s Office (LCSO) yesterday announced the Pegasus/Linn County Pilot Project, an innovative pilot project to demonstrate legacy database interoperability for authorized information exchange among Sheriffs’ Offices and municipal police department personnel within communities and nationwide.
Sheriff Donald Zeller stated, “The Linn County Sheriff’s Office has been looking for a cost-effective and flexible way to enable automated information exchange with our law enforcement partners in and near Linn County. Captain David Knott and Lieutenant James Houlahan, of our office, working with i/tx, our mug shot and imaging vendor, have created and implemented a new approach which enables authorized information exchange with our closest law enforcement partners. This approach combines the Pegasus Program’s secure fingerprint-based access authentication with an ‘Information Integrator Appliance’ which is located in our office. Through this combination, we can control the information we want to exchange and assure its secure fingerprint-based access locally and nationwide.”
Dr. Lee Colwell, speaking on behalf of the Pegasus Program, noted that, “Historically, law enforcement information exchange has been limited by two principal factors: consensus among law enforcement, especially at the local level of Sheriffs’ Offices and municipal police departments where the vast majority of law enforcement and public safety takes place; and the cost of technology to implement that consensus. Beginning in the spring of 2000, the Nation’s Sheriffs have taken the lead to build nationwide consensus on how local law enforcement is going to exchange information held in existing law enforcement databases through the Pegasus Program. Local law enforcement wants to exchange information built around their legacy systems, without interfering with existing software and vendor relationships, which are so essential to day-to-day operations.
Thanks to the leadership of Sheriff Zeller and the Linn County Sheriff’s Office, this pilot program demonstrates an approach to community and nationwide information exchange which uses the Global Justice XML Data Model and which may be implemented with much more information, more rapidly, and more cost-effectively, than is possible through traditional data integration and information sharing approaches.”
The Pegasus/Linn County, IA Pilot Project is built around an “Information Integrator Appliance” powered by software supplied by i/tx Information technology solutions, inc., a Cedar Rapids software firm and member of the Pegasus Technology Consortium. The “Information Integrator Appliance” translates LCSO-authorized data from legacy databases into Pegasus-Compliant Global Justice XML Data, extracts of which are made available nationwide, with more detailed information available via secured access to the appliance. As part of the Pegasus enrollment process, all data is securely accessed by law enforcement personnel using BIO-key International’s WEB-key software that replaces less secure passwords with more convenient fingerprint authentication.
Fingerprint authentication provides a high degree of security and user accountability in the Pegasus system.
About the The Pegasus Program
The Pegasus Program is a nationwide information sharing program providing a more efficient and secure way for local law enforcement officers to access the same information to which they have traditionally had access. It utilizes a non-federal, multi-state immediate information sharing system designed by and for the Nation’s Sheriffs and their local law enforcement and other first responder partners, utilizing COTS technology. The Program is administered by the Pegasus Research Foundation using U.S. Department of Justice-approved NIST standards, and is supported by the National Sheriffs’ Association.