For all those who are even a little familiar with the System Wide Information Management (SWIM) concept the recent publication of thousands of classified diplomatic documents must have come as a shock. If secret diplomatic correspondence can be hijacked and made public with such ease, what hope do we have of keeping the commercially or otherwise sensitive data that will be shared in the air traffic management environment confidential? Will anyone still be willing to share their sensitive data?
To give an answer to this question, we have to examine how those secret, electronically stored documents got into the wrong hands in the first place.
For many years the United States government was being lambasted from all sides for being a dinosaur in the information age. Adoption of electronic government functions, long commonplace in countries of far lesser sophistication, were being introduced at a painfully slow rate, if at all. Significantly, the 9/11 commission report charged that computers in the various government departments could not share information and that this contributed to the terrorists being able to conduct their preparations unnoticed.
In other words, Uncle Sam was badly in need of a healthy dose of SWIM. As we know, System Wide Information Management ensures that everyone has the data they need in a timely manner and in the quality that meets their requirements. SWIM also ensures that the confidentiality of information passing through it is rigorously protected.
When the US government went ahead to solve their information sharing problem, it was done in a way that went overboard and replaced zero sharing with a share everything with everyone policy. In all the enthusiasm the need to protect information that needed to be protected was somehow forgotten. During the Iraq and Afghanistan war, information sharing, under the banner of providing the best possible information to the warfighters in the field, was extended even further. To the point where Private Bradley Manning at an Army base in Iraq was able to download secret material without even needing to be a hacker. The fact that he violated several laws is of no interest. If something can be done, somebody somewhere will do it even if it is forbidden. Hence the need for proper protection of information.
Clearly, the problem at the root of the WikiLeaks hoopla was not any inherent shortcomings in electronic information storage or electronic information sharing but the way it was implemented.
The SWIM concept has been built from the ground up with the need to protect information paramount. SWIM is not the result of a crash action to remedy shortcomings in government systems but a concept and implementation that has its roots in industries where confidentiality and data protection is second nature. While there is no perfect system for protecting anything, data in a SWIM environment will be as safe as it needs to be and is economically justifiable. No little Mannings will get a chance to steal from SWIM.
Of course this whole issue raises another interesting point and that is: when should something be classified as secret or sensitive? If most everything is secret, than nothing really is… In our early work on Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) one of the major hurdles concerned convincing airlines that a flight cancellation was not something to be kept a secret (resulting in the loss of an airport slot) and nobody would gain a competitive advantage from knowing about the cancellation. On the contrary, sharing such cancellation information would improve airport throughput. Going overboard with secrecy does not benefit anyone. Unfortunately, to this day certain organisations seem to think that keeping information a secret gives them more power. It does… but the wrong kind.