Archives: Seattle Was One Of First Cities To Pilot FBI JTTF Program

HardPressed has started to process hundreds of documents from the Washington State Archives, digitized and published here for the first time.

A November 2002 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) document shows that the Pacific Northwest (PNW) was significantly overrepresented nationally at the initial implementation of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) Gateway Information Sharing Initiative (ISI).

Before Palantir, the ISI allowed hundreds of datasets to be combined into a comprehensive search, link chart generation and geospatial mapping application.

Of the eight cities across the entire country, four in the PNW, including Seattle, Spokane, Portland and Coeur D'Alene, were the sites of pilot programs for the ISI.

Why exactly the PNW was disproportionately saturated by the ISI pilot program is unknown. The very first pilot location of the ISI was St. Louis Missouri.

ISI is a precursor to the Law Enforcement Information Exchange (LInX) now operated by Naval Criminal Investigations Service (NCIS). Seattle Police Department (SPD) Chief Carmen Best signed a Memorandum of Understanding with NCIS to continue implementation of the LInX system in 2020.

SPD's point of contact for the LInX system, Captain Paul McDonagh, had previously received training from Israeli officials in Israel in 2005.