May 13, 1999 Web posted at: 3:14 p.m. EDT (1914 GMT) by Jessica Davis

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(IDG) -- Although returning to the parking lot to find that your car has been stolen may inspire outrage, it is not usually considered an IT issue.

However, if you work in the United States for the FBI, tracing stolen vehicles and communicating with other agencies that track them can be crucial to busting crime syndicates.

At the FBI, that's mission-critical.

It's also the motivation behind a project to connect law enforcement agencies in other countries to the Vehicle File Access available through the National Crime Information Center (NCIC).

Of the 1.5 million cars stolen each year in the United States, about 200,000 are shipped overseas -- often by organized crime syndicates -- to be sold on the black market.

By making the stolen car data available to overseas law enforcement agencies, the FBI hopes to help officials in those countries track down criminals.

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"The question that comes up is, `Isn't this a domestic problem? Why should any other country care about our vehicles?' " asks George Saymon, a management analyst at the FBI, and the leader of the project, in Charleston, W. Va. "But if someone buys a stolen car, they don't buy a car from a local source in that country. Countries suffer from a lack of a dynamic auto market."

Most IT managers don't have to worry about tracking criminals across national borders. However, they do have to share data with partners and customers in other countries, and the FBI's experience using a legacy system and the Web for global communications with developed and developing countries may provide a useful example.

Saymon got a jump-start for putting together the International Vehicle File Project by riding on the communications network of Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization dedicated to the coordination of law enforcement among different countries.

Many of the countries to which the FBI wants to extend the NCIC are developing nations with primitive communications infrastructures. Interpol, however, offers a secure, established network to carry the data.

The next step was the Intranet Browser project, a three-tier, browser-based system that pushes down to the user key functions to enable them to query the crime center's stolen vehicle database. On the advice of the Open Networks consultancy, the FBI used a development toolset from Prolifics to build a secure, multilanguage system that lets law enforcement in other countries track vehicle identification numbers.

The browser package now offers translation for five languages. It also translates complicated NCIC codes into these languages.

"With our project at the user level, people can get an answer back in seconds to minutes," Saymon says. "Before that, it took hours to days."

Currently, the FBI is working to complete the project in Belize, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Poland. The next phase will create links to Guatemala, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine.

"Funding is an ongoing process," Saymon says. "The State Department funds the project for developing democracies. To implement the project costs only a few thousand dollars per country."

For Saymon, the most challenging part of the project has been neither the technology nor getting the funding. Instead, it's been dealing with the international issues such a network creates.

"The political considerations of doing any type of data sharing really is a new concept," Saymon says. "Each country has restrictions -- laws that say what you can do. But this is a good first step in international data sharing."