Award made for JABS security

The Justice Department awarded a $4 million task order to Northrop Grumman Corp. to help secure a nationwide system for identifying and booking criminal suspects.

The Joint Automated Booking System program is designed to standardize arrest procedures, making sure that law enforcement officials collect the same information every time they make an arrest and providing the data necessary to maintain a national offender database.

JABS also would be linked to an electronic fingerprint database, reducing the time it takes to identify a suspect from weeks to hours.

Northrop Grumman was awarded the systems security task order to provide services and products to support the information security activities of JABS. The company will assist in developing system security policies, technical security requirements, contingency plans and security evaluation.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, experts criticized law enforcement and others for failing to have a unified system to track offenders and flag potential terrorists.

On the drawing boards for more than a year, JABS would create an information-sharing infrastructure among five law enforcement agencies -- the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Marshals Service.