Data Loading and Analysis System

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The Data Loading and Analysis System (DaLAS) is an electronic database used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Intelligence Community for counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations. It is used to store copies of seized digital media, including disk images of CD-ROMs, DVDs, hard drives, mobile phones, and raw network feeds, as well as scans of physical documents. DaLAS supports the upload, processing, and classification of media, and provides a central, remotely accessed, searchable repository of data. The full details of DaLAS, including the number of files and total amount of stored data, are classified. [1]

Database organized collection of data

A database is an organized collection of data, generally stored and accessed electronically from a computer system. Where databases are more complex they are often developed using formal design and modeling techniques.

Federal Bureau of Investigation governmental agency belonging to the United States Department of Justice

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States, and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, the FBI is also a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community and reports to both the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence. A leading U.S. counter-terrorism, counterintelligence, and criminal investigative organization, the FBI has jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crimes.

United States Intelligence Community Collective term for U.S. intelligence and security agencies

The United States Intelligence Community (IC) is a federation of 16 separate United States government intelligence agencies and a 17th administrative office, that work separately and together to conduct intelligence activities to support the foreign policy and national security of the United States. Member organizations of the IC include intelligence agencies, military intelligence, and civilian intelligence and analysis offices within federal executive departments. The IC is overseen by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) making up the seventeen-member Intelligence Community, which itself is headed by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who reports to the President of the United States.

During a 2011 investigation in the aftermath of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, a query of Nidal Malik Hasan's personal email account returned a result on a hard drive image stored on DaLAS. The drive had been seized in 2007 in an unrelated New Jersey tax case. The match was a message posted to a web forum by Hasan on February 10, 2005, asking whether doctors should prescribe intoxicating medications under Sharia law. [1]

2009 Fort Hood shooting mass murder that took place on November 5, 2009

On November 5, 2009, a mass shooting took place at Fort Hood, near Killeen, Texas. Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others. It was the deadliest mass shooting on an American military base.

See also

The Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), is a searchable database operated by the FBI. It was created in 2004. Much of the nature and scope of the database is classified. The database is a centralization of multiple federal and state databases, including criminal records from various law enforcement agencies, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), and public records databases. According to Michael Morehart's testimony before the House Committee on Financial Services in 2006, the "IDW is a centralized, web-enabled, closed system repository for intelligence and investigative data. This system, maintained by the FBI, allows appropriately trained and authorized personnel throughout the country to query for information of relevance to investigative and intelligence matters."

The Data Warehouse System — Electronic Surveillance Data Management System (DWS-EDMS) is an electronic database created by the Special Technologies and Applications Section (STAS) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Disclosed in a heavily redacted review of the FBI's role in the prevention of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, its full capabilities are classified but at a minimum, provides a searchable archive of intercepted electronic communications, including email sent over the Internet. Another report suggests that online chat transcripts, email attachments, and audio of unspecified origin are stored.

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The Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) is part of the Executive Office of the President of the United States. It was created by an Executive Order on March 19, 2002.

Computer forensics

Computer forensics is a branch of digital forensic science pertaining to evidence found in computers and digital storage media. The goal of computer forensics is to examine digital media in a forensically sound manner with the aim of identifying, preserving, recovering, analyzing and presenting facts and opinions about the digital information.

William H. Webster American judge

William Hedgcock Webster is an American attorney and jurist serving as Chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council since 2005. He was a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri and a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit before becoming Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1978 to 1987 and Director of Central Intelligence (CIA) from 1987 to 1991—the only person to have held both of these positions.

Joint Terrorism Task Force

A Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) is a partnership between various federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, as well as the D.E.A Joint Task Force Enforcement and private organizations, that are charged with taking action against terrorism which includes the investigation of crimes such as wire fraud and identity theft.

Data remanence is the residual representation of digital data that remains even after attempts have been made to remove or erase the data. This residue may result from data being left intact by a nominal file deletion operation, by reformatting of storage media that does not remove data previously written to the media, or through physical properties of the storage media that allow previously written data to be recovered. Data remanence may make inadvertent disclosure of sensitive information possible should the storage media be released into an uncontrolled environment.

National Software Reference Library organization

The National Software Reference Library (NSRL), is a project of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which maintains a repository of known software, file profiles and file signatures for use by law enforcement and other organizations involved with computer forensic investigations. The project is supported by the United States Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Defense Computer Forensics Laboratory (DCFL), the U.S. Customs Service, software vendors, and state and local law enforcement. It also provides a research environment for computational analysis of large sets of files.

Enterprise content management (ECM) extends the concept of content management by adding a time line for each content item and possibly enforcing processes for the creation, approval and distribution of them. Systems that implement ECM generally provide a secure repository for managed items, be they analog or digital, that indexes them. They also include one or more methods for importing content to bring new items under management and several presentation methods to make items available for use.

In computing, data recovery is a process of salvaging (retrieving) inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged or formatted data from secondary storage, removable media or files, when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a normal way. The data is most often salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), USB flash drives, magnetic tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID subsystems, and other electronic devices. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage devices or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system (OS).

Digital forensics

Digital forensics is a branch of forensic science encompassing the recovery and investigation of material found in digital devices, often in relation to computer crime. The term digital forensics was originally used as a synonym for computer forensics but has expanded to cover investigation of all devices capable of storing digital data. With roots in the personal computing revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the discipline evolved in a haphazard manner during the 1990s, and it was not until the early 21st century that national policies emerged.

National Counterterrorism Center U.S. government organization responsible for national and international counterterrorism efforts

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Data erasure is a software-based method of overwriting the data that aims to completely destroy all electronic data residing on a hard disk drive or other digital media by using zeros and ones to overwrite data onto all sectors of the device. By overwriting the data on the storage device, the data is rendered unrecoverable and achieves data sanitization.

Electronically stored information (ESI), for the purpose of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) is information created, manipulated, communicated, stored, and best utilized in digital form, requiring the use of computer hardware and software.

Nidal Hasan Jordanian-American army officer; convict

Nidal Malik Hasan is an American convicted of fatally shooting 13 people and injuring more than 30 others in the Fort Hood mass shooting on November 5, 2009. Hasan was a United States Army Medical Corps psychiatrist who admitted to the shootings at his court-martial in August 2013. A jury panel of 13 officers convicted him of 13 counts of premeditated murder, 32 counts of attempted murder, and unanimously recommended he be dismissed from the service and sentenced to death. Hasan is incarcerated at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas awaiting execution which is scheduled for 5 May 2019.

Digital forensics is a branch of the forensic sciences related to the investigation of digital devices and media. Within the field a number of "normal" forensics words are re-purposed, and new specialist terms have evolved.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the past and present terrorism in the United States:

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