was established in February 2002 to address desired improvements in collection, processing, sharing, and protection of homeland infrastructure geospatial information across multiple levels of government and to develop a common foundation of homeland infrastructure data to be used for visualization and analysis on all classification domains. Maintaining this original purpose, the HIFLD Working Group has attracted a voluntary coalition of Federal, state, and local government organizations and supporting private industry partners who are involved with geospatial issues related to Homeland Defense (HD), Homeland Security (HLS), Emergency Preparedness and Response (EP&R), or Civil Support (CS). Within these broad mission areas, the HIFLD members and non-federal contributors are involved in a wide range of different functions including: Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP), Crisis and Consequence Management, Intelligence and Threat Analysis, Antiterrorism/Force Protection (AT/FP), Defense Support to Civil Authorities (DSCA), Man-Made and Natural Hazard Modeling, and Government Facilities Management.
The HIFLD Working Group membership consists of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense & Americas' Security Affairs—OASD (HD&ASA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) National Protection & Programs Directorate Office of Infrastructure Protection (NPPD OIP) and Geospatial Management Office (GMO), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) Office of Americas (PM), and the Department of Interior (DOI) United States Geological Survey (USGS) National Geospatial Program Office (NGPO).
HIFLD also receives strong support from the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Mission Assurance Division (MAD), among many other organizations—with the common goal of promoting domestic infrastructure geospatial information sharing and protection, as well as knowledge management among the HIFLD membership at large.
HIFLD Working Group meetings are held on a bi-monthly basis. They focus primarily on different national-level and defense critical infrastructure sectors on a rotating schedule. Issues addressed by the HIFLD Working Group include the identification of authoritative homeland infrastructure geospatial data sources, acquisition of this authoritative data for common use by the HD/HLS Community, and a variety of other structural/governance themes related to geospatial information. These include, but are not limited to, data standards, symbology, enterprise architecture schemes, information exchange and protection, and the production of recommendations on other policy-related issues.
HIFLD Working Group sessions and communications are kept, to the greatest extent possible, at the Unclassified // Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) level in order to encourage active participation by state and local entities with significant HLS/HD interests. Parallel sessions and communications at SECRET or higher levels are conducted as necessary.