DHS/ALL/PIA-046-1 Neptune Pilot

The Neptune Pilot is a part of the overall DHS Data Framework, which directly supports DHS’s need to use and share homeland security-related information across systems and components with privacy and civil liberties protections built directly into the data.  The Neptune system is designed to take in authoritative unclassified data sets of person-centric identity information that DHS gathers during its routine interactions with the public for the purpose of tagging the data and providing the tagged data to authorized systems.  Neptune tags the data by assigning both tag names and values to all of the ingested information.  During the first sixty to ninety days, the Neptune Pilot will tag and share data with two different systems: the Common Entity Index Prototype (CEI Prototype) and the Cerberus Pilot.  Both the CEI Prototype and Cerberus Pilot are described in separate Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA).  The Neptune Pilot is a DHS-wide pilot administered by the Common Vetting Task Force (CVTF) with the support of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) acting in coordination with the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO).  DHS is publishing this PIA pursuant to Section 208 of the E-Government Act of 2002 since the Neptune system handles personally identifiable information.  If the system passes the testing and evaluation stage and DHS moves to an operational system, a new PIA will be published.