The dissertation offers an analysis of administrative and legal regulation of the National Police of Ukraine in the sphere of restricted information. Based on the research results obtained from the analysis of historical, political, technical and economic aspects, five stages of informational activity genesis were identified in the lawenforcement in Ukraine.
The author substantiated the scholarly approach which implies that legal and normative documents (laws of Ukraine) regulating the informational and informationanalytical activity of the National Police of Ukraine need to be classified as fundamental (establishing the fundamental principles of informational activity) and secondary (developed on the basis of the fundamental ones and supplementing the latter). It was proved that the concepts lying in the core of the National Police activities in the sphere of restricted information (among others «information resources», «restricted information», «information for internal use only», «classified information», «confidential information») are not infrequently defined in normative and legal acts not unambiguously, which has an adverse impact on legal regulation of operational activities of the National Police in general.
With the view to regulating the circulation of confidential information in the National Police units, the paper suggests a draft order of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine which determines the list of what is qualified as confidential information in the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. This draft order considers the norms of the valid normative and legal acts of Ukraine which explicitly qualify a piece of information as confidential.
Special attention was paid to the fact that the information resources of the National Police belong to the state information resources (classified information, for internal use only, confidential), in other words those which are not subject to spreading or transferring to other persons apart from the cases stipulated by the law. A major part of the mentioned information resources is stored in electronic data bases and it is handled through technical software, therefore their security ensurance is one of the major issues related to restricted information circulation in the activities of the National Police.
The author suggested interpreting the concept «information resources» in terms of the National Police operation: the National Police information resources are separate documents as well as sets thereof, results of intellectual, creative, operational, informational and analytical activity of the personnel, data banks and bases, information (sub)systems and technologies, archives and other storages containing the data (information) recorded on appropriate hardware are intellectual property of the National Police (Ministry of Internal Affairs) and have a certain consumer value.
It was specified that existing normative and legal principles of ensuring the information security do not cover the entire range of current threats to information security, especially to the restricted information circulation in specialized information searching and telecommunication systems of the National Police. Therefore, they must be revised and supplemented. In particular, there is a need to introduce changes on the legislative level in order to clearly identify the problem of safe functioning of specialized information systems, outline major threats in the sphere of information protection and timely provision of new up-to-date normative and legal means to counteract the threats.
It was emphasized that taking into account the present-day status of the National Police reforms, world tendencies of IT development and IT systems of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the National Police, the major directions for improving the activity of the National Police in the sphere of handling restricted information should involve the improvement of the following: normative and legal regulation of information relations; personnel training quality, available information networks and systems and establishment of new ones; provision of organizational and technical support for information security.
In terms of organization, it was suggested that the process of establishing complex systems of information security in the specialized information systems of the National Police should be divided into 11 logical stages of development and usage. For each stage a number of basic prerequisite steps were outlined.
For improving the organizational and technical provision for information security in specialized systems and networks, the author suggested devising and implementing necessary steps aimed at raising the levels of security while working with information resources in specialized information systems of the National Police.
