The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has been collecting, storing, and analyzing records on explosives and arson incidents since 1975. In 1996, the ATF Arson and Explosives National Repository Branch was established to satisfy a congressional mandate for the secretary of the treasury to establish a national repository of information on arson and explosives incidents.

With the passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and the movement of ATF to the Department of Justice (DOJ), U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft—in his August 2004 memorandum to the deputy attorney general and the heads of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), ATF, and the Drug Enforcement Administration—delegated the collection of the information required by section 846(b) of the act to ATF. The attorney general stated in this memorandum, “The Department’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) shall consolidate all of the Department’s arson and explosives incident databases, including, but not limited to, the FBI’s Automated Incident Reporting System and ATF’s Bomb and Arson Tracking System, into a single database.”