Homeland Security's Missing Link

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Homeland Security's Missing Link




The U.S. is spending plenty on tech, but it could spare far more. Even  
more important is cohesive planning and implementation

Workers used to take the day off for Chinese New Year at the Hong Kong  
International Terminals (HIT), the flagship outpost of shipping giant  
Hutchison Port Holdings in the former British protectorate. Now with  
the U.S. economy bubbling again and the global shipping business on the  
rebound, the busiest freight terminal in the busiest port on Earth goes  
full-tilt 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. From wrinkle-free pants to  
portable DVD players, the Hong Kong seaport moves 560,000 truckloads of  
merchandise to the U.S. each year.

Starting in May, 2004, every single truck bringing a load to HIT will  
be screened for radioactive material and suspicious cargo using a new  
portable scanner built by Science Applications International. In the  
past, time constraints prevented 100% coverage. Older scanners required  
two to three minutes to accomplish their task.

The new version takes only 10 seconds to scope out a truck, from front  
bumper to tailpipe -- a delay that's barely noticeable at HIT, where  
trucks have to make a hairpin turn to enter the terminal queue. Called  
a VACIS (vehicle and cargo inspection system), the device also combines  
two formerly separate scanning techniques. Gamma rays look for  
suspicious images, while radiation detection tracks radioactive  
signatures.

MISPLACED PRIORITIES.  Installing enough scanners to bring 100%  
screening capability to U.S. shipments traversing the world's 60  
largest ports would cost $500 million to $600 million, less than the  
cost of a week's operations in Iraq. Extending the program to cover air  
cargo and other key means for moving goods would cost several billion  
more. Yet such a capability could provide far better visibility into  
U.S. transportation systems and their vulnerabilities to terrorist  
attacks.

"When you have no system of tracking things, then you end up with a  
crisis of confidence and a Draconian response if something goes wrong,"  
says Steven Flynn, a transportation security expert with the Council on  
Foreign Relations in New York City. "If you can at least identify where  
something came from with certainty, we won't have to shut down the  
Ambassador Bridge from Toronto because a box blew up in Long Beach."

Sounds great. But Flynn and a growing chorus of critics say the Bush  
Administration has misplaced priorities in the war on terror, choosing  
to emphasize boots in the desert over far more economical and effective  
technology solutions to prevent terror closer to home. The federal  
government has spent only hundreds of millions on cargo protection and  
a fraction of that on VACIS programs. Even in instances where the  
Homeland Security Dept. has indicated that it'll pour big bucks into  
new programs, critics wonder if those efforts are part of a cohesive  
whole.

"I don't think we're much safer as a result of technology," says James  
Lewis, director of technology policy at the Center for Strategic &  
International Studies, a Washington (D.C.) think tank. "We have tons of  
gadgets and pilot projects, but we haven't tied them together for real  
intelligence."

BIG QUESTIONS.  Witness the $15 billion U.S.-VISIT program, an effort  
to identify foreign visitors as they enter America via land, sea, or  
air, and to track their whereabouts inside the country. Homeland  
Security is expected to assign the contract for the program, which will  
meld biometrics with cutting-edge computer networks, to one of three  
contractors within the next few months.

However, the program is raising more questions than it answers. Namely:  
How will that information be shared among law-enforcement bodies, from  
the FBI down to the local gumshoes? And how will U.S.-VISIT tie into  
other government networks that still don't talk to each other, such as  
the highly isolated systems at the State Dept.? "If the system is able  
to combine the watchlist and disperse the information to the  
appropriate agencies, it's good. If it's just compiling information,  
it's a waste of money," says Representative John Mica (R-Fla.),  
chairman of the Aviation subcommittee of the House Transportation &  
Infrastructure Committee.

So far, Homeland Security hasn't revealed the exact specifications of  
the project, but even in existing efforts, top-to-bottom sharing has  
proven problematic. At the same time, critics fear that intelligence  
efforts may go awry by a growing reliance on technology to do analysis  
work still better suited to humans.

"TERRORISM VARIES."  While the military and intelligence agencies still  
face tremendous shortages of Arabic-speaking agents, efforts to mine  
huge vaults of public and private data with software designed to finger  
likely terrorists has sucked up an inordinate amount of political  
capital from top Homeland Security officials. Yet those predictive  
data-mining efforts, such as the now-defunct Total Information  
Awareness System championed by former Admiral John Poindexter and the  
MATRIX system, which connects disparate state-level information  
systems, remain highly controversial and largely unproven.

Skeptics say they simply won't work or will create so many false alarms  
that the entire system will be worthless. Says Bruce Schneier,  
technology and security expert and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking  
Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World: "Like all crime,  
terrorism varies. You never know what's going to be important. And  
there are far fewer examples of terrorism to compare against than, say,  
auto theft. But data-mining assumes you know what you're looking for.  
Computers aren't good at that. That's a job for human agents.  
Unfortunately, hiring more agents doesn't play as well in the press as  
a $20 billion security project."

True, the U.S. and its allies are spinning out a raft of interesting  
pilot programs such as the Hong Kong effort and a walk-through  
explosive-detection portal at a highly trafficked Amtrak rail station  
in New Carrollton, Md., just outside the Beltway. Homeland Security  
also is rolling out a new sophisticated breed of sensors to detect  
biological threats and chemical attacks in the Washington (D.C.) subway  
system. And it's taking steps toward rapid-fire adoption of standards  
for communications gear and radiation-detection equipment that will  
ensure federal, state, and local emergency personnel are using tools  
that work seamlessly together.

LOOKS LIKE A NIKE.  Indeed, thanks to computer-system upgrades, the FBI  
can finally send images or audio files over its own networks, and the  
G-men are using modern data-analysis techniques to parse leads,  
something that wasn't an option in the pre-September 11 era.

Without a doubt, the digitization of America's borders is starting to  
pay dividends, as well. The application of radio-frequency  
identification technology -- smart, tamper-proof tags holding  
identifying information -- to mark trucks and cars that frequently pass  
over the border has helped cut down the grunt work of patrol agents  
stationed in the busy California crossing, just south of San Diego.

Or take the software that accompanies the VACIS machine in Hong Kong  
and creates a database of shipment footprints to benchmark images for  
future comparison. "If the software sees 12 containers of Nike  
sneakers, then it knows what they should look like. If something marked  
as Nike sneakers doesn't match the image, then an alarm sounds and you  
can bring in the human inspectors," says Flynn.

TOUGH TO WEAVE.  Adds Charles McQueary, Undersecretary for science and  
technology at Homeland Defense: "We have 7,500 miles of borders between  
Canada and Mexico. It would take 6.6 million people to cover those  
borders. That's a ridiculous number. It illustrates the solutions to  
security problems cannot only be people-oriented."

Indeed, the Bush Administration has committed some real dollars to  
funding tech as a part of the $39 billion Homeland Security budget.  
McQueary's unit has grown from 6 to 200-odd people with a budget of  
close to $1 billion to use as seed funding for technology projects  
around the country. At the same time, the federal government has handed  
out $20 billion to states and localities to help them upgrade their own  
security efforts.

However, weaving all of these pieces together, from radios for local  
cops to biosensors for subway systems, into a broader plan to safeguard  
America is proving a far more difficult task and one that will likely  
take years to play out.



By Alex Salkever, Technology editor for BusinessWeek Online



Copyright 2000-2004, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights  
reserved.

<http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/may2004/ 
tc20040525_6600_tc148.htm?tc>

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
To manage your subscription, go to
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/