[IP] Homeland Security's Missing Link
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 roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/