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September 1, 2003

Shared Risk, Shared Rewards

Why is homeland security driving IT innovation? The risks of terrorism endanger both public and private sectors, and privacy concerns must still be satisfied. But potential rewards through collaborative ventures are coming clear

by Seth Grimes

Continued from Page 1

Common Concerns

The new homeland security demand comes just in time for IT solution providers. While automation and communications drove economic expansion in the 1990s, the IT sector has since suffered due to economic retrenchment, commoditization, oversupply, and globalization. Many believe that homeland security spending will help fuel an IT recovery. IT solution providers may some day look back on the War on Terror and be grateful for the opportunities born out of turmoil.

Homeland security efforts have utilized commercial technologies to a very large extent, thanks to the similarity in the goals and approaches of private-sector customers that dominate IT spending with government agencies involved in homeland security. In-Q-Tel's Louie says, "A lot of homeland security problems are being solved for commercials needs." At In-Q-Tel's Web site, the company states: "One could compare the CIA with any Fortune 500 company, and there would be a 70 to 90 percent overlap in information technology needs. The CIA and the Intelligence Community are super information enterprises that collect, sort, analyze, and distribute knowledge. Comparing these core business activities with those of major U.S. companies — their strategies for collection and management of information repositories, and for protecting information and infrastructure — provides a picture of much of the technology that the Intelligence Community needs to do its job today."

Similar overlap exists between other government and private security domains, for example:

Private industry and the military similarly want to optimize logistics. Both employ advanced inventory and materials tracking via bar codes and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags as well as geo-location devices.
Private corporations look to IT to help them meet new regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which established stricter corporate reporting and accountability standards. Homeland security initiatives will surely benefit from the resulting accounting and performance management technologies.
Many industries are putting a growing emphasis on using IT to protect property, including creative and commercial intellectual assets (music, books, movies, data, and trade secrets) as well as physical facilities. Such objectives provide new impetus for the development of secure, reliable identification, authentication, and authorization. Personal information gathered in the course of commercial transactions also becomes a form of property that must be safeguarded.
Just as the retail, marketing, and financial sectors seek to build predictive models of consumer behavior and fraud risk, homeland security must detect and report anomalous activities. Both sectors face similar challenges in integrating personal and demographic information from disparate sources.
Public and private sectors must both assess and manage risks and create recovery plans.

As with research efforts, the vast majority of projects continue existing or long-planned programs. Notable examples include United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT), an automated traveler entry/exit system that "will be designed to collect, maintain, and share information, including biometric identifiers," and high-profile data integration and mining efforts such as DARPA's much-debated Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA).

TIA's goals should be familiar to anyone in the commercial sector working with multiterabyte analytic databases that draw from disparate structured and unstructured data sources and with real-time analytic needs. TIA describes itself as focused on "the development of (1) architectures for a large-scale counter-terrorism database, for system elements associated with database population, and for integrating algorithms and mixed-initiative analytical tools; (2) novel methods for populating the database from existing sources, create [sic] innovative new sources, and invent [sic] new algorithms for mining, combining, and refining information for subsequent inclusion into the database; and (3) revolutionary new models, algorithms, methods, tools, and techniques for analyzing and correlating information in the database to derive actionable intelligence."