A Connected Homeland


A "Connected" Homeland

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 2005 budget is $40.2 billionan increase of $3.6 billion from 2004and DHS has the fourth largest IT budget of civilian agencies (and the fastest growing one). More than $2.5 billion of the 2005 DHS budget is dedicated to BioDefense,[2] and approximately $3.4 billion[3] will be spent on information technology in general.

[2] http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/FY_2005_BIB_.pdf.

[3] Federal Sources Inc., a McLean, Virginia, market research firm.

Arguably, the events of 9/11 could in part be attributed to disjointed government systems that did not communicate with each other. More than 40 separate information systems behaved as though they were islands of data unto themselves. Recently, the DHS started a program to introduce information sharing into the nation's intelligence systems infrastructure. A $350 million contract was awarded to Northrop Grumman to interconnect the U.S. departments of Justice, State, CIA, Homeland Security, and the FBI via systems that are compatible with each other and that can share each other's data. The goal, of course, is to leverage all the intelligence available in the fight against terrorism and other national security threats. The first, and now obvious, step is to have more pervasive networking and communications capabilities.

The U.S. federal government is now on the road to solving a problem that never should have existed in the modern computer age. However, a less-tractable problem is figuring out how to build automated systems that use electronic sensorsperhaps thousands of them spread over a specific geographythat perform real-time threat detection and analysis. Attacks from chemical or biological sources can be devastating and difficult to prevent. Even if some forms of attack are ultimately not preventable by these systems, the data they collect is of great value in determining what is going on when an attack commences (such as being able to track the progress of a chemical wave as it moves toward densely populated areas). Even afterward, the data can be used to determine how similar attacks might be prevented or at least dealt with better.

Thermo Electron's Environment division makes a variety of sensors for industry, and now for homeland security applications. Greg Herrema, president of the division, states: "If the probability of prevention (of an attack) goes down, then the capability in terms of detection and response has to be significantly greater." So, although DHS might not be able to prevent biological, chemical, or nuclear radiation attacks on the general populace, it can at least attempt to understand, contain, and deal with them should they arise. "Our new customers want smaller sensors with real-time data collection abilities that they can deploy pervasively," says Herrema. "Well-placed sensors located around choke points (e.g., bridges and ports) can support both threat prevention and response, in particular for radioactiveA0threats that can be more readily detected from a distance."

The federal government is hopeful about its ability to deploy thousands of sensors across cities and suburban regions. There are many challenges, however. The number of different chemical or biological threats is large. In the past, sensors were built for a single purpose, for detection of a certain gas or chemical leak within a factory, for example. Building sensors with a broader range of detection capabilities will add significant cost and complexity. Another of the more daunting challenges is supplying power to these small and discreetly placed devices. "It might only cost $50 or $100 to produce a certain kind of sensor equipped with some sort of wireless capability, but if you have to run A/C power to each location, you dramatically increase the cost. Solar power and extremely long-lasting batteries will dramatically lower the need for expensive power circuitry, and alternative energy sources will aid in that challenge as well," says Herrema. Nevertheless, powering these sensors economically remains a short-term difficulty. In the meantime, real deployments of more expensive sensors are occurring, albeit in a somewhat less-pervasive manner.

ZigBee

What is ZigBee? ZigBee (www.zigbee.org) is an alliance of networking companies (including Motorola, Siemens, Philips, Honeywell, and15 others at last count) creating a new open standard for low-power, low-cost wireless networking. The goal is to enable the mass production of tiny monitoring and control devices that can wirelessly communicate with each other (and router nodes) using dramatically less power than anything presently available.

Instead of aiming at the market for faster and more capable networks, ZigBee is heading the opposite direction. To minimize power consumption, the distance between nodes is small and the internodal data rate is significantly lower than that of WiFi. However, the payback is greatly reduced size and expense, and much longer battery life.

Monitoring and control nodes are typically deployed in a star or mesh topology because they depend on each other to relay messages from one to another and on to router nodes. Early ZigBee deployments have occurred around industrial control and monitoring. However, ZigBee has obvious applicability for homeland security.

Does ZigBee compete with Bluetooth? In a word, no. ZigBee and Bluetooth are aimed at different uses and markets. Bluetooth devices require recharging and assume that deployment environments are more data rich. Consequently, Bluetooth is about seven times faster in terms of bandwidth than ZigBee and is aimed at more of a consumer- and communications-oriented market (cell phones, laptops, home audio/video), whereas ZigBee is aimed at automated, pervasive monitoring and control opportunities. Both have practical missions to fulfill in the world of Inescapable Data.

Millennia Net is one company making sensor products using the ZigBee protocol and has created tiny devices that can last several years on a wristwatchsize battery. Its slogan is "Wireless Sensor Networking...Anywhere," and is targeting military/homeland and industrial opportunities. Their sensor networks can self-organize and self-heal, meaning that the network can automatically route communications around a failed node. Millennia Net is able to deploy large numbers of the sensors throughout a geographic area with minimal support requirements and high overall data/connectivity reliability.


The U.S. federal homeland security budget for fiscal year 2005 has a significant amount of money allocated for the detection of bio-related threats that are grouped under the general heading of BioDefense. Of that, $2.5 billion is allocated to a project known as BioShield. Another $274 million is earmarked for BioSurviellance. Another $118 million will be spent on enhancing environmental monitoring activities of such elements in a key subprogram known as BioWatch, a next-generation biosurveillance system. Between 2003 and 2005, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sequenced genomes of all bacteria considered to be a possible bioterrorism threat[4] as well as viral and protozoa pathogens, and this data can now be exploited.

[4] http://www.hhs.gov/budget/05budget/nih.html.

BioWatch has been deployed to more than 31 major U.S. urban areas as of July 2004. In total, more than 500 sensors cover approximately half of the U.S. population.[5] These sensors are in use today for environmental sampling to detect biological agents. Currently, most of their data is collected manually, meaning that inspectors periodically visit the devices, plug into them, and download their data to some portable computer (such as a laptop), and then send the data off to analysis centers. Given the remoteness of some sensor locations, bicycles are used in some cases. One sensor is located up wind from the National Mall and somewhat resembles a telephone booth with an air sniffer and radio antenna.[6]

[5] http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/article.cfm?Id=1467.

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/national/16TERR.html?ex=1094011200.

Part of the new BioDefense budget is to enhance automation and integration of the data. Approximately $11 million is earmarked to integrate real-time biosurveillance data gathered by sensors with information from health and agricultural surveillance and other terrorist-threat information from intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. Very much consistent with the Inescapable Data attitude, the federal government is moving in the direction of pervasive collection devices whose information is fused in real-time with other information streams. Clearly, post 9/11, we have learned that combination and assimilation of information streams is needed to extract real power from raw data.

Blanketing a wide geographic area with sensors presents new data processing challenges. Data must be analyzed in real time and correlated with other events taking place (perhaps from emergency-response vehicles, traffic-pattern sensors, communications traffic, etc.). The challenge facing the government is similar to that posed to manufacturers contemplating the use of radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags throughout a factory or warehouse. Tons of data generated in a short period of time must be processed as "complex events"; otherwise, the resulting information overload will render the data useless. Complex event handling is a new style of computer processing that brings intelligent understanding to rapid and seemingly unrelated streams of data blipsessential for certain sources of Inescapable Data.

DHS is equally concerned with monitoring and controlling U.S. geographical borders. The US-VISIT program, for example, is a new program designed to use biometricspattern-recognition systems using fingerprint and a digital photo datato more accurately identify foreign visitors. As of January 2004, more than 115 U.S. airports and 14 seaports were using the system. Foreign visitors traveling to the United States must submit to having their index finger on each hand digitally scanned to verify identity at the port of entry. The process starts overseas at the U.S. consular offices that issue visas. A traveler's fingerprints are taken and examined against a list of known criminals before a visa is issued. Travelers arriving in the United States are rescanned to verify their identity. In addition, a digital photograph is taken at the exit port and reexamined at the port of entry. Clearly, a global network built on massive data collection and communication processes is the heart of this system.

Similarly, $65 million will be spent on border patrol surveillance and sensor technology using remote video systems; $50 million for radiation detection for trucks and cars passing through various ports of entry, and $11 million for a new international trade data system, which is the first government-wide system for collection and dissemination of trade and transportation data, essential for more than 100 federal agencies. The trend is clear: more real-time data collection about individuals and vehicles, and more closing of some well-publicized gaps in overall homeland security by information sharing among government agencies.



    Inescapable Data. Harnessing the Power of Convergence
    Inescapable Data: Harnessing the Power of Convergence (paperback)
    ISBN: 0137026730
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 159

    flylib.com © 2008-2017.
    If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net