Homeland Security News

5th Annual CBRNe Conference is taking place on Jan. 19 – Jan. 21 at the Westin Peachtree Plaza, 210 Peachtree Street NW, Atlanta, GA, 30303. The conference addresses the challenges of improving national preparedness and consequence-management strategies and explores ways to support federal- and state-level efforts to better prepare the U.S. for possible threats. Participants explore the latest technologies that offer protection from some of the world’s deadliest agents. The panel moderated by Dr. DeMeo includes: Pavel Castulik, Ph.D., former R&D senior director of weapons of mass destruction at the University of Brno in the Czech Republic; Lew MacDonald, district chief of special operations with the Saint John Fire Department and federal project advisor with the Research and Technology Initiative Canada (CRTI); Lt. Col. Jeffrey Allen, former commander of the 781st Joint Task Force in the United States; Lt. John Cassidy, R.N., a supervisor for the Hazardous Materials Response Team with the Fire Department of New York; James Bradshaw, Ph.D., RST’s senior research scientist; and Charles Milligan, Ph.D., program area manager focusing on military weapons of mass destruction defeat at The John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

A program to detect plutonium and uranium in US ports has stalled because the US has run out of Helium 3. Helium 3 is a light non-radioactive isotope of helium that is formed when tritium decays. Helium 3 is a crucial raw material for the screening machines that were to be utilized in shipping ports for the detection of nuclear weapons.

GateKeeper USA, Inc., a Maryland company developing proprietary detection and identification technologies for the maritime container industry, announced that it is unaffected by the recent shortage of Helium 3:

“The shortage of Helium 3 does not have any effect on GateKeeper USA’s CAMS devices ability to detect radiation, as GateKeeper USA is not reliant on this antiquated method of detection.”

The whole body imaging systems manufactured by Brijot Imaging Systems, Inc. are ready for deployment in airports and other government facilities. These systems are designed to clearly detect non-metallic items hidden under clothing, such as the powdered explosives used by the attempted airline bomber Christmas day.

Brijot’s passive millimeter wave imaging systems do not emit radiation or energy at people during the screening process. Instead, they only receive naturally occurring millimeter waves from the human body, and any items hidden on someone’s body will show up in clear contrast in displayed images. The resolution of the images is deliberately set low to keep from showing anatomical detail to satisfy public’s privacy concerns.

Brijot Imaging Systems, Inc. announced the launch of two new solutions in Brijot’s suite of people screening technology — SafeScreen™ and MobileScan™, addressing the key deployment-related issues—throughput, portability and footprint size.

With its small footprint, SafeScreen was specifically designed to address the infrastructure and operational challenges currently faced by many airports and other facilities that have limited space to incorporate large-scale technologies that typically have slower throughput and larger footprint and power requirements. SafeScreen is highly compact and can be coupled with existing passenger screening solutions for an added layer of security to enhance primary screening capabilities and throughput. It detects smaller objects, offers a low total cost of ownership and requires minimal training and maintenance.

MobileScan, the industry’s first fully portable whole body imaging system, is a self-contained unit on wheels. It can be easily moved, plugged in and operational within minutes of arrival at any location without changing the existing infrastructure. MobileScan is ideal for both primary screening and secondary screening, or for use in conjunction with intelligence for random screening.

Both systems, built on Brijot’s patented GEN 2 millimeter wave technology, readily detect metallic and non-metallic items concealed objects under or in a person’s clothes such as liquids, explosives, weapons, drugs or cash without emitting any radiation or energy, making the systems safe, while also protecting personal privacy, since no anatomical details are revealed. SafeScreen is immediately ready for acquisition by government agencies and will be available to resellers and their end-users later this year. MobileScan is in full production and generally available.

Terremark Worldwide, Inc., a provider of managed IT infrastructure services, has launched cloud-enabled disaster recovery services. Terremark’s Virtualized Disaster Recovery solution provides disaster recovery solution, which supports a variety of operating systems and enterprise applications and databases, customers protection for their business-critical environments without the cost or complexity of maintaining the server, networking, and facility infrastructures at a secondary site. This service is based on a Terremark’s platform and takes advantage of the company’s highly secure, top-tier data center facilities to deliver reliable, repeatable and predictable solutions that reduce recovery times to a matter of hours at a much lower cost than that of traditional disaster recovery services.

“Our cloud-based disaster recovery offering is more than just a remote-replication solution; it is a complete cloud-based site redirection service that incorporates the enterprise-class services necessary to run IT operations securely in the event of a disaster declaration. Terremark’s physical and information security, trusted personnel, proven solution framework and industry-leading connectivity to global networks make the service a DR/COOP solution our customers can trust when a disaster strikes,” said Tom Mays, Terremark’s Senior Vice President for Advanced Data Solutions.

Terremark’s Virtualized Disaster Recovery, based on NetApp storage and VMware’s vSphere technologies, offers a diverse set of reliable options with array-based, host-based, and application-based replication options, support for physical or virtual source servers, and is suitable for customer environments that range from the most basic to the most sophisticated. On-demand managed security services like intrusion detection, log aggregation, firewall services, and on-demand managed backup services protect customer applications and data at similar or higher levels of security than required in their production environments.

The Homeland Security Appropriations Bill is focused on securing our nation’s borders and preparing for any potential disaster. The conference agreement totals $42.776 billion of discretionary budget authority for fiscal year 2010, $2.648 billion, or 6.6 percent, above fiscal year 2009.

Priorities in the bill are focused on five major goals:
1) Securing our borders and enforcing our immigration laws;
2) Protecting the American people from terrorist threats and other vulnerabilities, and ensuring the Department is nimble enough to address future threats;
3) Preparing for, responding to, and recovering from all-hazards;
4) Supporting our State, local, Tribal, and private sector partners in homeland security with resources and information; and
5) Giving the Department resources to strengthen financial, procurement, IT systems, and other management tools that it needs to succeed; eliminating or reducing programs that are ineffective or duplicative.

Bill Total
2009 Enacted: $40.128 billion
2010 President’s Request: $43.071 billion (includes Coast Guard Overseas Contingencies)
House Passed: $42.617 billion
Senate Passed: $42.927 billion
Homeland Security Market: $42.776 billion
[Read more →]

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) manages a group of subcontractors from academia and the private sector providing high performance computing capabilities to conduct research on advanced methods for information analysis and to develop computational technologies that contribute to securing the homeland.

According to a recent Market Research Media report Worldwide Defense High Performance Computing (HPC) Market Forecast 2010-2015 the global defense high performance computing market is projected to increase from $2.6 billion in 2010 to $3.3 billion in 2015. The estimate for worldwide cumulative market 2010 – 2015 is $18 billion, for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.7% in the 6-year period.

These University Affiliate Centers and their partners collaborate with the Institute for Discrete Sciences (IDS), a joint project between DHS and several National Laboratories, led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The discrete sciences apply the methods of discrete, or finite, mathematics to computer science. Their focus is developing simpler, more efficient software algorithms and architectures for use in a broad range of homeland security high performance computing (HPC) applications. The University Affiliate Centers are studying such topics as knowledge representation, natural language processing, text or information extraction, uncertainty quantification, and high-performance computing architectures. These are applied by the Science and Technology Directorate to address problems in information analysis, decision support, risk analysis, critical infrastructure protection, bioinformatics, and computational biology.

Rutgers University serves as the coordinating affiliate center, joined by the University of Southern California, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Pittsburgh. DHS has awarded a combined total of $10.2 million over three years to these institutions and their partners. Their work advances efforts to identify common patterns from numerous sources of information, which may be indicative of potential threats to the nation. The centers will also focus on an high priority areas identified by Congress for DHS university-based research.

“This effort will bring together an outstanding group of researchers with a proven track record in information analysis,” said Dr. Jeffrey W. Runge, Acting Under Secretary for Science and Technology (S&T). “The biggest challenge facing this critical area is the need for improved methods to quickly and accurately analyze, organize and make sense of vast amounts of changing data.”

The University Affiliate Centers to IDS are part of the DHS Research and Education Centers program, overseen by the Office of University Programs, within S&T. Established by Congress, this program has created an integrated network of centers at the Nation’s leading research universities, which will help to continually align scientific results with homeland security priorities.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today announced decision to recruit and hire 1,000 cybersecurity professionals across DHS over the next 3 years to protect the nation’s cyber infrastructure, systems and networks.

“Effective cybersecurity requires all partners—individuals, communities, government entities and the private sector—to work together to protect our networks and strengthen our cyber resiliency,” said Secretary Napolitano. “This new hiring authority will enable DHS to recruit the best cyber analysts, developers and engineers in the world to serve their country by leading the nation’s defenses against cyber threats.”

This step will definitely stir the cyber security market – private contractors are lining up to fulfill the employment gap and undertake projects including cyber risk and strategic analysis; cyber incident response; vulnerability detection and assessment; intelligence and investigation; and network and systems engineering.

Mercury News Columnist Chris O’Brien has offered a rather gloom view of homeland security market’s future in a recent article O’Brien: The boom in security spending that never was. The article quotes Frost’s analyst:

“The homeland security market has been grossly overestimated,” said David Fishering, a security industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “And GE is not the only one that made these kinds of mistakes. The opportunity there was not as great as we were all led to believe.”

We tend to agree that homeland security fiesta is over.

A new analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Asia Pacific Maritime Security Market Assessment, finds that Asia Pacific maritime security market reached revenues of over $5.1 billion in 2008. The Frost report forecasts Asia Pacific maritime security markett will grow to $9.8 billion by 2015. The market covers the maritime security and seaport security sectors.

Frost & Sullivan Consultant Amartya De says:

Growth of the overall Asia Pacific seaport security market, comprising of port, container, and ship security is pegged at a CAGR of 9 percent between 2009 and 2015. The maritime security and the total seaport security market accounts for about 10.6 percent and 13.4 percent respectively in homeland security spending in the Asia Pacific region. Lack of coordination among government agencies in the implementation of security measures and the scattering of funds among government and semi-government agencies have diluted efforts and as a result, accountability has been compromised. However, governments in the region are taking positive steps to ensure that their homeland security (HLS) agencies work in a cohesive manner.

Serco Inc., a provider of professional, technology, and management services to the federal government, announced today that the Company has been awarded a prime contract with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to provide record processing for the adjudication of immigration benefits. The contract has a one year base period with four one-year option periods and is valued at approximately $190 million, inclusive of the options.

Under the contract, Serco will provide records management services at the USCIS National Benefits Center (NBC) located in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. Serco’s services include file operations, records distribution management, business process improvement support, automated system transactions, and system update functions. This work provides the government adjudicative support as it processes immigration-related applications for Adjustment of Status, Naturalization, Adoption, and Permanent Resident Card replacement.

According to U.S. Federal IT Spending Forecast 2010-2015 report of Market Research Media Ltd, Department of Homeland Security is one of the largest IT spenders of the Federal government.