Homeland Security News

ManTech International Corporation (NASDAQ:MANT) (www.mantech.com) received a task order under its Strategic Services Sourcing (S3) prime contract to support the operations of the U.S. Military Group Colombia and the AFSOUTH Air Operations Coordination Cell (AAOCC) in Colombia. The award is valued at $6.2 million, with an initial period of performance of 12 months plus two additional option years. Under the contract, ManTech will provide a bilingual team to support communications to U.S. air assets conducting counter-narcotics operations in Colombian air space. The team will help coordinate diplomatic clearance for U.S. air assets, support air operations planning and support the U.S. Military Group Colombia with technical and security assistance advice, strategic planning and coordination for institutional strengthening initiatives in Colombia.

Biomatrica, Inc., a developer of room temperature biostability technology, announced a strategic partnership agreement with In-Q-Tel (IQT). Biomatrica has developed SampleMatrix® technology which has pioneered recent innovations in ambient storage of biological samples from purified DNA, RNA, and proteins as well as in complex systems such as tissue, cell lines, biopsies and whole blood.

SampleMatrix® is based on extremophile biology in which organisms are able to survive long-term in a state of anhydrobiosis (life without water) and later be revived by rehydration. Extremophiles such as tardigrades, also known as water bears, and brine shrimp are able protect their DNA, RNA, proteins, membranes and cellular systems in a dried state for extended periods of time. Biomatrica’s technology mimics the natural molecular mechanisms used by these organisms. The technology works by forming a thermo-stable barrier during the drying process to protect samples from degradation during storage at room temperature.

The company’s products serve a wide range of customers such as those in the forensics, biomedical research (academic, government and industry), molecular diagnostics and biobanking.

Digital Reasoning, the leader in complex, large scale unstructured data analytics, today announced a strategic investment, licensing, and development agreement from In-Q-Tel (IQT), the investment firm that identifies innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The transaction will make Digital Reasoning’s technology available for use within in the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Digital Reasoning analytics software is based on a distinctive, patented mathematical approach to understanding natural language and leverages bleeding edge cloud technologies to make these analytics work effectively on vast amounts of data. Digital Reasoning was founded on the vision that software should read and understand language as humans do – by analyzing concepts and entities in context across multiple information sources. Since its founding in 2000, Digital Reasoning has pioneered the field of Entity Oriented Analytics, going beyond the relevant document paradigm and focusing on the actors of interest—people, places, organizations—and their connections.

With its flagship product Synthesys®, Digital Reasoning empowers analysts to review facts and associations at a glance—across millions of documents. Operating without a rigid taxonomy or ontology, Synthesys allows the discovery of non-obvious connections hidden in the data, such as alternate meanings of words or “coded” or “disguised” messages.

“With the explosive growth of data over the last decade, there is a need for a new generation of solutions that provide timely, actionable intelligence at massive scale,” said T.J. Rylander, Partner on IQT’s Investments team. “The technology being developed by Digital Reasoning offers great promise to address this challenge and meet the unique needs of our customers in the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA) Cyber Security Division’s (CSD) announce a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for Fiscal Year 2011 to improve the security in both Federal networks and the larger Internet. This Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) seeks ideas and proposals for Research and Development (R&D) in 14 Technical Topic Areas (TTAs) related to CSD. The total estimated value of this acquisition is $40 million.

The goals of the DHS Cyber Security Division (CSD) are:

• To perform research and development (R&D) aimed at improving the security of existing deployed technologies, and to ensure the security of new emerging systems;
• To develop new and enhanced technologies for the detection of, prevention of, and response to cyber attacks on the nation’s critical information infrastructure; and
• To assist the transfer of these technologies into the national infrastructure as a matter of urgency.

With a cumulative market valued at $55 billion (2010 – 2015), the U.S. Federal Cybersecurity market is predicted to grow steadily – at about 6.2% CAGR over the next years. These are conclusions of market study conducted by Market Research Media.

Cyber attacks are increasing in frequency and impact. Even though these attacks have not yet had a significant impact on our Nation’s critical infrastructures, they have demonstrated that extensive vulnerabilities exist in information systems and networks, with the potential for serious damage. The effects of a successful cyber attack might include: serious consequences for major economic and industrial sectors, threats to infrastructure elements such as electric power, and disruption of the response and communications capabilities of first responders.

The DHS S&T mission is to conduct, for homeland security purposes, research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) and timely transition of cyber security capabilities to operational units within DHS, as well as local, state, Federal and operational end users in critical infrastructure. Cyber security is defined in broad terms to encompass the usual attributes of security, as well as reliability, availability, and survivability in the face of adversary attack and accidental fault, while preserving privacy.

DHS S&T invests in programs offering the potential for revolutionary changes in technologies that promote homeland security and accelerate the prototyping and system prototype demonstration in an operational environment of technologies that reduce homeland vulnerabilities.

A critical area of focus for DHS is the development and deployment of technologies to protect the nation’s cyber infrastructure, including the Internet and other critical infrastructures that depend on computer systems for their mission.

The Homeland Security Modeling and Simulation Workshop will be held February 8-9, 2011, Gaithersburg, Maryland.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish modeling and simulation (M&S) technical interest groups (TIGs) with technical experts from the various M&S domains associated with homeland security. The TIGs will share information, promote cross-fertilization of ideas, identify community research and standards needs, review plans, and help to establish community consensus on a number of technical issues. Subject matter experts and other homeland security M&S stakeholders, both inside and outside the government that can serve as reliable information sources and sounding boards for various M&S related homeland security activities carried out within homeland security enterprise are encouraged to attend the workshop.

The proposed objectives of the TIGs are listed below:

• Refinement and/or expansion of definition of the technical scope for each TIG within the general guidelines that have been established
• Specification/ratification of simulation user needs and modeling requirements
• Recommendation of appropriate modeling techniques
• Identification of subject matter experts, relevant existing models and tools, data sources and reference data sets, guidelines, formats, and standards, best practices
• Recommendations for M&S evaluation approaches such as verification, validation, and accreditation

The initial set of M&S Technical Interest Group meetings that will be held at this workshop include:

• Incident Management
• Hazardous Material Releases
• Critical Infrastructure Systems
• Healthcare Systems

Plenary sessions will address homeland security topics of general interest to all participants. Breakout sessions will be formed on the basis of the TIGs. Attendees to the workshop will receive materials that define the scope of each TIG and preliminary information that has been assembled for that M&S domain including: needs analyses, requirements specifications, listing of M&S resources, research and standards issues, and references. Technical experts will review, update, and expand upon this preliminary information set. Workshop results will be assembled into a published report that will be provided to DHS, attendees, and will be made available to the general public.

Technical Contact:
Swee Leong
Phone: 301-975-5426
Email: swee.leong@nist.gov
Fax: 301-258-9749

SMi’s Counter CBRNe Operations conference (2 - 3 Feb 2011, Millennium Gloucester Hotel, London) returns for the 4th year, following on from the sell-out success of last year’s event to bring together industry experts to discuss all aspects of CBRNe operations.

This exceptional conference will offer delegates the chance to experience an exciting and diverse four days, which will include: an optional site visit to the UK Defence CBRN centre, industry leading keynote addresses and presentations, interactive panel discussions and two workshops focusing on IED and interoperability between agencies during a CBRNe incident.

Hear from our line-up of international speakers:

• Chief Superintendent Stuart Harrison, Police Military Liaison Officer, Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), Home Office, UK
• Lauri Luht, EU CREMEX 2011 Co-ordinator, Ministry of the Interior, Estonia
• Gennadi Lutay, Head of Assistance and Protection Branch, International Coorperation and Assistance Division-OPCW
• John Conaghan, Counter Terrorism Security Coordinator, London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, British Transport Police
• Captain Michael Collins, Chief of Staff, Joint Task Force Civil Support, US NORTHCOM
• Chief Warrant Officer 4 Domah Diggs, Director, CBRN Defence School, US Marine Corps

Border Security 2011 (28 Feb – 1 March 2011, Sofia, Bulgaria), held in partnership with Borderpol, the World Border Organisation, is the leading European event dedicated to bringing together industry experts to examine the latest challenges facing the international border management community. Now in its 4th year, SMi’s forthcoming conference will present an exceptional line-up of keynote speakers, insight from leading experts and senior government officials, special addresses from Borderpol and an outstanding programme covering themes including border crime, border management in developing countries, interoperability and biometrics.

Hear from our keynote addresses:

• General Commissioner Zaharin Penov, Director, Chief Directorate Border Police, Bulgaria
• Principal Police Quaestor Ioan Buda, General Inspector, Romanian Border Police
• Colonel Leszek Elas, Commander in Chief, Polish Border Guard
• Colonel Sergey Agapov, Deputy Head, Directorate of International Cooperation, Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB)
• Serge Rinkel, Director of Technical Committee, Borderpol
• Colonel Zoltán Szabó (Ret’d), Director of European Secretariat Office, Borderpol
• Commodore Dan Thorell, Director & Head of Regional Command South, Swedish Coastguard
• Police Colonel Dr. Gábor Kovács Ph.D, Resident Twinning Advisor, EU Twinning Project, Hungarian National Police
• Nenad Banovic, Chief, Serbian Border Police Administration
• Lieutenant Colonel Tõnu Hunt, Deputy Director General, Estonian Border Guard
• Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Zehnder, Commander 2nd Region, Swiss Border Guard

Designing and maintaining databases for homeland security and defense applications is a challenge of cosmic proportions, considering a number of requirements to meet:

• Resilience
• Scalability
• Speed of data access
• No single point of failure
• Distributed data acquisition and common data sharing
• Managing massive unstructured data

For example, rapid image acquisition and analysis is an important initial source of information that can detail conditions over a wide area both to mitigate the effects of large-scale natural or technological disasters and to provide digital terrain analysis and geospatial updates to battlefield commanders and weapons platforms in support of mission planning, rehearsal and execution. Prior to the emergence of the non-relational database platforms, the image acquisition, analysis and sharing depended on slow, processing-intensive relational database management systems (RDBMS) that could not meet the field operator’s requirement for rapid access to accurate image data and analysis, timely update of database with multiple input sources and necessary level of redundancy.

In search of solutions engineers turned to the non-relational database management systems or NoSQL, a new technology that emerged to tackle scalability problems in exponentially growing social networks such as Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. With the emergence of the open source NoSQL platforms governmental agencies and a few technology startups tried to adopt NoSQL database technology to military and homeland security applications. We are getting reports of successful NoSQL pilots currently used as an alternative supplement/backup to existing systems.

Outstanding results have been accomplished in data mining application serving multiple data input points and collaborative data analysis. The NoSQL technology is not supposed to replace traditional RDBMS in military and homeland security applications. NoSQL addresses the RDBMS problems by supplementing scalability, seed and robustness, value adding to existing data, and maintaining a common set of data on the battlefield or emergency area for use by multiple field operators.

According to a recently released market report NoSQL Market Forecast 2011-2015, a considerable share of burgeoning NoSQL market will be attributed to the military and homeland security applications.

In-Q-Tel (IQT), the venture arm of CIA, has announced a strategic investment and development agreement with Cleversafe Inc., a provider of resilient storage solutions for storage clouds to support the missions of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The Cleversafe platform is ideal for storing mission critical data by addressing the core principles of data confidentiality, integrity, and availability within its information dispersal architecture. This approach solves the security problems associated with Cloud Storage since Cleversafe secures the confidentiality of data by transforming it to be inherently secure.

Cleversafe’s Dispersed Storage technology, which has been in the commercial market for more than two years, seamlessly transforms data into secure slices, and then disperses these slices to multiple storage nodes typically across three or four data centers. Each individual slice is unrecognizable as data and therefore inherently secure, whereas a defined threshold of slices can be used to bit-perfectly recreate the original data. This storage efficient approach has thin provisioning built in and eliminates the need for traditional replication, thereby reducing storage requirements by 50 to 70 percent when compared to traditional RAID with replication and yet has even higher availability than four replicated copies.

Riot Control Technology has been demonstrated today at the opening of Israel Defence Exhibition (ISDEF) 2010.