Official outlines Homeland Security Department computer needs

The Homeland Security Department continues to need help with internal computer systems and security, as well as with billion-dollar national technology initiatives along the border and elsewhere, a senior department official said on Tuesday.

"We're moving generally into departmental-wide initiatives now," Scott Hastings, chief information officer for Homeland Security's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said at an event of the Computer Security Institute. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he added, "I've had people coming out of your companies just pleading to help." Now the department is seeking that help.

The department is trying to issue a request for proposals this month for a $7 billion to $10 billion project of integrating existing entry and exit systems for U.S. visitors into the new, unified U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program, Hastings said.

In the fiscal 2004 appropriation for Homeland Security, Congress cut the funding request for US-VISIT out of concern over planning and deployment of the system. The program will use biometric scanning to track U.S. visitors' entry, exit and whereabouts during their stays in the country. It also will render the data about visitors in a way that can be analyzed, Hastings said.

He said after his talk that the department is using many analytical tools for investigative purposes such as data mining yet is "mindful" of the laws governing the use of such tools.

Hastings said the department hopes to track visitors and identify security threats without impairing travel for the "99.9 percent" of visitors who are legitimate travelers. Government also needs better tools for "credentialing" to prove people's identities, he said.

Homeland Security also wants help with technologies to search data without raising concern that the government is profiling its citizens, he said.

Another area of need is for communications systems, including voice and data services, that are both secure and able to interact with others. "This is going to be a huge challenge," Hastings said, adding that the department is the "transition point" for federal-level information heading to states and localities.

The department is "still pounding into shape" a security-management policy that considers the roughly 200,000 people inside the secure environment, he said. Security services, in addition to security technologies, is a new niche for industry, he said.

The department also needs to ensure that every system has a backup system, he said. Some of the agencies that moved into the department early this year had such "redundancy" in their systems while others did not, he said. But Hastings said it is difficult to get funding. "It's hard to make a pitch for [investment in] information infrastructure modernization."

Continuity, which involves ensuring that systems are retained or re-established after an attack, is another area where the department needs help, he said. Hastings noted that U.S. workers "have grown to rely incredibly on the most basic applications" such as e-mail. He said the department deserved more credit for meeting the "incredible technical challenge" of making disparate e-mail systems work together.