Tech coordinators for Homeland Security face challenges

ROANOKE, Va.-Integrating 22 agencies into the Homeland Security Department remains a challenge for project coordinators, Chief Information Officer Steve Cooper said Tuesday.

"Our challenge is a little bit different than the commercial case studies we've tried to learn from," Cooper said. "We don't actually have an acquiring entity. We are a merger, and there is no parent company to break the ties and make the calls in terms of policy decisions."

Cooper appeared here at the Commonwealth of Virginia Information Technology Symposium via Teleportec, a new EDS technology enabling participants to view each other in a 3-D format.

Despite the challenges, Cooper said Homeland Security is aiming to "have one network in our unclassified space by December 2004" and to have that pared down to a single infrastructure by December 2005.

To do this, the Homeland Security transition team had to figure out what they had "...in the way of IT assets and solution sets," said Cooper, speaking from Washington. "We weren't exactly sure what we were inheriting."

In terms of IT assets, Cooper offered three broad categories: infrastructure, enterprise solutions and mission.

"Against those three categories, we started to figure out what we had," Cooper said. "If you simply identify components from an IT standpoint, we came up with a list of more than 50,000. Currently, that list is 80 to 90 percent complete. There will be things we'll find a year or two from now, but I don't think we'll miss any of the major" projects.

The information-technology sector involves more than just networking and solving internal problems, Cooper said.

One of those initiatives is CAPPS II, a program Cooper categorized as a "risk-based scoring engine by which we can assess the threat or risk posed by an individual getting on a specific flight at the point in time that they are ready to board that flight."

Cooper addressed some of the privacy and civil liberties concerns. "We have no intention of disregarding civil liberties," he said. "We want to create an algorithmic scoring engine similar to engines used in credit reporting and risk assessment [or] insurance underwriting."

"The challenges are not so much technology, but the people and the process," he said.

To make sure those people are using valid documentation, the department has turned to biometrics. While a nationwide driver's license is not an option, Homeland Security wants to make sure it can authenticate state licenses at a federal level, Cooper said.

That information sharing also applies to local law enforcement. "We're not 100 percent where we want to be; we're still working to bring together some of the multiple watch lists," he said. "The good news is that we have a process worked out and now we can move very rapidly to complete the terrorist watch list so that we can make that available through DHS" and eventually to local law enforcement.