security beat

December 2007

Controversial Secure Border Initiative Demonstration Program Moving to Detroit

Reported by Stew Magnuson

Customs and Border Protection and Boeing Co. had a fitful and controversial start to their Project 28 border surveillance program.

Problems integrating commercial-off-the-shelf technologies caused a four-month delay and much consternation on Capitol Hill and at Department of Homeland Security headquarters.

CBP and Boeing will attempt a similar program beginning next year in the waterways near Detroit, DHS officials said at an Institute for Defense and Government Advancement border management conference.

Secure Border Initiative Program Manager Kirk Evans said the “northern border demonstration” program will have its own set of challenges. It will not be able to simply migrate Project 28 technologies north.

Sensors and cameras will have to function in extreme cold, rather than the intense heat found at the Sasabe, Ariz., border area where Project 28 was set up. The area is marked by heavily trafficked waterways, 30-foot tall trees, million dollar homes and notorious smugglers’ routes in the St. Clair River, which separates Michigan from Ontario.

Rowdy Adams, SBI deputy director, noted that “there’s little to no technology between the ports of entry” on the U.S. side of the border with Canada.

There are 1.9 million registered boaters in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. Ontario has about 350,000. The challenge in the Detroit and Great Lakes region will be keeping an eye on these small watercraft.

“Someone out fishing on the Great Lakes is not necessarily someone seeking to do the United States harm,” Adams said.

Details of the program will be worked out in January. Until then, Adams and Evans both declined to set any dates for when the program will get underway. However, there will be some command-and-control demonstrations using existing Coast Guard systems next summer, Evans said.

Congress has appropriated $20 million for the project, and despite the delays on Project 28, Boeing will remain the technology integrator, Evans said.

Along with Boeing, the Coast Guard and the Space and Naval Warfare Command will be partners in the project.

Border Protection Agency Outlines New Plans for Unmanned Aircraft

Customs and Border Protection will expand its unmanned aerial vehicles’ areas of operations to the northern border and the Caribbean and will set up its own command and control center.

Douglas Koupash, acting program manager for unmanned aerial systems and the executive director of mission support at CBP, said the agency’s new air strategic plan calls for three aircraft to operate along the southwest border, and one in the north stretching about 1,200 miles west of Detroit.

CBP currently has two operating on the southern border. The agency was scheduled to take delivery of one new Predator B aircraft in November and a second in January. Wildfires near the manufacturers’ plant near San Diego may push the schedule back, he said.

The plan calls for 18 aircraft, although that might be adjusted downwards if a lower number is deemed to be sufficient, he said at an Institute for Defense and Government Advancement conference.

There will be operational tests in May next year carried out with the Coast Guard to determine the UAVs’ utility in the Caribbean, he said. The Predator will fly from Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. The Navy and Air Force will also participate in the project. In addition, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is interested in using the aircraft to keep tabs on tropical storms, he said.

“This could end up to be quite a diverse program office,” Koupash said.

In the north, CBP will eventually expand its area of operations east from Detroit to monitor the Great Lakes. Unlike the first five UAVs, the contract calls for the sixth Predator to be built for the maritime environment, he said.

There are currently no plans to expand the types of UAVs used along the borders, he added.

“Our experience with the Predator B has been very, very good,” he said. The crash of the agency’s first UAV in April 2006 in Arizona was due to pilot error. Smaller UAVs are not being considered at this time because they would fly below 18,000 feet and make it more difficult to get Federal Aviation Administration approval, he said.

Larger UAVs, such as the Global Hawk, which fliy higher and provide a broader area of surveillance, would be useful but are “a bit expensive for our tastes now,” he said.

CBP is also planning to build its own command-and-control headquarters at its air and marine operations center in Riverside, Calif. It currently flies from the Army’s Fort Huachuca, Ariz., base. General Atomics provides operators now, but CBP is training its first class of dedicated pilots, he said.

CBP also wants the ability to quickly pack up a Predator on a Coast Guard C-130 aircraft and transport it to an area suffering from a natural disaster. It completed one operational test in September. NASA used a Predator B drone with an infrared sensor in a similar capacity when it assisted California authorities during the fires in October.

Defense Prodding Agencies to Beef Up Disaster Preparedness Planning

Most federal agencies are unprepared to do their part in the event of a catastrophic terrorist attack of natural disaster, a Defense Department official complained.

“The one thing the Defense Department does better than any other government agency is planning,” said Peter Verga, deputy assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and America’s security affairs.

Except for the Department of Homeland Security, other federal agencies do not have the “culture of mission assurance,” that the Defense Department holds dear, he said at a National Defense Industrial Association homeland security executive breakfast.

Part of his office’s challenge is cajoling other agencies to plan for the 15 homeland disaster scenarios, most of which involve a weapon of mass destruction attack or natural disasters such as earthquakes or hurricanes.

“What we’re trying to do is teach them the DoD strategic planning process,” he said.

If a dirty bomb goes off in a major U.S. city, the Department of Health and Human Services or Environmental Protection Agency, for example, should be expected to perform certain functions and have the plans, trained personnel and equipment in place to carry them out, Verga said.

“Typically what happens is people just say ‘well, we’ll do what we do and the Defense Department will do everything else,’ and we find that not particularly helpful,” Verga said.

DHS and the Defense Department have five-year budget plans, but that isn’t the case with most other agencies, he noted. Their funding is approved from year to year, and therefore, it is more difficult for them to ensure that they have the personnel, plans and equipment in place.

Meanwhile, the office has written a new “National Strategy for Homeland Security,” which emphasizes natural disaster preparedness.

The strategy recognizes that the average American is more likely to be the victim of an earthquake, hurricane, flood or fire than a terrorist attack, he noted.

DHS Technologists Continue Search for Tunnel Detection Technology

The Border Patrol in Yuma, Ariz., employed a unique method to locate the latest tunnel used to smuggle drugs and people underneath its fences. A water truck drove over it and caused the clandestine structure to collapse.

The discovery was happenstance, said Edward Turner, program manager of the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency.

“They thought it was just a sinkhole until they looked down into it and saw lumber,” he said at a border management conference.

Laboratories and agency’s such as HSARPA, the Department of Homeland Security’s organization dedicated to high-risk technology research, continue to seek scientific means to locate border tunnels. Technology, so far, has not detected any of the dozens of tunnels discovered over the years. Human intelligence or, in the Yuma case, sheer luck, have tipped authorities off.

Researchers acknowledge that there won’t be any technological silver bullets to discover tunnels. However, HSARPA is putting its money into an airborne gradiometer, which can measures slight anomalies in slopes or earth.

Whatever the solution will be, the technology must be easy to for the Border Patrol to use, Turner said. Most of the tunnel detection in use now “requires a PhD to operate,” he added.

Troubled US-VISIT Program Still Seeking Solutions

Ensuring that foreign visitors actually leave the United States when their visa expires has been a long-time goal of the Department of Homeland Security’s US-VISIT program.

Unlike European and Asian countries, U.S. airport and land border crossings do not have immigration lanes where agents stamp passports with the date of departure.

The director of the program, Robert Mocny, told attendees at an Institute for Defense and Government Advancement conference that a solution will be in place by June 2009, which is when congressional mandates kick in.

At airports, he said DHS will ask airlines to take the information and report it to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

He acknowledged that the industry will not be happy with this proposed solution.

Having Transportation Security Administration baggage screeners carry out this function would slow down the already long lines at security checkpoints, he said.

DHS tried a pilot program with self-checkout kiosks, but that ended in failure because visitors couldn’t locate the machines. Airports nowadays are shopping malls, he said. Authorities did not allow the machines to be placed in conspicuous locations. They “didn’t want to give us valuable space that they could give to a Starbucks or a Cinnabon,” he said.

A 15-month pilot program at land border crossings also ended in failure. That used radio frequency chips in cards that were supposed to be read automatically as cars drove through crossings.

Along with technical difficulties, the system could not prevent a visitor from giving the card to someone else to take across the border. In other words, the card was leaving the country, but not necessarily the person, he said.

Please email your comments to SMagnuson@ndia.org

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