June 6, 2005 | Lecture on Department of Homeland Security
For most of the 20th century, counterterrorism and technology coexisted in a one-sided relationship. In large part, law enforcement and the military adapted the technologies that were commercially available to their needs.
That relationship may simply be inadequate for addressing the challenges of the 21st century. Meeting the test of terrorism will likely require a more proactive approach to technological innovation-betting on the future: formulating clear requirements, prioritizing needs, establishing cooperative means to foster the development of technologies, and building the human and financial capital programs necessary to transition and sustain them as effective anti-terrorism tools.
In my remarks today, I want to list my "big bets" for the future-six technologies that I believe offer the greatest promise for providing significant advantages in combating terrorism-and address as well the challenge to turning the potential of technology into concrete capabilities.
Traditional means of developing law enforcement technologies are simply inadequate to deal with today's strategic realities, and the war on global terrorism should top our list of concerns.
While every country may not agree on a definition of terrorism, that does not mean that it does not exist and does not represent a terrible threat to world peace. Nor do terrorists seem concerned about definitional nuances. They have decided they are most certainly at war with us, and they think they are in a war they can win.
We are at war. In fact, the global war on terrorism will be like most wars. It will have casualties and sacrifices, victories, defeats, advances, and setbacks. Progress will not be determined by the outcome of individual battles or campaigns. It will, to a remarkable degree, look much like the Cold War. Like the Cold War, it will be a long, protracted conflict because, despite the preponderance of power held by the nations united in their commitment to combat terrorism, we will not be able to come directly to grips with the enemy-then because it risked nuclear war and annihilation, now because the enemy is too disparate and diffuse to be defeated in climactic battle. We are in another long war.
It is, however, a war of a different kind. There are no frontiers in 21st century national security. Distinguishing clear lines of responsibility between foreign and domestic security is a thing of the past.
Additionally, the age when only great powers can bring great powers to their knees is over. The specter of catastrophic terrorism that could threaten tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in destruction will be an enduring concern. And if catastrophic terrorism is a threat to great countries, the prospects for smaller nations is even more daunting to imagine.
Making Big Bets
Technology is, of course, not the only answer to addressing the specter of transnational terrorism, but the technological answers we have today are inadequate to deal with the scope and potential severity of the threat. Rather than adapting technologies to stay apace of evolving dangers and changing tactics, we need to get ahead of the terrorists and develop "overmatching" security systems that protect the public, safeguard their liberties, and leave travel and commerce unencumbered.
Developing technologies that leap ahead of the terrorists requires vision and strategy, and a good strategy requires hard choices. It begins by establishing criteria for selecting the most crucial technological investments. In my mind, there should be three:
I want to suggest six candidates that meet these standards. They are (1) system integration technologies; (2) biometrics; (3) non-lethal weapons; (4) data mining and link analysis technologies; (5) nanotechnology; and (6) directed-energy weapons.
In some cases, these technologies are fairly mature but are just finding their counterterrorism niche. Others show great potential but will still require many years of research and development before they are ready to become operational. Yet all share a common characteristic: They offer significant potential solutions to addressing the most pressing counterterrorism concerns.
My first two candidates clearly fit the first criterion for a counterterrorism technology strategy. They represent a family of capabilities that are essential for building national capabilities.
System Integration Technologies. One of the highest priorities for technological innovation ought to be simply getting the most out of the resources that are already available. That means adopting a new approach to counterterrorism operations as well as the enabling technologies to support it. This approach is often called "network-centric" operations.
Network-centric operations generate increased operational effectiveness by networking sensors, decision makers, law enforcement officials, and emergency responders to achieve shared awareness, increased speed of command, higher tempo of operations, greater efficiency, increased security and safety, reduced vulnerability to potential hostile action, and a degree of self-synchronization. In essence, this means linking knowledgeable entities from the local to the national levels in an integrated network that addresses counterterrorism missions ranging from intelligence and early warning to response and post-strike investigations and forensic analysis.
Systems integration technologies might produce significant efficiencies in terms of sharing skills, knowledge, and scarce high-value assets, building capacity and redundancy in a national counterterrorism system as well as gaining the synergy of providing a common operating picture to all law enforcement and emergency responders and being able to readily share information.
Many of the technologies required to facilitate network-centric counterterrorism operations are already widely commercially available, including information technologies that facilitate passing high volumes of secure digital data, create ad hoc networks, integrate disparate databases, and link various communication systems over cable, fiber-optic, wireless, and satellite networks.
Biometrics. Identity is the linchpin of virtually all security and investigatory systems. Since September 11, 2001, there has been increased interest in using biometrics for identity verification, especially in the areas of visa and immigration documentation and government-issued identification card programs.
Biometrics are recorded measures of a unique physical or behavioral characteristic of individuals. They are thought to be more reliable and more difficult to forget, lose, have stolen, falsified, or guessed since they are part of a person rather than an ID card, a personal identification number, or a password.
Biometrics can be used for verification or for identification. When a biometric is used to verify whether a person is who he or she claims to be, that verification is frequently referred to as "one-to-one" matching. Identification, by contrast, is known as "one-to-many" matching. In identification, a person's presented biometric is compared with all of the biometric templates within a database.
There are five major types of mature biometric technologies. They include iris recognition, hand geometry, fingerprint recognition, face recognition, and voice recognition.
Researchers are also looking for other useful biometrics. Some of these emerging technologies include vein scans, facial thermography, DNA matching, odor sensing, blood pulse measurements, skin pattern recognition, nailbed identification, gait recognition, and ear shape recognition. Biometrics like vein scanning are just becoming commercially available, while others, such as ear shape recognition, are recently started research projects.
"Biggest Bang for the Buck" Technologies
The next two categories of candidate technologies that I want to mention fall under the second criterion for an aggressive counterterrorism technology strategy: getting the "biggest bang for the buck."
Non-lethal Weapons. One of the most significant challenges in the war on terrorism is that its battlefields are often the everyday world, where civilians and terrorists often stand side-by-side, where as much attention must be given to safeguarding lives and property as to disrupting, apprehending, or incapacitating terrorists. Non-lethal weapons may offer the military and law enforcement a new range of options for taking the battle to the terrorist without endangering others.
Non-lethal weapons are discriminate, explicitly designed and employed to incapacitate personnel or materiel while minimizing fatalities and undesired damage to property and environment. These weapons are actually a set of capabilities which have approximately three functions:
Today, non-lethal weapons technologies cover a broad spectrum, including areas related to the development of acoustics systems; chemicals (e.g., antitraction materials, dyes, markers, and malodorants); communications systems; electromagnetic and electrical systems; entanglement and other mechanical systems; information technologies; optical devices; non-penetrating projectiles and munitions; and many others. It is also possible to combine non-lethal weapons with lethal ones or with electronic, psychological, and/or information warfare, making these other anti-terrorism tools more effective and discriminate.
Research by the U.S. military suggests four areas of non-lethal weapons development that show particular promise. They are:
Data Mining and Link Analysis Technologies. We live in a world that is becoming increasingly awash in commercial and government information. The trail of the terrorist, however, is often indistinguishable from a mass of bills, license applications, visa forms, census records, and telephone lists. Traditional law enforcement investigation techniques often begin with the identification of a suspected individual, followed by the laborious process of seeking out information related to that individual. As more and more information becomes available, this task becomes more and more problematic.
Technology, however, now has the potential to turn this challenge into an advantage. Rather than trying to narrow the scope of information that has to be looked at, data mining and link analysis technologies work best by exploiting larger and larger amounts of information.
Data mining is a "technology for analyzing historical and current online data to support informed decision making." It involves identifying patterns and anomalies from the observation of vast datasets. The primary goals of data mining are prediction and description. Prediction involves using some variables or fields in the database to predict unknown or future values of other variables of interest, and description focuses on finding human-interpretable patterns describing the data. Description concerns increasing knowledge about a variable or dataset by finding related information.
This second characteristic of data mining- description-is often referred to as link analysis. Whereas data mining attempts to identify anomalies in vast amounts of information, link analysis technologies sift through databases to find commonalties.
Link analysis is a slightly different twist on data mining. In preventing a terrorist attack, it is critical that one understands the relationships among individuals, organizations, and other entities which could be security threats. Link analysis is the process of analyzing the data surrounding the suspect relationships to determine how they are connected-what links them together.
While the technology to conduct data mining is rapidly maturing, it is currently limited by its capacity to handle non-structured formats; i.e., those that are a mix of text, image, video, and sensor information. In addition, future algorithms will also need to incorporate the knowledge of human experts into their derivation of patterns.
My final two candidate technologies definitely fit into the last category of an aggressive technology acquisition program. They offer two potential breakthroughs which could significantly reshape the nature of competition between terrorism and counterterrorism.
Nanotechnology. As a counterterrorism tool, nanotechnologies are in their infancies. Nanotechnology involves developing or working with materials and complete systems at the atomic, molecular, or macromolecular levels where at least one dimension falls with the range of 1-100 nanometers. Working at such a small scale offers unique capabilities, such as being able to control how nanodevices interact with other systems at the atomic or molecular level.
Current research areas include materials, sensors, biomedical nanostructures, electronics, optics, and fabrication. Materials which have been modified at the nanoscale can have specific properties incorporated into them. For instance, materials can have coatings that make them water-repellant or stain-resistant. According to a study by Daniel Ratner and Mark A. Ratner:
Nanoscale sensors are generally designed to form a weak chemical bond to the substance of whatever is to be sensed, and then to change their properties in response (that might be a color change or a change in conductivity, fluorescence, or weight).
Biomedical nanostructures, by design, interact with people at the molecular level, allowing for targeted drug delivery, adhesive materials for skin grafts or bandages, etc. Nanoscale electronics can help to shrink computer circuits even further and to make them more efficient. Nanoscale optics allow once again for materials that fluoresce to be tuned at the nanoscale to change specific properties under certain conditions. Fabrication at the nanoscale offers the potential of creating devices from the atom up, as opposed to having to shrink materials down to the needed size.
According to a RAND report, there are numerous future applications for nanotechnology, though most face at least some technical hurdles. They include nanofabricated computational devices like nanoscale semiconductor chips, biomolecular devices, and molecular electronics. If one includes integrated microsystems and micro-electrical-mechanical systems (MEMS) in the discussion, and one probably should, there are additional uses for nanotechnology, including smart systems-on-a-chip and micro- and nanoscale instrumentation and measurement technologies.
While there are counterterrorism applications for all of the research areas, sensors are the most promising. Nanodevices offer the opportunity for fast, cheap, and accurate sensors and detectors, and markers that can be used for a wide range of forensic activities.
Directed-Energy Weapons. Active defenses such as directed-energy weapons could provide counterterrorism protection for critical infrastructure. Directed-energy weapons include a host of technologies, including lasers and microwave radiation emitters. These weapons can inflict casualties and damage equipment by depositing energy on their intended target.
Compared with conventional weapons, which rely on the kinetic or chemical energy of a projectile, directed-energy weapons can hit a target with subatomic particles or electromagnetic waves that travel at speeds at or near the speed of light. They generate very high power beams and typically use a single optical system both to track a target and to focus the beam on the target in order to destroy it.
Lasers-the most mature form of directed-energy weapon that can counter airborne threats-form intense beams of light that can be precisely aimed across many kilometers to disable a wide range of targets, from satellites to missiles and aircraft to ground vehicles. Additionally, the laser beam can be redirected by mirrors to hit targets not visible from the source, all without compromising much of the beam's initial power.
Such systems could evolve to provide active defenses against a wide array of potential threats from artillery, rockets, mortars, missiles, and low-flying unmanned aerial vehicles to improvised explosive devices. For example, these weapons could be deployed at airports to defend planes from attacks by shoulder-fired missiles (and by makeshift rockets and missiles) during takeoff and landing-the times when aircraft are most vulnerable.
With most airports located in or near major urban centers, directed-energy weapons could help to address the near impossibility of providing adequate, credible security zones around airports. Furthermore, they could defend coastal airports from attacks launched from a commercial or private ship loitering offshore-a potentially ideal platform for launching precision strikes. Several countries, including the United States, already have these systems under development.
It remains to be seen how governments and the private sector apply their energy and imagination to turning these technologies into potent anti-terrorism tools. There are several serious obstacles to be overcome.
Research and Development Trends. The September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington seem only somewhat to have affected research and development trends in the United States, and, indeed, it appears that the same trend is holding true for other nations as well. American research and development efforts have been affected only "on the margins." For example, the newly created Department of Homeland Security has a science and technology directorate with a research budget of about $800 million. While that seems like a great deal of money, it is a small fraction of the $90 billion the U.S. government spends on research.
In turn, government research represents an increasingly less significant portion of the total research and development effort. In the 1960s, about two-thirds of U.S. research was federally funded. Today, two-thirds of research-about $180 billion-is funded by the private sector. For example, American software and semiconductor companies spend about $10 billion, which is about the same amount as the entire research budget for the U.S. space program.
The balance of investments for research and development does not bode well for counterterrorism technologies. Most of the cutting-edge research in related areas, particularly with regard to information technology and biotechnology, is in the private sector where development programs are largely driven by potential markets and the profits to be made in the security sector seem to pale in comparison with other commercial opportunities.
In part, this challenge can be addressed by making the counterterrorism community a more attractive customer for the private sector. Legal incentives such as indemnification for products may help-as would broadly accepted international standards for the application of technologies, particularly in the areas of biometrics. Moving to open and non-proprietary information architectures that make it far easier to adapt commercial technologies to law enforcement needs would also be of great benefit.
A significant next step would be initiating a serious dialogue to determine what a future international counterterrorism security technology development regime might look like. It would require, among other things, a technology clearinghouse so that partners know what technologies are available for transfer; a method of setting standards so that technologies are understandable; interoperable and transferable means for industry-to-industry dialogue; predictable export control requirements; and acquisition mechanisms such as joint development programs, licensing agreements, and something comparable to the foreign military sales program.
Any of these or other initiatives that serve to create a more uniform and dependable market for counterterrorism technologies would serve to make it a more attractive target for the private sector and, in turn, stimulate the responsiveness of private research and development in support of key law enforcement needs.
Barriers to Innovation. Even if private research and development can be better teamed with government efforts and focused on the terrorism challenges of the 21st century, the traditional barriers to innovation in law enforcement technologies will remain. These challenges include four areas.
Perhaps the best means to satisfy these concerns is to address potential policy issues that may serve as barriers to the adoption of new technologies before new capabilities are introduced. Policy development that anticipates technological development represents a largely unprecedented challenge to law enforcement. More often than not, law enforcement's approach has been to take years to develop the procedures that govern the implementation of new technologies, largely waiting for commercial technologies to mature, threats to evolve, and legal precedents to be established. This process will not serve for the challenges of the 21st century, where policy innovation must match, or indeed exceed, the speed of technological progress.
The terrorist threat against the free world is serious and enduring. We need to jointly develop the means and the technologies needed to meet this threat.
The obstacles to creating an arsenal of counter-terrorism technologies that are practical and affordable and overmatch the threat of 21st century terrorism are daunting. Creating a vision of these future technologies, implementing initiatives that broaden the market and make it more predictable and dependable, and developing policies that will help to overcome the barriers to innovation are essential steps to harnessing technology to the future needs of law enforcement.
James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow for National Security and Homeland Security in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation. These remarks were prepared for delivery at a Middle East Police Exhibition Conference held at the Dubai World Trade Center.
Army Science and Technology for Homeland Security, Vol. II (Washington, D.C.: National Research Council, 2004), Chapter 4.
Paul Rosenzweig, Alane Kochems, and Ari Schwartz, "Biometric Technologies: Security, Legal, and Policy Implications," Heritage Foundation Legal Memorandum No. 12, June 21, 2004, at www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandDefense/lm12.cfm (November 16, 2004).
Naval Studies Board, An Assessment of Non-Lethal Weapons Science and Technology (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003), executive summary, at www.nap.edu/execsumm/0309082889.html (November 16, 2004).
Committee on the Role of Information Technology in Responding to Terrorism, Computer Science and Telecommunication Board, Information Technology for Counterterrorism: Immediate Actions and Future Possibilities, eds. John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson, and Herbert S. Lin (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003), p. 68.
Usama Fayyad, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, and Padhraic Smyth, "From Data Mining to Knowledge Discovery in Databases," Artificial Intelligence, Fall 1996, p. 44, at www.kdnuggets.com/gpspubs/aimag-kdd-overview-1996-Fayyad.pdf (November 16, 2004).
Daniel Ratner and Mark A. Ratner, Nanotechnology and Homeland Security (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall Professional and Technical Reference, 2004), p. 13.
Ibid., p. 21.
Philip S. Anton, Richard Silberglitt, and James Schneider, The Global Technology Revolution: Bio/Nano/Materials Trends and Their Synergies with Information Technology by 2015, Prepared for the National Intelligence Council (Santa Monica, Cal.: RAND, 2001), pp. 25-28.
Ibid., pp. 28-30.
Jack Spencer and James Jay Carafano, "The Use of Directed-Energy Weapons to Protect Critical Infrastructure," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 1783, August 2, 2004, at www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/bg1783.cfm.
Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D., "The Emerging Promise (and Danger) of Directed-Energy Weapons," Lexington Institute Capitol Hill Forum on Directed Energy, July 11, 2002, at www.lexingtoninstitute.org/defense/energyforum_thompson.htm (July 23, 2004).
Josef Schwartz et al., "Tactical High Energy Laser," presented at the SPIE Proceedings on Laser and Beam Control Technologies, January 21, 2002, pp. 1-6. TRW developed a fixed-site THEL under an $89 million contract. In tests, the system has successfully shot down 25 rockets. It is, however, not currently capable of being deployed for operational use. The U.S. Army is developing a mobile version and has requested additional funding for the program. In February 2004, the Army's tactical laser project was formally converted into an acquisition program. The first prototype of the mobile laser is due to appear in 2008. See Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D., and Daniel Gouré, Ph.D., "Directed Energy Weapons: Technologies, Applications, and Implications," Lexington Institute White Paper, February 2003, pp. 11-12 and 24-25, at www.lexingtoninstitute. org/docs/321.pdf.
G. Pascal Zachary, "Technology Is Destiny," The Milkin Institute Review, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Third Quarter 2004), p. 6.
William Schwabe, Lois M. Davis, and Brian A. Jackson, Challenges and Choices for Crime-Fighting Technology: Federal Support of State and Local Law Enforcement (Santa Monica, Cal.: RAND, 2001), p. xxi.