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Release Date: June 3, 2008
Washington D.C.
Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
Secretarty Chertoff: Jay, thank you for that introduction. Let me thank the National Defense Industry Association and our own Science and Technology Directorate for their roles in making this year’s conference possible. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you about the increasingly prominent role that science and technology play in homeland security in a post-9/11 world. When I spoke to you last year, I summarized our progress in applying science and technology to the protection of our country, and this year I’d like to update you further on what we’ve been doing to continue to make this kind of progress as we move forward.
What I want to do is provide you with this update in the context of the five major goals that we have laid out for the Department of Homeland Security: protecting our country from dangerous people; protecting our country from dangerous things; securing the nation’s critical infrastructure; strengthening our emergency preparedness and response; and ensuring that the department continues to become a fully integrated single entity driven by an overall critical mission.
First, let me deal with protecting against dangerous people. In the last year, 414 million people came into the United States through our ports of entry, and that meant that we had literally seconds to determine who among this vast throng of travelers might be coming here for the purpose of doing us harm, whether it’s a terrorist or criminal, or a drug dealer or smuggler. And we had to do this analysis in a way that protected the privacy and allowed the vast majority of innocent travelers to pass unhindered into the United States.
In dealing with this large number of people and winnowing out the very few who are dangerous from the majority who are not, we had to do several things as efficiently as possible. First, we had to get some advance information when we could about who was coming in. We had to confirm their identities with speed and accuracy and check them against watch-lists. We had to prevent them from impersonating another individual using fraudulent documents. And we had to protect against the possibility of an unknown, yet-to-be identified terrorist hiding among these travelers. All of these tasks necessarily involved the use of technology in some fashion.
As I mentioned last year, one such element of technology is biometrics, or fingerprinting, where we apply technology in order to capture and analyze biometric or fingerprint information as rapidly as possible. In order to confirm -- to improve our ability to confirm identity and to check individuals against latent prints, we are in the process of transitioning from two-fingerprint collection to ten-fingerprint collection. We do this using a technology that is not only more accurate than under the old two-print system, but a technology that allows us to scan and match the fingerprints that we’re collecting from those who enter the country or seek visas against a database of latent prints we’ve collected across the globe at crime scenes and safe houses and even on battlefields. And this use of technology to capture and compare fingerprints has allowed us a much greater opportunity to identify a terrorist whose name is yet unknown to us, but whose physical presence in a safe house or bomb factory suggests that the individual is in fact a danger to us in the United States.
Not only is this a good tool for identifying the unknown terrorist, but it actually creates a deterrent effect. Terrorists who have been in safe houses or training camps now have to wonder whether they have left fingerprints behind that have been lifted, captured, and recorded in a database so that when they cross our border they will face the possibility of being arrested because we’re able to make that connection between that latent fingerprint at the scene of a bomb making factory and the fingerprint of the traveler who is seeking to enter the country.
Another way we use technology is to prevent people from impersonating others so that they can evade our various watch lists that we use to prevent known terrorists from entering the country. Again, we recognize that human nature from time immemorial has prompted people to try to masquerade as others in order to conceal their identity when that identity is potentially a warning sign to those who are monitoring entry into a border or any other place where security is a concern.
As the 9/11 commission itself noted, a forged or stolen travel document is a potent weapon in the hands of a terrorist. And that’s why we’re taking decisive steps to ensure that people who say -- that people actually are the person that they claim to be when they cross the border. And we do this by rolling out a requirement of secure travel documentation through such initiatives as our Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. Using these initiatives as well as our requirements under the Visa Waiver Program, we are requiring stronger and stronger security measures and security systems in the documentation that is presented at our borders or getting on airplanes or getting into our federal buildings. And here again technology is a key enabler in terms of our ability to make sure that people are not able to forge or alter documentation to disguise their true identity.
A final example I’d like to use to talk about how technology is assisting our capabilities and protecting against dangerous people coming into the country is to talk about our SBInet program that’s part of the Secure Border Initiative, which is designed to give us a better capability to monitor, deter, and prevent people from crossing illegally between our ports of entry. Whether that is for the purpose of human smuggling, whether it’s for the purpose of drug smuggling, whether it’s for the purpose of carrying out acts of violence or even carrying out an act of terror.
By combing a whole suite of technological capabilities, not the same thing at every square mile of the border, but the appropriate mix depending on the terrain, we are bringing to bear ground based radar, aerial video, ground based video, ground based sensors, and modern communications to weave a web that will allow the Border Patrol to better detect and disrupt those who want to cross the border. This is truly using technology to leverage the ability of the boots on the ground, the Border Patrol agents themselves, to do their jobs as efficiently and as safely as possible. Again, an important element of this whole system is the use of technology.
Now, just as we use technology to pursue the goal of keeping out dangerous people, we also want to use technology to keep dangerous things out of the country, including most particularly radioactive material – nuclear material. Well, one way we’re using technology is by deploying and having deployed radiation portal monitors to basically scan about 100% of inbound cargo that comes into the United States for radioactive emanations. We have now deployed over 1000 radiation portal monitors. We’re deploying these overseas in some instances, working with the cooperation of our foreign allies. And we are working on the next generation of technology for radiation detection that will be smaller, more precise, easier to deploy, and therefore more efficient.
Now, of course we recognize that some threats will get through, or some threats will be generated from within the country. And that’s why we have to harden our critical infrastructure, which is the third element of our major strategy.
In the months and years following 9/11, we took dramatic, long-overdue steps to make America’s airports a lot safer and more secure. And here again we use multiple layers of security, many of which are technology based. Explosive detection devices for screening baggage. Explosive detection devices for screening passenger carry-ons and passengers themselves, including our new millimeter wave technology, which allows much greater visibility in to what kind of material an individual might be concealing on their person.
And of course in using technology, we still do use good old-fashioned human ingenuity, including behavioral detection analysis, which allows our TSA officials to observe the behavior of people entering into the area, the securities under the airport, so they can detect those whose conduct suggests they might be concealing a nefarious purpose. A little over a month ago at BWI airport I announced our latest iteration, or round of this process - a three-fold set of changes that will not only further enhance security, but make the air traveling experience more palatable.
The first change tackles the problem of misidentification or false positives - when a person winds up not being able to get their ticket or their boarding pass right away because their name happens to match the name of a person who’s on a watch list. Under the new system we announced at BWI, airlines will, if they chose, now be able to store more biographical data in their systems which will allow them to distinguish the false positives from the true positives for purposes of screening and will allow passengers, all passengers now who are not on actual no fly list, to obtain their boarding pass at a kiosk or even online in the same way that every other traveler does.
The second change I announced involved the creation of new ID standards at airports to give travelers greater clarity about what documents will be acceptable. Much like our efforts through the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, this change will give our document checkers a smaller universe of documents to inspect which will give them a better ability to detect forgeries and will also provide greater clarity for the traveling public about what kind of documents are acceptable.
The third change we unveiled at BWI was what we call checkpoint evolution. This involves three things. The deployment of, as I said, multiple-view millimeter wave x-rays to help us look at the body and see if something is concealed. It also involves the use of better technology to actually examine what is in the carry-on baggage, and it involves the ability to use - and this is not quite so high tech - but use lighting, music and signage and to reconfigure the open space to reduce the stress level which not only makes it better for the travel, but it also makes it better for the Behavioral Detection Officer to separate those whose anxiety is focused not on the anxiety of the travel experience itself, which heaven knows can be anxious enough, but on the anxiety caused because someone is planning to do something bad.
The fourth element of our strategy is emergency preparedness and response, and here’s where interoperability and other communications technology plays a very critical, enabling role. Of course, the gateway technologies that now allow us to communicate across various frequencies is a critical technological tool that has driven us in the direction of interoperability. But here again I have to emphasize, you know -- technology by itself is not a magic bullet. Technology only works in a system. A good piece of what has to be done to complete the drive to interoperability is an agreement on common language, common protocols for communication, and common standards. If you don’t get this agreement among the responders in the field, no amount of technology is going to allow them to communicate with each other. And that perhaps is my key message here. Technology only works in the context of a system which has been designed to achieve an end. A system which includes consideration of human factors and the incentive structure, or the micro-economics of how we live as well as the gizmos and gadgets which you all are out there inventing. It’s only as part of a whole system that these gizmos and gadgets actually make sense.
Finally, in terms of our drive to a single, unified DHS, technology is of course critical here as well. Critical in the sense of allowing us to integrate our IT systems, reduce our major data centers from what began as 17 to just two, give us a one-net program so that our seven wide area networks can be consolidated into a single departmental network. And for those of you who have followed our cyber-initiative, technology will be an ingredient, although not the totality, of what I think is the most ambitious and perhaps long overdue effort to take a jump forward in cyber security in recognition of the significant vulnerability we currently have with respect to penetration by cyber espionage, and vulnerability to cyber terrorism or efforts to destroy or damage our infrastructure using computer networks.
So as we look to the future, I remain confident that we will continue to build on the technology and ingenuity of groups like this as part of a systems-based strategy to elevating the security of the homeland, but doing it in a way that allows the vast majority of transactions and trade and travel to continue unhindered in a way that serves our freedom and our prosperity. I know you will continue to work with us to make valuable contributions in this crucial area, recognizing that our greatest strength as a nation is ingenuity and creativity unleashed by freedom. And it is that ingenuity and creativity that will allow us to continue to enhance our homeland security, but to do it in a way that fosters our fundamental values. Thank you very much.
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This page was last reviewed/modified on June 3, 2008.
