A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unit within the Science and Technology (S&T) branch that is charged with helping transition technology to operational use is working with the component agencies of the department to develop research and development (R&D) strategies and related investment plans during the next one to five years.
This week the first of those R&D strategies, a joint effort between the Federal Protective Service (FPS) and the General Services Administration, is expected to be signed by the director of FPS, says Paul Benda, director of the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA) within S&T. He says the R&D strategy for the Secret Service has been completed and signed but that they are still reviewing what can be briefed to the public.
The strategy for the Transportation Security Administration is nearly completed and will have to be signed by Benda and John Sanders, the agency’s assistant administrator for the Office of Security Capabilities. Strategies are also being developed for chemical and biological defense, critical infrastructure protection, and Customs and Border Protection, says Benda.
Earlier this month, HSARPA hosted a webinar to present the FPS R&D strategy. HSARPA plans to do additional webinars to present more component R&D strategies.
The strategies are broken down into priority areas with focus areas as subsets. The top priority area for the FPS is Security Operations and Countermeasures, says Benda.
“How do they do security at a facility, how do they improve that security, how [do they] choose the technology they have, [and] how do they improve their throughput” are the kinds of questions the strategy seeks to help with, Bend says. “Their number one priority here is how do they screen better?”
The FPS wants metrics for their screening and they want to be able to find kinetic and chemical and biological threats on people quickly, Benda says. Countering radiological threats is not of interest currently, he adds.
To counter chemical and biological threats, the FPS would like to find these at the checkpoint, Benda says. They can’t do this currently “unless they see an anomaly in the X-Ray,” he says. There is no interest in deploying sensors in facilities to detect the presence of these threats, he says.
The FPS also wants to increase screening throughput without adding additional resources, Benda says. That’s because the number of visitors to federal facilities is growing, he says.
These issues are similar to those facing the TSA at the nation’s airports and as various strategies come together, HSARPA will be looking for overlap between the components, Benda says.
The FPS provides security for all non-Defense Department federal facilities across the U.S., typically in buildings owned or rented by the GSA. There are 9,600 GSA owned or leased facilities in the U.S. that house more than one million federal employees.
Benda says that while the FPS, like all federal agencies, is operating with “significant cost constraints,” their appropriations come through facilities rents, which means there is “some funding available for improvements” in a lot of areas.
The typical screening set up at many of the GSA managed facilities that the FPS provides protection for includes ID inspection, walk-through metal detectors, X-Ray screening of bags, and the use of handheld metal detectors for secondary screening. Given limited staff, a problem develops when a hand inspection of a person is done, which backs up the screening queue, Benda says.
“The idea here is are there ways to improve the screening while maintaining, or hopefully even reducing the costs that we’ve got,” Benda says. “Are there ways to improve the throughput?”
Unlike TSA, the FPS is not interested in three ounces of liquid but rather person-borne IEDs and chemical and biological weapons, Benda says. So a computed tomography type of explosive detection system is unlikely to be of interest, he adds.
FPS also wants repeatable methodologies to test and evaluate countermeasures, Benda says. They want to understand the costs of systems and the impacts of implementing a system, he says.
FPS is also interested in improving training as there are no standard best practices across the enterprise, Benda says. He points to the ability of the TSA so project threat objects into the images that Transportation Security Officers view while screening bags at airport checkpoints as a potential means to improve the skills of FPS officers.
Other priority areas include improved intelligence and analysis, including fusing and disseminating operationally relevant threat data across the enterprise, Benda says. The FPS is currently broken into nine regions, each operating somewhat independently of the others, he says.
“But the problem that we’ve got is that we have no enterprise view at FPS headquarters and we have no way to share in near-real time threat data that comes in,” Benda says. However, he says FPS doesn’t have the money or headquarters staff to implement a “large-scale enterprise solution” for this. That means an “innovative solution” is necessary.
FPS is also interested in finding ways to reduce the time and labor needed to conduct facilities inspections, and in better vetting its contract personnel and in recording and tracking their security force personnel and related qualifications, Benda says.