A New Dimension

Scenario 2007: You’re a Federal field agent who investigates cybercrime and identity theft. Your boss tosses you a credit card and barks, “We’ve nabbed a punk. Check this out.” You squint at the plastic, turning it in your fingers. You can see the “optical variable device”—the hologram. Is it authentic? Unsure, you bag it and send it through a lengthy chain of custody to a forensic lab in Washington, DC. Your answer arrives … two weeks later.

Scenario 2008: With the help of a new technology developed by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, the verdict on that credit card is in—in 30 minutes.

The new technology is a revolutionary suite of three-dimensional scanners created with California startup Third Ring, with guidance from DHS law-enforcement investigators. Using modified low-cost flatbed scanners and smart software, these scanners will help agents quickly spot a counterfeit driver’s license, credit card, passport, birth certificate—any document but currency. One scanner even plays back the hologram image as a movie.

Hologram or hollowgram? After photographing a hologram from all angles, the Optical Variable Device Station saves the images as an animated gif (Graphic Interchange Format) file. If the hologram is genuine, the agent sees a movie. If it’s not, the agent sees a “still life.”

How it works: Tell the scanner what kind of card or document you’re about to scan, and its software will calibrate the speed, brightness, contrast, and color palette to make its security feature(s) stand out. These are features such as microprinted text, multihued watermarks, or fibers that glow under ultraviolet light. You compare the scan with a baseline, or “exemplar.” If a feature is missing, you have a forgery.

The system’s crown jewel would make CSI’s forensic examiners drool: a hologram scanner called the Optical Variable Device Station. It can’t project a volumetric display like the 3-D objects in the Enterprise’s holodeck. But it can capture, from every viewing angle, a hologram’s “motion” and colors—features that, before now, were impossible—to many, unthinkable—to capture.

The hologram is illuminated by a swift-changing star pattern of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) (see the photos). As the LEDs fire, a digital camera shoots a series of images. The images are stacked like movie frames into an animated GIF movie—an electronic flip card; its movement—or dead stillness—serves as an optical lie detector.

“When you have a fake, it really leaps out,” says John B. Price, the program manager at the Directorate. “When you try to see the motion, it just won’t move. This is while-you-wait service.”

The Optical Variable Device Station can scan a bank card’s hologram from many angles.

Armed with these scans, you can reasonably decide whether the document is a fraud. If in doubt, you email the files (securely) to Washington for a half-hour verdict.

In 2005, ten systems were field-tested in three major cities. Their surpassing performance caught the eye of several Federal law-enforcement agencies, which have since run field trials. Using the system’s many modules, agents can now unmask forgery not only in a document’s fibers or a bank card’s hologram, but also in a package’s bar code … or a bank card’s magnetic stripe.

Is the stripe scanner smarter than an ATM? “Bank on it,” says Price.

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Locating the Heroes

For thousands of office workers who fled the twin towers on 9/11, the most astonishing sight during the rush to descend was the wave of resolute firefighters making their own way upwards. Eleven firefighters from Rescue 1 went in. None returned. Seven from Engine 33 rushed in. Only the driver survived. “We found eight of them together in a stairway void,” said a rescue worker. “They were still holding their tools …” The number of casualties was astounding. Entire companies were lost.

One of the cruelest facts of 9/11 was the inability to locate those brave souls who plunged into harm’s way, to warn them when to get out, and to locate those who were trapped when the towers collapsed. One reason was that they neither carried, nor wore, any sort of technology that could tell their command center where they were. As a result, it was a severe challenge to know where rescue personnel were once they were out of sight, enveloped in smoke or fire, and scattered across many floors.

This is all about to change.

Finding and tracking the whereabouts of firefighters and other first responders was a major challenge on 9/11. Soon, as a solution, a new 3-D Locator could be worn as a small, lightweight daypack.

It started when the DHS Science and Technology Directorate asked the boots-on-the-ground what they need. “One of the most important needs of the firefighters and other first responders turns out to be a technology that can accurately track and locate where their comrades are in three-dimensional space,” says Jalal Mapar, a program manager at the Directorate. “Now we’ve got a solution … the 3–D Locator.”

Mapar is developing an innovative 3-D Locator system with L-3 Communications Corporation—what he calls a “cocktail solution” that includes several components needed to track the first responder: an inertial measurement unit, altimeter, ultra-wideband radio, GPS, pedometer, magnetometer, barometric altimeter, Bluetooth, and wireless mesh network. Lightweight, and worn as a small daypack, the locator is achieving an accuracy of three meters.

“That’s good enough to identify even the floor the responder is on in disaster or emergency situations,” says Mapar.

The 3-D Locator uses an enhanced ad hoc network router, consisting of a processor for the entire system, an integrated radio, and an integrated 20-channel GPS receiver. “Ad hoc” technology assists by providing a private network to determine the location of a radio when GPS alone can’t do the job. It links individual GPS locators worn by first responders into a network that shares GPS satellite and other navigation information. If a firefighter’s locator is receiving only one satellite signal, it can share information from other locators receiving additional satellite signals, along with information about their relative location.

The current model is being prepared for testing in several large metropolitan areas around the country. Once fully developed, the 3-D Locators have potential use in thousands of applications for police, fire, and emergency medical personnel.

“It’s a game-changer that will save lives,” says Mapar.

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Outside the Box

Now here’s a concept not usually associated with the government: approach a challenge with completely new thinking. Not just a turn of direction, but a whole new way of looking at things.

This is the aim of the Safe Container project at the DHS Science and Technology Directorate. Also called SAFECON, the project is looking for an innovative, all-in-one security system that would scan, in one quick swipe, cargo containers as they are lifted off ships.

This will be no small task, as there are tens of millions of these boxes entering U.S. ports every year. Currently, ports rely mostly on import laws and regulations to keep out threats. No single system for security now exists.

Yet Ed Turner, who manages SAFECON for the Directorate, can envision what one might look like and do. Using sensors or some type of other technology—likely mounted directly to automated cranes at ports—each box would be simultaneously checked for different chemical and biological risks, explosives, and even humans. It would not only detect threats, but identify what they are. And obviously, to keep trade and commerce flowing, it would have to work fast … very fast.

“We want to do all this in 45 seconds or less,” says Turner. “We’re looking for something that utterly changes the picture.”

SAFECON is not your typical Directorate project. It’s one of a group of projects called Homeland Innovative Prototypical Solutions (HIPS). Using less than 10% of the organization’s budget, HIPS are designed to deliver prototype-level demonstrations of game-changing technologies in just two to five years. HIPS even have a moderate-to-high risk of failure. If they succeed, however, they could absolutely improve homeland security in a major way.

To get SAFECON moving, the Directorate has posted a request for information, which seeks ideas and comments from industry and other interested parties by October 1. Once he gets a sense of what’s out there in terms of capability and inventiveness, Turner intends to establish some kind of testing ground. Here, ideas and sample technologies could be shown off and demonstrated. “I can see it as a simulated port-of-entry environment,” he adds.

SAFECON is looking for an all-in-one, completely new way of scanning cargo containers as they are hoisted off ships and onto trucks or trains.

The SAFECON project could have a prototype to work with in the next year or so. The Directorate has also been working closely with the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, which is addressing threats posed by nuclear or radiological material, to explore how the office’s current and future technologies could be integrated into Directorate systems for single-device screening solutions.

Once operational, SAFECON could serve not only the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, but state, local, international, and even private ports. “This could be a very big deal,” Turner says.

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S&T Snapshots is a monthly newsletter produced by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate in partnership with the Homeland Security Institute. HSI is a Studies and Analysis Federally Funded Research and Development Center.