Register Now For…  Putting First Responders First: 2008 Homeland Security S&T Stakeholders Conference–West January 14-17 Los Angeles, CA The conference is presented by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), with subject matter support provided by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate. The State of California Governor’s Office of Homeland Security is a key participant. The theme for the conference is “Putting First Responders First,” and the event will focus on the technology needs of first responders and emergency management personnel at all levels of government. For more information, visit www.ndia.org/meetings/8690.

Security From on High

Click here to see the CIIMS “electronic flight bag” in action during an in-flight test by the Maryland State Police Aviation Command (16 MB download).

A police helicopter crew has just finished rescuing a damsel from peril and chasing down a bad guy on the run. Job well done, and it’s time to head back to HQ.

But there’s no time to kick back for the ride home. The area was just hit by a major storm, so a bridge needs to be inspected for any damage. There have also been reports about a suspicious truck parked outside a nearby power plant. Better check it out with a flyover.

It’s a typical day’s work for members of the Maryland State Police Aviation Command. They conduct both emergency response and law enforcement missions from a fleet of helicopters. Yet these return missions can be time-consuming and complex to keep track of, especially when you’re needed elsewhere in a hurry.

Thanks to funding from the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate, however, the Maryland State Police—and agencies like it across the Nation—now have a quicker, easier, and cheaper way to conduct these kinds of inspections. It’s called the Critical Infrastructure Inspection Management System (CIIMS). Developed at the State Police’s request by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, CIIMS will help flight crews efficiently manage their checks of vulnerable structures and sites, such as dams, bridges, and large industrial complexes.

Here’s how CIIMS works: Just before takeoff, a State Police flight crew loads data onto a handheld computer tablet, called an electronic flight bag. The data may include updated photos, coordinates, and maps for each critical infrastructure that needs to be inspected. This is all publicly available information, taken from Internet maps, navigation charts, and other sources.

In addition to the geographic data, the tablet is loaded with a series of questions that the inspections are designed to answer. While flying over the site, a crew member uses touch-screen controls on the tablet to answer the questions based on his or her observations. Questions like: “Do you see any cracks in the concrete at the base of the bridge?” or “Do you see a yellow truck parked outside the power plant?” After the crew lands back at State Police headquarters, the data on the tablet are uploaded and sent to the proper authorities (a state or Federal agency). From that point on, the inspections can be filed, managed, and prioritized electronically, saving time and resources while improving homeland security.

CIIMS is almost ready for primetime. The Maryland State Police will conduct further tests on CIIMS throughout the 2008 fiscal year and provide vital feedback to Johns Hopkins APL engineers, who will then tweak the system. Meanwhile, other state and local jurisdictions are expressing interest.

“Right now, we’re working with Maryland to really refine CIIMS, and then integrate the information collected by the tablets into a dependable reporting process,” says Herb Engle, who manages the CIIMS project for the S&T Directorate’s Command, Control, and Interoperability Division. “We’re hoping that we can start offering CIIMS to other states by the end of next year.”

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Portable Pathology

Lawrence Livermore chemist Chris Bailey, who has directed much of the BioBriefcase development efforts, makes some adjustments to the system.

If James Bond were a homeland security agent, Q would arm him with the BioBriefcase. If the villain Goldfinger ever tried to unleash deadly pathogens, Bond would flip off the lid of the BioBriefcase, quickly detect the germs, and notify authorities to limit any harm. Lives saved and evil defeated…until the next Bond adventure.

In the real world, however, the villains are terrorists and the threat of a biological attack is far from fiction. Luckily, the BioBriefcase works in much the same way, and it really can save lives.

Funded by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, the BioBriefcase was developed by scientists and engineers at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories. It’s a product of a comprehensive DHS effort launched in 2003 to deploy a network of biomonitors, detectors, and warning systems. The Nation needs to be prepared in the event of an attack using a harmful or deadly biological agent, such as anthrax or another type of bacteria, virus, or toxin. BioWatch technologies are also significant products of this effort. (See the June 2007 issue of Snapshots.)

The BioBriefcase is a portable option for the biodefense arsenal. It’s only about the size of a large suitcase, and it can be placed in hard-to-reach areas such as air ducts. It can also conduct a bioanalysis within about an hour of receiving a sample, giving emergency responders a vital early warning of a possible attack.

According to Lawrence Livermore, the BioBriefcase can play a critical role as an affordable tool for many kinds of civilian applications. It can be used by first responders, homeland security companies, and agriculture operations, or even for the purpose of environmental monitoring in factories or office buildings.

“Our team is particularly proud of the system’s performance in field trials late last year,” said Lawrence Livermore chemist Chris Bailey, who has directed much of the system’s development. “For the future, we’re looking for new opportunities for biological monitoring and further advancing the technology.”

The BioBriefcase uses state-of-art technologies to collect, process, and analyze samples. It can detect as well as identify genetic and protein signatures of agents. It can also be converted into a bench-top instrument for medical diagnosis and scientific research, with built-in capabilities for autonomous sampling and processing. Lawrence Livermore is looking for industry partners to help commercialize the BioBriefcase and, maybe, equip an army of James Bonds to take on the villains.

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Eye of the Lobster

Truly from science to security, the lobster eye x-ray imaging device—shown here in this illustration—can peer into many types of cargo containers.

Want a device to see through walls, wood, concrete, earth, and steel? Scientists working for the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate looked around and found that nature sometimes comes in mighty handy.

Take the lobster.

Here you have a crustacean with an amazingly miniscule brain, yet this creature is able to “see” through walls of dense water obscured by silt and sand to find its food buried deep along the ocean bottom. Lobsters have limited image resolution, but possess high sensitivity and the ability to detect fast movement and the polarization of light. Over eons, this bottom crawler developed compound eyes to view its world through a large number of long, narrow square-shaped cells, arranged in a spherical array with a 180° field of view. Any light the lobster takes advantage of down there is reflected from very highly reflective walls of the cells over a wide range of angles of incidence to form a fast focus. Each cell captures that small amount of light, which then enters the lobster’s eye from all angles. The light from these cells is then focused to form a single, intensified image.

This is some eye-opening stuff.

The eye that the S&T Directorate is building is almost as good as a lobster’s. And while it doesn’t exactly look and work like the eye of a lobster, this new handheld, through-the-wall “lobster eye x-ray imaging device” (LEXID) can detect and identify humans and contraband in hidden compartments and through walls of various thicknesses and material.

“LEXID is still very developmental, but it has some tremendous potential,” says Jim Apple of Physical Optics Corporation of Torrance, CA, which built the technology under a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant.

The Directorate has some tough specifications for this device. It must be able to “see” behind ship bulkheads, through several inches of soil, through steel, through wood beams, and through concrete. And, it must do this from about 9 feet away—a considerable distance that calls for the device to pack a hefty amount of power.

LEXID has sparked interest from the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Charged with knowing and scrutinizing what is coming into the country by land and by sea, both agencies are hard pressed when inspecting all the goods and vehicles that cross our borders—everything from cars to ships to cargo containers. The Transportation Security Administration has also expressed an interest in LEXID, particularly for its ability to see into wooden crates and cardboard containers, which make up many air cargo containers.

“In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, tools to inspect hidden or closed compartments for contraband or security threats was a need specifically identified and conveyed to us,” says Gerry Kirwin, who manages the project for the S&T Directorate.

“Who’d have known we’d get our inspiration from lobsters?” adds Kirwin.

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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.