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Advocacy Group Seeks More Private Enterprise Participation in Homeland Security Technology Development

By Karen Peterson

Developing the technology needed to help secure the U.S. against terrorist attacks is a task too important to be left solely in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security, a Northern California-based homeland security advocacy group contends.

According to the nonprofit Homeland Security Innovation Association (HLSIA), the best way to ensure protection against the long-term terrorist threat is to let private enterprise do what it does best: create appropriate, fast-to-market solutions. And the only way to make this happen, says HLSIA founder Donald C. Masters, a 20-year veteran of the State Department, is to replace the current government-dominated market for developing security technologies with an open-market approach.

In Masters' view, the first priority in the race to develop counter-terrorism technologies should be to allow free enterprise the freedom to innovate, unshackled by politics, bureaucracy and an old-style procurement process weighted in favor of prime contractors. This will happen only when the market becomes more competitive, said Masters, allowing "the private sector to play a greater role on the demand side."

"Time is of the essence. The threat is now," said Masters.

In a recent interview, Masters, an adjunct professor of economics at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., said that maintaining the status quo simply prolongs a dangerous disconnect: government as the sole driver for developing both the policies and the technologies needed to meet the very real, and in his view, imminent threat head-on.

"Private industry needs to take back the technology," said Masters. "Government's job would be to establish standards based on threat-assessment metrics. Only then can we hope to begin producing the technologies we need to protect the nation."

Using a combination of Web-based information sharing and advocacy to bring together private business and individuals concerned about policy reform, Masters said HLSIA (www.hslia.org) is pushing for a more holistic approach that would, in the best-case scenario, give government the job of establishing threat priorities, funding R&D, and determining standards. From there, competitive product development would take over.

"Homeland security, terrorism, these are the new facts of life, and what HLSIA is afraid of is that a lot of cost-effective technology is not being evaluated, and a lot of commercial technologies now on the shelf -- which could easily and expeditiously be reconfigured to address homeland security threats -- may never see the light of day because the small- and medium-sized companies that developed them are out of the government procurement loop," said Masters.

"As long as the government dominates the process, the range of needed security technologies is stalled," he said. "Just look at how long it took the intelligence community to develop surveillance satellites - 10 years. That's too long to wait. We need to let private industry get involved now."

More damaging, in terms of innovation, said Masters, is that the government is both driving the security development process and institutionalizing "a massive monopsony as the sole buyer of the technologies it chooses to deploy."

One result of this monopsony is what DHS is in fact doing today, adds Masters -- relying on billion-dollar "high-cost technology" development awards that, due to budget limitations, "inherently create unequal threat-technology coverage." A case in point, he notes, is the continuing problem of interoperability between first-responder communication systems five years after 9/11 and one year after Hurricane Katrina.

"There are hybrid solutions that could be used," Masters said of the interoperability issue. "But without an open-ended technology approach, the market won't develop."

While the HLSIA approach to a new security-procurement matrix reaches across all security-target markets, there is an area that the group currently identifies as a sitting duck in this government-dominated vs. free enterprise-driven stasis: the container cargo industry.

At present, only 3-4 % of the 10,000 containers processed each day at America's ports are inspected. While DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff is optimistic that new radiation monitoring portals (RMPs) -- awarded to Raytheon Company - Integrated Defense Systems, Thermo Electron Corporation and Canberra Industries Inc. in July under a $1.157 billion contract -- are the answer, Masters is skeptical.

To begin with, said Masters, the new RMPs are drive-through portals designed to "quickly scan" the trucks carrying the containers, as opposed to a system that could check the containers in a more stable environment: on board the ship.

Masters also notes that the radiation-detection technology itself is still being fine-tuned. "The technology is not quite there. The process is more complicated," he said. "There is the problem of false-positive readings that arise from naturally occurring background radiation; there are issues, too, that involve the unions and concerns that the gamma rays used in the portals pose a health hazard."

A more complete solution may be available through the very process of private-sector inclusion that HLSIA is pushing for, said Masters: using existing wireless technologies. As Masters notes, RFID technologies are advanced enough now -- thanks in large part to mandates for RFID tagging by the Department of Defense and WalMart -- for use in the development of "smart containers" outfitted with a range of radio frequency systems and sensors that could monitor, in real time, the contents of containers or detect when containers have been breached.

"We have the capability with advances in wireless technology to begin this process now, and there are moves in that direction, but it's not enough," said Masters. "What government could do to ensure greater protection is to use these technologies along with a threat assessment that anticipates, for example, what environments are the most obvious target for what terrorists tend to use: explosives.

"With innovations in wireless technologies, solutions could be assembled at these target areas quickly and without too much difficulty," Masters said.

Serving as a Foreign Service officer in Jordan, among other countries, Masters understands the dynamics that both drive the violence and the U.S. policies that seek to thwart it.

"I have an appreciation of what we can do to protect ourselves," said Masters, a PhD in economics. "I feel that I understand the intensity and emotion, the attitudes and the frustrations, in that part of the world. It has given me an appreciation of the enormity of the threat."

He also believes another attack, greater than 9/11, is imminent. "They have to do an encore," said Masters. "Something bigger and even more dramatic. This is psychological warfare, and until the geo-political environment improves, we have to prepare ourselves in terms of homeland security.

"The private sector has to participate in this defense, both as buyers and suppliers of security technology," said Masters. "We can no longer rely on a slow-moving bureaucracy and military type-procurement systems."