Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) new technology and acquisition office is focused on technologies and solutions to help with surveillance, detection and identification to meet a wide range of requirements, according to an agency official.
The Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition is looking at solutions to help detect, identify and classify humans, vehicles such as all-terrain vehicles, cars and trucks, low and slow flying aircraft such as ultra lights and small single engine planes, and marine craft such as Jet Skis, row boats and speed boats, Jim Riordan, executive director of the Program Management Office within the Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition, said at a Department of Homeland Security Industry Day last month.
“These are all mechanisms that are used to transport illegal drugs, people and other things across the borders,” Riordan said.
As for detecting people in vehicles, Riordan said CBP is looking for solutions that are covert and overt.
The new office was created over the summer to help the agency ensure that its acquisition plans and programs are lined up with CBP’s mission needs.
Riordan said that in the coming months expect to see requirements issued for some of CBP’s needs. In particular, he mentions detection of low and slow flying aircraft, including ultralights, tunnel detection, radars for the maritime environment to detect personal watercraft, row boats and speed boats across open water, and video downlinks from aircraft.
The agency is also interested in improving surveillance capabilities at some ports of entry, he added.
Riordan also listed several “challenges” facing CBP, in particular the Border Patrol. One is difficulty in detecting humans in high foliage areas.
“It’s very easy for an individual to go undetected while walking through an area that’s got a lot of trees or a lot of brush,” he said.
Another challenges is detecting people in adverse weather conditions such as high winds, rain or snow, Riordan said.
Yet another challenge, one that CBP has been mentioning more frequently, is communications in remote areas of the country along both the northern and southern borders.
“There are a lot of remote areas that aren’t equipped with any type of communications infrastructure,” Riordan said. “So some types of mechanisms that can help move video, data, voice in those types of remote areas.”
Satellite communications are not an answer, he said, because they cost too much.
CBP is very interested in doing pilot projects with potential technology solutions, just buying one or two systems to “rapidly” try them out with operators in the field.
In the interest of keeping its costs down, CBP is interested in existing solutions that can be purchased either commercial-off-the-shelf or government-off-the-shelf, Riordan said.
“A lot of times it will be asking for a solution that has already been put together, used, and shown to operate correctly,” Riordan said.
CBP is also interested in solutions that feature open architecture, Riordan said.
“If you could pull one camera out and put the next generation in without having to reengineer the entire system, that’s the type of solution that we’re looking for.”
White House CIO Releases Action Plan To Reform Federal IT Efforts
The White House yesterday issued a 25-point action plan that establishes ownership responsibilities and deadlines for each in the coming months as a means to keep federal information technology (IT) projects on track and within budget so that the improved functionality promised by these efforts can be realized every few quarters rather than every few years as is currently the case.
“Many projects use “grand design” approaches that aim to deliver functionality every few years, rather than breaking projects into more manageable chunks and demanding new functionality every few quarters,” the introduction to the new plan says in outlining the problems facing federal IT efforts. “In addition, the Federal Government too often relies on large, custom, proprietary systems when “light technologies” or shared services exist.”
The 25 Point Implementation Plan To Reform Federal Information Technology Management was issued by Vivek Kundra, chief information officer (CIO) for the United States.
The plan notes that since the 1990s the government has been adopting best practices for IT management that are consistently obstructed. The purpose of the plan is to help “clear these obstacles” so that the government can use IT to be more efficient and effective, it says.
The action items include things such as:
Completing detailed implementation plans to consolidate at least 800 federal data centers by 2015. The consolidation effort was called for earlier this year and the new reform plan wants the White House Office of Management and Budget and federal agencies to have the implementation plans in place within the next six months;
Also within six months the Federal CIO is supposed to publish a cloud computing strategy to “accelerate the safe and secure adoption of cloud computing across the government.” To jump start this effort, the plan requires each agency CIO to identify and create plans for three “must move” services to cloud solutions and retire the existing legacy systems. It also requires that one or more of these “must move” efforts be fully migrated within a year;
And another action item is aimed at improving collaboration between agencies and industry before a Request for Proposals (RFP) is issued by creating efficient and inexpensive means for interaction between the two groups. For example, the Implementation Plan pointed to the recent use by the government of an online “wiki” tool to quickly examine solutions for an upcoming federal IT effort that allowed large and small companies to discuss the best solutions and also “allowed participants to tag and vote on the best ideas, providing the agency with a list of top priorities and key themes that made the feedback both more comprehensive and more actionable than what could have been obtained through traditional methods.” Plans for a pre-RFP interactive platform are due within six months.