The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to build out its new biometric repository in four increments during a six-year period and still hopes to soon issue a solicitation to compete for the new system, according to department officials.
The Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) system will be implemented in four increments, each one lasting about 18 months, with the first increment slated to begin in FY ’16, says Bill Phillips, acting division director for the Identity Capabilities Management Division within the Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM). Increment 1 will consist of core foundational work such as replacing the transaction manager for the current IDENT system that HART will replace, he says during an Oct. 20 webinar hosted by DHS.
A transaction manager is a highly configurable and adaptable workflow application.
OBIM is still pursuing approvals for HART within the DHS acquisition process and is preparing to solicit proposals from industry, says one of the briefing slides presented by DHS during the webinar. In September OBIM Director Shonnie Lyon said that his office is close to issue a Request for Proposal for HART but is waiting on Congress to approve a federal budget for FY ’16.
In their respective markups earlier this year, the House and Senate committees that appropriate funding for DHS both provided $65.8 million to begin the first increment of HART. The federal government is currently operating under a continuing resolution in FY ’16. DHS officials on the webinar didn’t answer a participant’s question about whether an RFP for HART Increment 1 will be issued if there is a continuing resolution for all of FY ’16.
The HART system is central to the evolution of DHS’ biometrics capabilities going forward. The current IDENT system is based on fingerprints and department officials have been saying that the initial core capabilities of the replacement system will be finger, face and iris.
Beyond being multimodal, the HART system is needed to be able to handle the increasing demands that are being place on IDENT and OBIM wants a more flexible and scalable system to meet evolving DHS mission needs. The current system began as a pilot in the early 1990s and grew significantly after 9/11 as DHS stood up the US-VISIT biometric entry program to the point that it now handles about 300,000 transactions daily and contains more than 190 million identities.
The biometric modalities that will ultimately reside on HART depend on component requirements throughout DHS. Paul Hunter, chief of biometrics strategy within the Biometrics Division of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, says his agency is interested in both voice recognition and DNA, which would be useful for familial relations. However, while USCIS has a requirement for DNA collection, it doesn’t have authority, Hunter says. The Department of State has authorities here, he adds.
No modality is currently off the table, Phillips says. “We are looking at multiple modalities,” he says.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) manages the US-VISIT entry process for foreign national arriving through ports of entry into the U.S. The agency is working toward developing biometric exit processes to better verify that these individuals have left the country. CBP has been doing pilot tests of exit solutions using fingerprint at one major international airport in the U.S.
Ed Fluhr, assistant director for the Office of Field Operations at CBP, says that his agency is interested in on-the-move or on-the-fly biometric applications for exit applications that don’t negatively impact the economy by making travel more difficult.
DHS in August issued a Biometrics Strategic Framework to industry that lays out the vision, goals and objectives for the department for biometrics through 2025. Beginning in October, the department began a “Winter Study” that is focused on developing an enterprise-wide Biometrics Roadmap for DHS, according to one of the briefing slides from the webinar.
The roadmap will “help us better articulate our resource requirements” and show how different biometrics will enable the DHS mission , demonstrate efficiencies and look for shared services with the department, says Steve Yonkers, director of the Screening Coordination Office within the DHS Office of Policy. It will also better position the department to request funding from Congress for these capabilities, he says.
Through the development of the roadmap, the officials say they plan to have a resource allocation plan in place for DHS biometrics beginning in FY ’18 through FY ’21. That doesn’t mean DHS won’t be funding and purchasing biometrics capabilities between now and then they say, pointing to the forthcoming competition to replace IDENT with HART.