The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology (S&T) branch is pursuing an “enterprise capability” aimed at providing greater situational awareness across the nation’s borders, including land, coastal, and ports of entry, an agency official says.
The Border and Coastal Information System (BACIS) “work includes integrating and federating existing standalone data sources, developing new sensor systems to create new data, developing and integrating decision support tools and analytics to translate data into actionable information, and sharing information with partners,” Anh Duong, director of the agency’s Borders and Maritime Security Division, tells the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Duong, in her prepared remarks for the panel, says that providing situational awareness across the Homeland Security Enterprise provides “the biggest return on S&T investment…enabling both tactical response and strategic risk-based resource allocation.”
Work is underway in both the land and maritime environments and will begin for ports of entry in FY ’17. For the land environment, S&T this year is initiating the Border Situational Awareness (BSA) Apex Program, which will include better measurement of illegal border activity, better risk assessments of border security threats, and improved alignment of resources to risk for border security, Duong says.
S&T on its Apex program website says the goal of the BSA effort “is to improve border situational awareness by establishing an enterprise capability to 1) access more data sources, 2) make available decision support tools to translate the available data into actionable information and intelligence, and 3) share that actionable information and intelligence with partner law enforcement agencies.”
Duong says the BSA program will develop BACIS capabilities along land borders.
For maritime borders, Duong says S&T began the Integrated Maritime Domain Enterprise (IMDE) and Coastal Surveillance System (CSS) project, which is being pilot tested with Customs and Border Protection’s Air and Marine Operations Center (AMOC) in California for greater awareness of the waters off Southern California. The system is intended to enhance maritime domain awareness by integrating and federating “existing federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, and foreign surveillance infrastructure and assets to detect, track, identify, and interdict maritime threats,” she says.
Even though the IMDE/CSS project is a pilot, operators at the AMOC have “enthusiastically…embraced” the system for its help “in not only finding more bad actors but also allowing DHS to save money by pursing threats more efficiently,” Duong says.
There are plans to expand IMDE/CSS to portions of the Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, and the Great Lakes by the end of FY ’15, she says.
The land and maritime efforts will ultimately be integrated with the ports of entry project, called the Air Entry/Exit Reengineering (AEER) Apex Program in FY ’17. The AEER Program is also underway, and includes the use of biometrics to identify and verify foreign nationals upon arrival and departure from the U.S.
Security data from all the programs will be integrated into the “BACIS information sharing environment,” Duong says. “Utilization of common data standards, tools, and architectures will allow us to efficiently develop BACIS capabilities in the three environments in parallel and ultimately allow their integration into a single enterprise capability as each is ready for deployment.”