By Calvin Biesecker
Northrop Grumman [NOC] said yesterday it has received a potential $39.6 million contract from the Army to redesign and enhance an intelligence gathering and distribution system that collects biometric and other contextual data to help United States military forces gain identity dominance on the battlefield.
The upgraded Biometric Intelligence Resource (BIR) system will take in data from multiple biometric repositories and even handheld collection devices currently being used by military forces and eventually other information streams allowing military intelligence to more quickly and effectively link an individual or individuals to insurgent or enemy activity, Larry Schneider, senior director in the Land Forces business unit within the Command and Control Systems Division of Northrop Grumman’s Information Systems Sector, told Defense Daily yesterday.
In addition to ingesting data from more biometric repositories and systems than the current BIR, the new system will provide reports to make information available to more analysts, Schneider said. Eventually, he expects the BIR to link to a number of reporting streams that are created by troops in theater and by intelligence officials in the United States, such as the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization’s intelligence operations center, to help automatically stitch together disparate bits of data to draw a clear picture of a particular person and his activities and associates.
For example, Schneider said, an individual whose fingerprints and other biometrics are collected in an operational theater may be linked to a report of that person having been arrested previously for trying to get into an Army base. And the BIR will not only provide that linkage, it will provide access to the person’s interrogation report and data collected elsewhere, he said.
Eventually the BIR will be connected to Department of Homeland Security databases, Schneider said.
Northrop Grumman won its original BIR contract in late 2006 when the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center decided to recompete the project after initial work had been done by then prime contractor SAIC [SAI]. Northrop Grumman completed the development of BIR, fielded it and moved it through all of its security accreditation, Schneider said.
The second version of BIR entails a redesign of the platform to a service-oriented architecture. The contract has a base year and four one-year options. The award was made last September as part of a new competition but Schneider attributed the lag in yesterday’s announcement to making sure the company’s press release about the contract win didn’t contain any sensitive information.
At the end of this year Northrop Grumman will have completed the redesign of the BIR and have working prototypes for field testing, Schneider said. In addition, the BIR will begin to hook into more biometric collection systems than just the current one, which is called the Biometrics Automated Toolset (BAT). BAT is used in Iraq to collect fingerprints, iris and facial images at military detection centers and even in dangerous areas to make a record of people to be able to identify if they belong there.
With the upgrades, BIR will collect data from the Biometric Identification System for Access, which is used to identify foreign nationals and other non-U.S. citizens who want to access military installations in Iraq, the Defense Biometric Identification System, which is used to identify credentials of persons at some U.S. military installations worldwide, the handheld HIIDE collection device, and the Automated Identity Management System. The new system will also have connectivity to the field for testing.
Northrop Grumman’s teammates for BIR include SAIC, Booz-Allen-Hamilton and SPARTA, Inc., a business unit of Britain’s Cobham.