IT On GuardIT On Guard

This week's Group of Eight Summit at a small resort island off the Georgia coast is the biggest test to date of the federal government's ability to coordinate secure communications among law-enforcement and other public officials at all levels of government. The Homeland Security Information Network is at the center of that effort, letting local, state, and federal officials collect and share sensitive-but-unclassified information.

HSIN, which the Department of Homeland Security rolled out four months ago, is a collection of collaborative tools, including Groove Networks Inc.'s Workspace and Microsoft's SharePoint portal and workflow software, that works in real time over existing networks and the Internet. It's a "fairly ubiquitous way to send out alerts throughout the country," says Lee Holcomb, chief technology officer for the Department of Homeland Security. "HSIN provides the ability for federal partners to reach out and touch local and state agencies."

The technology is in place in and around Sea Island, Ga., where President Bush is hosting leaders from seven of the most powerful nations in the world. It lets the 20,000 police and federal agents deployed to the area access information from federal, state, and local law-enforcement groups, as well as federal security agencies, governors' offices, and other emergency-management groups. Local law enforcement, including the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, can send information on local situations back to the Homeland Security Department and other federal agencies monitoring the event.

Groove's Workspace technology delivers high-level security through an Advanced Encryption System algorithm that provides 192-bit encryption for sending and archiving messages, internally or over the Internet. Workspace uses public-key-technology practices to provide user authentication, data privacy, and data integrity.

"This is the largest and most complex [event] we've ever done," says a spokesman for the State Department's Summit Planning Organization, which organized the G8 summit. In addition to protecting the foreign dignitaries, 30,000 attendees, members of the media, and workers have to be checked and provided with appropriate credentials. Sea Island is a five-mile-long residential and resort island with two hotels and a population of 63,000. The only access from the mainland is via a seven-mile causeway.

Anti-globalization groups are expected to stage demonstrations in Brunswick, Ga., which is six miles from Sea Island, and Savannah, which is 80 miles away but also the site of the G8's international press center. Law-enforcement officials hope to avoid the violence that disrupted past international gatherings, including the World Trade Organization's 1999 meeting in Seattle and the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy.

HSIN technology also will be deployed at the Democratic National Convention in Boston and the Republican National Convention in New York later this summer. The President's Homeland Security Advisory Council has designated those venues, like the G8 summit, as National Special Security Events, putting the Secret Service in charge of designing and implementing security.

Seventy sites are up and running on HSIN now. By midsummer, the Homeland Security Department plans to add 30 more federal, state, and local law-enforcement and government entities, including state homeland security advisers, emergency operations centers, and National Guard units, Holcomb says. The Homeland Security Department modeled the network on a law-enforcement information exchange developed two years ago by the Department of Defense, California Justice Department, and New York City Police Department. The Joint Regional Information Exchange System lets state and urban law-enforcement agencies share crime data and terrorism intelligence among themselves and with the federal government, says Ed Manavian, chief of the California Justice Department's Criminal Intelligence Bureau.

This earlier system "established a set of technology tools and a governance model to promote information sharing," Homeland Security's Holcomb says. The federal effort expands the concept beyond law enforcement to make the technology available to other local and state public officials. HSIN eventually will tap into county-level law-enforcement systems and also will be used to exchange classified information.

The Joint Regional Information Exchange System was the brainchild of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was looking for a way to let law-enforcement groups securely share data without extensive IT overhauls. It cost $250,000 to build and has been expanded to include the Los Angeles Police Department and state law enforcement in New York and Texas.

That system and other regional law-enforcement data-sharing efforts will feed into the federal HSIN. Homeland Security's greatest challenge with the system is ensuring that the many different participants can effectively use it, says Patrick Duecy, a partner with Homeland Solutions and the former director of the Defense Department's Joint Intelligence Task Force Combating Terrorism, in an E-mail. Homeland Solutions is a consulting firm that has provided management and operations services for both the Joint Regional Information Exchange System and HSIN.

If it all works, local and state security officials will benefit from fast, easy access to the secure communications capabilities that HSIN will provide. And the country will benefit in a bigger way, since the technology will let federal officials use locally gathered intelligence to fight terrorism on a national level and more effectively protect significant national events such as the G8.

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