WASHINGTON – Cyber threats are growing daily and the U.S. has technological advantages in combatting those threats, but is too slow in using them, according to Department of Homeland Security researcher Stephen Dennis.
“We’re going to have to move as fast as the threat,” Dennis said. He said the government moves too slowly to capitalize the U.S. role as an international leader in technology. The U.S. has vast amounts of data, he said, and analysts need to be able to understand it so they can identify potential threats indicated by the patterns.
As the innovation director of Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, Dennis highlighted a few key pattern analytic programs DHS is working at a “Big Data” conference last week. Among the programs are natural disaster responses and cross-language border security data.
Last July, DHS Undersecretary Tara O’Toole, who heads science and technology efforts, detailed the urgency of improving such software to a Senate hearing of the Committee of Homeland Security and Government Affairs.
“Over the past three years alone, we have witnessed several highly complex and consequential disasters ranging from the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill, to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and Super Storm Sandy,” O’Toole said. “Our nation must improve its capacity to predict, prevent, and rapidly respond to and recover from such catastrophes.”
By hiring people who understand the data and how to use it, Dennis told the gathering of industry professionals, the Department of Homeland Security could better hone responses to natural disasters and protect the borders.
“You got to have the people who know how to work this technology,” Dennis said. “Not people with badges and guns.”
At the committee hearing last year, O’Toole told the Senate committee that continuing to attract these types of employees would “require reasonably predictable funding levels, the ability to recruit and retain specialized expertise as needed, and congressional and departmental support of the S&T mission.”
Dennis told the conference that all the programs under DHS science and technology were vetted for privacy protections and that certain types of data were heavily regulated and could not be comingled.
As an example of the enormity of the data, he outlined the job facing DHS every day at U.S. airports — 1.8 million passengers moving through 448 airports. DHS places an emphasis on perfecting name-matching software for airport security because “shaking down the wrong people at the airport is bad press for DHS,” he said.
