On the Line With GIS
GEOSPATIAL INFORMATION IS PLAYING A GROWING ROLE IN GUARDING U.S. BORDERS.
Geospatial intelligence has revolutionized the way U.S. Border Patrol does business. Border Patrol, whose mission is to guard against incursions along U.S. boundaries, has come to rely upon software applications that deliver precise geospatial data to assist agents in the apprehension of intruders and contraband.
To put more technology into the hands of Border Patrol agents, the Department of Homeland Security has established the Secure Border Initiative-Network (SBI-Net) program. The program, under a contract award to Boeing, aims to establish communications towers nearly 100 feet tall along the Mexican and later the Canadian borders.
The first leg of that program, dubbed Project 28 for the 28 miles it covers along the Arizona state border with Mexico, was expected to go operational with nine towers at some point during the month of October, according to Border Patrol spokesman Brad Benson. The towers contain communications equipment, regular cameras, infrared cameras, radars and other sensors as appropriate.
“The system takes radar returns that we get from our towers and locates those on a map,” Benson stated. “The idea is that they scan the horizon, pick up activity that is crossing the border, identify it initially with the radar, and then follow up with cameras to see exactly what it is. The equipment tracks what is coming across while the Border Patrol goes to pick it up.”
Border Patrol command centers in each sector would communicate with agents via a Wi-Max network, as envisioned by SBI-Net.
“Information from the towers is communicated to a central command post. It’s integrated into a common operating picture,” Benson said. “Then the command post assigns a Border Patrol person to intercept an event and they can share the common operating picture. An agent can get a repeat of what the command post is looking at. They get a blip on the radar and identify where it is at, which way it is moving, and how fast it is moving with GPS.”
While Border Patrol awaits the complete rollout of SBI-Net in the coming years, the agency is relying on other geospatial information systems to assist in fulfilling its mission.
WALKING THE TRAILS
Border Patrol began using GIS in the mid-1990s to combat illegal immigration and smuggling from Mexico, starting in the Border Patrol sector surrounding San Diego, Calif. About two years ago, DHS signed an enterprise license agreement with ESRI for use of the company’s ArcGIS system, including the ArcView, ArcEditor and ArcInfo applications.
“They use GIS to help them to analyze the migration, look at the patterns, try to plot out the activities and get a better handle on and be more proactive with trying to capture the ‘coyote’ or the smuggler or the organization that supports that individual,” said Wayne Sweeney, ESRI account manager for Justice and Homeland Security.
Generally, Border Patrol uses desktop-based systems to access applications that have been decentralized throughout its 20 patrol sectors. Concentrating the use of the GIS applications at the sector level has allowed Border Patrol to get relevant information into the hands of Border Patrol agents as quickly as possible.
While Border Patrol has not yet made widespread use of mobile GIS applications over the Web, the sectors have put actionable information in the hands of agents who can then execute tactics based on that information, Sweeney explained.
“Ultimately, there is the intent to bring this kind of information out to the agent in the field on mobile devices, but they have not yet done that,” Sweeney remarked. “They have done some pilots. They have used handheld devices to do data collection in the field.”
Centralized databases collect information from agents as they walk the trails in their sector, catalog various sites and report on specific apprehensions.
“That information flows up into the headquarters GIS system,” Sweeney said. “That information is available to everyone in the organization, based on accessibility. Over time, you end up with an accurate and datarich system that allows you to do the kind of forecasting that enables them to be proactive in their job.”
Border Patrol headquarters in Washington, D.C., is in the process of standing up an implementation of ArcGIS that would enable each sector to perform its own ad hoc analysis as needed. Sectors could then analyze the need for constructing fences or deploying sensors or other technologies using environmental and apprehension data collected within the GIS system.
“If I am a chief of a sector and I am planning for the future, I would be able to go into the Web-based application and take a look at a proposed fence and how that should be implemented,” Sweeney noted. “How high is it? What material is it made out of? That would tie directly into their budget process. The same kind of thing would happen with sensors if they advocated a need for that.”
Using ArcGIS for such purposes demonstrates the strengths of ESRI’s platform, which has been built from an enterprise perspective, Sweeney emphasized. ESRI executives argue that the company has differentiated itself in the market by taking an enterprise approach to GIS solutions, while others have offered piecemeal applications designed to fulfill specific GIS needs.
ASSESSING PATTERNS
DHS examines various solutions to bring together geospatial information from multiple sources and present a complete picture of an operating environment to its individual officers. In 2005, the department’s Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA) awarded the final phase of a small business innovative research (SBIR) program to SPADAC for the development of a pattern-recognition/pattern-assessment capability that performed pattern analysis based on multiple types of geospatial data to predict likely locations of future activities.
Several of SPADAC’s projects, such as the HSARPA SBIR, support Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency of the Border Patrol, said Mark Dumas, SPADAC chairman and chief executive officer.
“We are working with CBP to provide a solution for the purposes of targeting cargo containers inbound to the country,” Dumas said. “We have another effort where we are going to provide analytical tools for users such that they can correlate and link what would be seemingly unrelated events that occur within our nation’s borders. By tying them together through some geospatial coordination, we could link those events together so that the non-obvious becomes obvious. When you see that there is a relationship between these things happening, you can roll them up together and take a look at it.”
CBP has been testing the system developed from the HSARPA SBIR, using the SPADAC pattern assessment capabilities in an operational context.
“The system isn’t operational, but we are testing it in the operational environment side by side with real systems,” Dumas commented. “We are performing research. We are testing the ability of the system to perform and we are looking at real data. We continue to evolve it, improve it and tweak it until we get to a point in time where [HSARPA] will evaluate its performance and make a decision on how much more they want to integrate with the different situations that are out there where people could potentially use it.”
Dumas explained how Border Patrol could make use of the pattern assessment technology.
“Let’s say, for example, we want to look for tunnels along the U.S. border or border-crossing activity,” he supposed. “We have, of course, apprehended folks coming out of tunnels. We have discovered tunnels along the U.S.-Mexican border. These past events are captured by law enforcement and studied. With the geospatial pattern recognition system, we can take those past events and locations of the events and metadata associated with those locations and put them into our pattern recognition systems so we can forecast other areas where tunnels are most likely to be discovered along the border.
“We could hotspot the most likely conditions and areas where these could occur in the future,” he continued. “A law enforcement official could then focus their assets and their resources. If they are going to do an operational screening of looking for some of these things, they could focus on the hotspots first as a best approach— absent any other information to go on.”
COMMERCIAL TECHNOLOGY
Industry has worked to make geospatial information available to as many users as possible, relying on the input from multiple operators to provide a greater flow of information related to specific areas. Perhaps the ultimate example of this has come from large commercial software companies offering GIS applications to the public, thereby empowering individuals around the world to share information about various coordinates.
For instance, search engine giant Google developed the Google Earth application to enable users to zoom in a great deal of the globe and check out the topography at various coordinates. Various clients have used Google Earth for homeland security purposes as well, said Noah Doyle, a product manager for Google Earth, adding that the company provides specialized services to clients using the application in those ways.
“As you can imagine, there are countless uses for this kind of geospatial information in everything that these agencies do related to homeland security. Everything ultimately comes down to places and where things are happening, understanding risks and reacting to events all in a location context,” Doyle remarked.
“You can’t really predict what people will need to know in advance. The greatest way to get the most value from information is to let as many people access it as is appropriate subject to usual confidentiality and access restrictions. But ultimately, you try to get the most information to the most people to let them do their jobs efficiently,” he added.
The state of Alabama is using Google Earth in just such a manner, Doyle reported. Creating a Virtual Alabama project in its Google Earth implementation, the state reached out to its counties and offered them access to the system if they contributed data to it. While it wasn’t the primary method of populating the geospatial database, the approach built a deep database of information very quickly utilizing the people most intimately familiar with the details of specific locations.
“Virtual Alabama is a great model,” Doyle declared. “It really is representative of the homeland security challenges across the country, both at a national level and with respect to Border Patrol. They started with identifying critical infrastructure and mapping that within the system. When first responders who aren’t necessarily involved in the planning of homeland security respond to events, it is important for them to know if critical infrastructure is near an event they have been called to.
“So by having a single system open to the community and having information easy to access, first responders could be made aware of where risks might be relevant to any particular call they may get even if it seems to be a routine event,” he continued. “They have used that information about the location of critical infrastructure to map out response plans and to categorize and standardize their incident response plans.”
While such GIS applications were once restricted to a few specialists with powerful computers, the increase in the number of users has yielded more eyes and thus more robust intelligence with applications such as Google Earth.
“It’s been a ‘glass room’ technology, where people with the proper training worked with high-end tools, heavy workstations and big servers running databases. Those experts would produce periodic reports that were static in nature. They were maps. They weren’t interactive applications,” Doyle remarked. “With the advent of the Internet, even many Web applications just take the static map and make it display in a browser.
“Google Earth set out to turn that model on its head,” he concluded. “Instead of having experts choose what gets published, let’s have the end users decide what is useful to them. We will provide all of the data to them in an easy-to-use intuitive interface and let the end user figure out where the value is and put the information together in ways they find useful.” ♦
