In an October 5, 2006 report titled, Homeland Security Technology, Global Partnerships, and Winning the Long War, the Heritage Foundation reported on the burgeoning bureaucracy surrounding the search for technologies to keep us safe in an era of international terrorism.
According to the Heritage report, “The U.S. government spends considerably more money on developing homeland security technologies than is spent by any other national government. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Appropriations Act of 2006 allocated approximately $6 billion for homeland security technologies…”
The report tells us that DHS spends approximately $4 billion annually on R&D, one-third of that sum, $1.4 billion, managed by DHS under its Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate. Also involved in the search for new security technologies are the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, as well as numerous colleges, universities, and private defense contractors. Attempting to reassure their readers regarding the bureaucratic morass surrounding the search for effective security technologies, the Heritage report states that, “Several efforts are underway to coordinate interagency efforts to research and develop homeland security technologies.”
Those involved in this effort include the Homeland Security Council, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Technical Support Working Group, a joint operation of the State Department and the Department of Defense. However, the fear that homeland security could easily become the largest cottage industry in Washington, with individual jobs, titles, and political careers becoming an even greater concern than actually winning the War on Terror, may not be far off the mark.
What it appears we are already seeing is a lot of sound and fury, wasteful spending, and bureaucratic empire-building, but with few technological innovations to show for it. And while the Washington bureaucracy focuses on the search for bells, whistles, and magic boxes, the most successful security system in the world, the Israeli system, focuses on screening people, not things. We should follow their example. While the Israelis operate just four major international airports and six international border crossings, the United States has some 326 official ports of entry and 15 pre-clearance offices in Canada and the Caribbean. That being the case, it would appear extremely helpful if DHS had access to technology that would allow TSA and Customs agents to confront all foreign nationals attempting to enter the country and to determine, within a matter of seconds, whether or not a particular individual represents a potential security threat and should be singled out for in-depth scrutiny.But wait! That technology already exists. The National Institute for Truth Verification (NITV) of West Palm Beach, Florida has developed Computerized Voice Stress Analysis (CVSA®), an interrogation tool now used by more than 1700 law enforcement agencies across the country, including the FBI and certain special operations units of the U.S. military… but not by DHS and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Although NITV received strong congressional support for the development of Voice Stress Analysis in the post-9/11 period, the funding for the CVSA® initiative was blocked by powerful civilian bureaucrats affiliated with the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute.
Nevertheless, in spite of opposition from senior officials, the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM) undertook an independent study to evaluate the utility of Voice Stress Analysis as a truth verification tool. They concluded that Voice Stress Analysis was being used with great success by state and local police organizations across the country. When asked why they preferred CVSA® over the polygraph, police officials replied that: a) it is more reliable, b) it is less expensive, c) it is far more user-friendly, and d) unlike the polygraph, it does not require the cooperation of the individual being interrogated.Given the apparent reluctance of DHS and TSA to utilize the best available technology for airline passenger screening applications, NITV announced on July 7, 2007 the results of a “privately-funded research initiative designed to optimize the credibility assessment of individuals passing through security checkpoints in high volume venues.” That research has produced the next generation of Voice Stress Analysis, the CVSA®II, a fully automated version of earlier CVSA® models. To date, extensive validation trials, with data from both in-house testing and law enforcement field evaluations, have produced an accuracy rate consistently exceeding 96%, with a false positive rate of less than 0.7%. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has recently expressed a “gut feeling” that the United States is under increased risk of terrorist attack this summer. If he’s really serious about his “gut feeling” he might want to put in a call to NITV in West Palm Beach and place an order for a couple thousand of their CVSA® devices. Better late than never.
