Biometrics Crosses The Border

The US-VISIT contract will not only be a major coup for the winning prime contractor but also for the team of subcontractors it brings in to develop and manage systems that track those entering and leaving the country.

Aimed at using biometric fingerprint scanners and digital photographs, the DHS launched US-VISIT last month with great fanfare. While the fingerprinting of foreigners made the evening news and the covers of all the nation's daily newspapers, under the radar was the request-for-proposals (RFPs) to manage the system. Nonetheless, the US-VISIT contract is very much on the radar of government VARs in the federal sector. Bids were due in late January, with an award anticipated this spring. The leading contenders are teams headed by Accenture, Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) and Lockheed Martin. The three teams include VARs of varying sizes and capabilities.

Not only are government VARs watching US-VISIT due to the size of the contract but because of its scope as well.

There's a lot riding on the program, to be sure.

"US-VISIT is a top priority of the Secretary [Tom Ridge]," says Scott Hastings, CIO for the US-VISIT program within the DHS. "He has said that the Department of Homeland Security will be measured in large part by the success of US-VISIT."

Not only is US-VISIT seen as essential to tracking those who enter and leave the country in order to prevent future terrorist attacks, but the complexity that comes with the project will, perhaps, be a leading indicator of the DHS' ability to tie together information resources from across more than a score of agencies and law-enforcement entities. The inability of law-enforcement agencies, including the CIA and FBI, to share data is believed to be a key factor in the lack of information-sharing that some argue could have detected the activities of the terrorists who hijacked four commercial airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, before they happened. As a result, US-VISIT will also be a cogent test for the widely touted enterprise architectures that are deemed essential in tying this data together. At the same time, it will remain a lightning rod for civil-liberties activists and privacy advocates who say it will do more to harm innocent travelers than it will to prevent would-be terrorists from carrying out their plots. Fingerprinting everyone won't necessarily be able to stop terrorists, contends Bruce Schneier, author of the book Beyond Fear (Copernicus Books) and founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, a provider of managed security services. "It's extraordinarily costly and of very dubious value," Schneier says. "I'm not saying it's of no value, but there are better ways to spend $10 billion to counter terrorism."

Those challenges and the need to provide this infrastructure within the budget constraints that the DHS faces will be a marquee contract for whomever wins it--or it could give the integrator a black eye if it fails to help the government achieve its goals.

The contract will be performance-based, meaning the ability to meet or exceed the DHS' milestones will be critical to the success of the prime and subcontractors. In addition, because the RFP is open-ended, the winning bidder will have significant latitude to try new technologies and best practices as deemed appropriate, says Ray Bjorklund, an analyst at Federal Sources, a research and consulting company focused on the federal government.

"The government doesn't have the time and the large number of qualified program managers that can take a project of this complexity and size, so they're looking to whomever wins this to be one of the key players in helping them achieve their goals," Bjorklund says. He points out that the RFP addresses broad operational goals as well as extensive geographic coverage.

Bidding on the contract will entail part science, part art. While DHS is looking for suitable technology to better secure U.S. borders, it has put the bidders on notice that the government is not writing a blank check. "The private sector needs to understand the policy challenges and restrictions in what we do, and help make things affordable," Hastings says. "It doesn't help to offer a technical solution I can't afford. I often say, an unfounded vision is a hallucination."

Some key decisions to be made will focus less on where to put biometric scanners and more on how to stitch together legacy systems from the 22 departments that now are part of the DHS, including the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Transportation, Customs and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

A major component of the project will be to determine to what extent to replatform existing databases and file structures versus tying together legacy systems with enterprise application-integration tools and Web-services standards. The contractor will also need to build data warehouses that support modern analytical tools that will allow officials to fingerprint travelers without creating bottlenecks.

So how much of US-VISIT will require new platforms vs. connecting existing legacy systems? The bidders, not surprisingly, are keeping that information close to the vest.

"I'm sure each of the vendors has their own view on that; certainly that is part of our solution," says Eric Stange, who heads up Accenture's defense and homeland-security portfolio. He considers, however, that what will be spent on new systems will depend on how much Congress appropriates in future fiscal years.

"Obviously, there's a choice of how much you can stitch together and approximate the outcome you're looking for versus taking the next step and investing in a more modern capability," Stange says. "Some of these things can be done more rapidly if the funding materializes."

The most recent indications last fall weren't promising. Congress reduced funding for US-VISIT over President Bush's original budget request by 25 percent to $330 million this year. The reason for the cuts, according to a report by market researcher Input, is that Congress was concerned about the slow process overall of IT projects used to combat terrorism. The budget reductions will likely result in scaled-down projects rather than expediting IT implementations within the DHS, according to the report. Overall, US-VISIT represents roughly 10 percent of the DHS' overall IT budget of $3 billion.

While US-VISIT could be critical to the success of Ridge and the new DHS, it also could be pivotal in advancing biometric scanners from a niche technology to one that is broadly used to authenticate individuals accessing both government and commercial systems.

"This is certainly the largest-scale implementation of biometrics that has been conceived of by the federal government, and it very likely will set the standard for the use of biometrics for many years to come," says Dennis Carlton, an analyst at the International Biometrics Group (IBG), a New York-based consulting firm that has been tapped to help DHS assess the bids.

Expenditures on biometric technology will jump 60 percent this year to $1.2 billion, up from $719 million last year, according to IBG.

No doubt, whoever wins the US-VISIT contract will see a nice piece of that business.