Q&A With Scott Hastings of US-VISIT Program Management Office

Scott Hastings is the CIO for the US-VISIT Program Management Office within the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. In an interview with VARBusiness/GovernmentVARsenior editor Jeffrey Schwartz, Hastings discusses the debut of US-VISIT, the more than $700 million biometrics-screening program at U.S. airports and cruise-ship ports of entry.

VB: What were some of the key challenges in getting to today's milestone?

Hastings: It was a very aggressive schedule. We actually didn't get our budget approved and money dropped until mid-September, so that's the time we had to pull the interoperable nature of what we had to do. The deployment, as you can imagine; between training, we had to deploy new workstations. We deployed 3,000 workstations [PCs] plus the associated peripherals,camera, fingerprint-capture devices. When you do that at 115 airports and 14 seaports all over the country, the logistics of that is quite a challenge.

VB: Who is currently providing the technology for this project?

Hastings: None of this is new technology. What we did is take several applications that had been running in different organizations, one in Customs, one in State and one in INS, and we made them interoperable and added some capability. So we had been already capturing two prints under a system called Enforce, [and] we had been getting advanced information about airline passengers, which we are still taking advantage of. We are reading the State Department data that we get from them issuing their visas, and we are continuing to get biographic information that was in our legacy Integrated Border Inspection System (IBIS). All of those applications had legacy contractors who had supported them; we had a configuration of contractors who came together in an integrated project.

VB: Who are some of the legacy contractors?

Hastings: They're Lockheed, CSC, and Barton & Associates. SAIC was our testing and integration contractor. We do have [our] major solicitation on the street that we'll award in the spring to take us through the balance of the program, but given the mandatory time frames, we had no option but to use existing technologies and applications. We didn't put [out] a lot of new solicitations for this. [We mostly took] advantage of existing procurement vehicles. We had no option, given the time frame.

VB: In addition to using biometrics to take fingerprints, are the photographs being used with biometrics based on facial recognition?

Hastings: We do capture a digital photograph, but there's no matching of the digitized image against facial-recognition software. We do pull [the photos] up so [during] the inspectional process, when the state department issues a visa, part of that process is to capture a digital photo. When we scan the visa at inspection, we now pull that image up from their database. But that's the extent of it. At least for this increment.

VB: In addition to the Cross Match biometric scanners, are you using other readers?

Hastings: There are different card technologies in DHS, but not as a part of this particular program.

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