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A Look Into the Future of Homeland Security

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A Look Into the Future of Homeland Security

Interview with Antonio Villafana who currently serves as Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Office of Health Affairs (OHA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In this position, Antonio provides executive leadership and technical expertise in support of IT Investment Acquisition and Governance.

Let us know a little bit about yourself and your session?
“My name is Antonio Villafana, and currently the Chief Information Officer of the DHS Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD) Office. I have been with DHS since 2008 and have served several IT leadership roles. As a former developer and architect, AI and Blockchain technologies really speaks to my inner geek. AI and Blockchain has opened a gateway to advanced autonomous machines and algorithms.”


What are some of the challenges that you are facing right now?
“There are numerous challenges facing Federal CIO’s, that said, the key challenges I’m facing today include, in no particular order, is the availability of skilled resources to modernize and architect AI and Blockchain solutions. We are certainly not on the same level when it comes to compensation. However, we are seeing more millennials interested in Civil Service opportunities, and they are attributing their decisions to patriotism and a desire to serve. In addition to skilled resources, AI and Blockchain requires massive amounts of computing power, which can be cost prohibitive and difficult to architect within current architecture."

Where do you see the unexpected threats coming from?
"They are everywhere, there are no shortage of “unexpected threats”. Mission partners competing for the limited available resources in the federal government."

What are some of the solutions and R&D efforts that you are currently exploring in regards to Homeland Security?
"We are currently looking at advanced data analytics and visualizations to support our different lines of business. There are thousands of solutions out there, so having a disciplined approach will be paramount. That said, there are some differentiators out there that are incorporating AI into their products. With AI technologies, data analytics and visualizations tools are getting more powerful, especially in predictive analysis."

 

Interview with Paul Hunter, Chief of Biometrics Strategy at U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), explores the current and future use of biometric technology at USCIS. 

Could you explain what the current use of biometric technology looks like at US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)?
“USCIS collects 10-rolled fingerprints, a facial recognition ‘quality’ photo and a signature. Fingerprints and photo, along with certain biographic data are submitted to the DHS enterprise repository for biometrics; the Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM), Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) database. The same information is sent to the Department of Justice (FBI) Next Generation Information biometric database for a check against Criminal History Record Information (CHRI) and the results are transmitted back to USCIS. The results of these checks assist a USCIS Immigration Service Officer (ISO) in the decision process for providing (or denying) an immigration benefit. ”

What new solutions is the USCIS currently exploring? Also what would implementation look like, and how far out is it?
“Person-centric processing versus form based (or encounter based) is the next leap in transformation at USCIS. Instead of enrolling a person every time an application is filed at USCIS, identity verification at the time of interview or encounter at a biometric enrolment center (at USCIS enrolment centers are called Application Support Centers or ASCs for short). Scheduling to an ASC for every form type will become obsolete, because once enrolled, what’s the point of duplication? We know who you are already, why not just verify that you are who you say you are? USCIS has started the person centric approach with the adoption of slap print verification at field offices. Full implementation will require employees to better understand identity management [education], systems changes to ensure that results are delivered to the ISO in a format that is quickly and easily interpreted, and culturally embracing the fact that verification is equally as secure as enrollment. In a nutshell it’s simply faster.”

I saw you shared an article on LinkedIn about voice analytics. In what way can that help you?
“Voice holds a lot of promise in the digital age, especially for business process improvements at USCIS; think about this, cell phones are ubiquitous and can transmit an excellent quality voice print. Right now there are two potential business use cases for voice biometrics at USCIS:

  1. Immigration benefits applied for electronically (on-line identity proofing).
  2. Integration into the help desk call process (faster, automated and more secure identity verification).

Capturing and using a catch phrase will overcome arguments that knowledge-based authentication is less secure. With simpler authentication and less effort for the customer, applicants will feel more in control when calling for assistance or seeking the status of an immigration benefit. Knowledge based authentication is typically more time consuming, versus voice; on an average day USCIS will answer 44,000 phone calls 1 on the toll-free customer service line and the use of a voice biometric holds the promise of significantly reducing time to verify a person’s identity. Voice biometrics can be passive, where the user can say anything and a match is made from the voice to a voiceprint, or it can be active, where the caller is asked to recite a previously captured passphrase. Either way, the process is natural, effortless, and a more accurate way to authenticate an individual. In addition, successful integration of voice as a biometric opens the door to potential (future) mobile phone application development and improving the customer experience."

What is your view on mobile biometrics?
“With the advent of a press print to open a phone, it’s now a part of everyday life. Mobile biometric adoption and use is the future. The desktop is largely obsolete, the tablet is on its way out, the phone and mobile application development for biometrics is an expanding market and nearly every phone has a camera. Facial recognition holds huge potential to improve and/or eliminate face to face interaction with the government. If we can verify a persons identity from a previously enrolled record via facial recognition -- and a classic business use case would be employment verification, (although the potential use cases are almost limitless outside the immigration arena) -- we can eliminate the need for forms and the time consuming process of completing and transmitting what is essentially digital paper.”

 

Q&A with James A. Loudermilk, the Senior Level Technologist for the FBI Science and Technology Branch. James focuses upon identification issues, especially biometrics, and frequently represents the FBI on these topics. Recently he served as the Department of Justice co-chair of the Biometrics and Identity Management Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council.

What are some key challenges in the area of biometrics that you are facing at the Department of Justice?
“Our longest operating program – fingerprints – has achieved unprecedented search reliability at 99.6% TAR with a 0.1% FRR. Which is wonderful. However, our daily volume averages more than 145,000 tenprint checks a day, 365 days per year. With that volume of activity there remain a lot of potential misses. And some misses can have serious consequences. We need to improve the image quality of the underlying fingerprint data in the criminal master file. Commercial surveillance cameras have proliferated and increasingly criminal activity is captures on video and slow scan systems. Again, image quality is an issue. Face matching performance has dramatically improved over the past two decades, yet still often produces an excessive volume of leads referred to human analysts. The ability to effect cross-spectral matching between low light and infrared surveillance imagery and conventional visible light arrest mugshots falls well short of desired performance.”

The FBI is seeking vendors for a mobile biometrics app, can you tell us who they are considering for this application, and how exactly you see this app being implemented in the field?
“No. Procurement related activity is extremely sensitive. But what I can tell you is that the Next Generation Identification program introduced a fingerprint Repository of Individuals of Special Concern (RISC) and mobile fingerprint “stoplight” matching has been deployed as a national service. We have had well over a million searches (searches only, enrollment must be done subsequent to arrest at the booking station) with about a 7% “hit” rate. This tool can greatly reduce officer workload as well as reduce the number of arrests in ambiguous identity situations. Approaching half the states are participating in this program although as yet relatively few officers have been issued mobile fingerprinting equipment.”

What are you most excited about in the area of biometrics technology, and are you personally involved in any new projects for solving identification issues?
“Both personally and organizationally we are very excited about the prospects of introducing rapid DNA collection and analysis into the booking environment with its potential of linking arrestees to serious violent crimes while the suspect is still in custody. The technology is showing great progress and the necessary infrastructure changes have been identified. However, as Director Comey recently noted during testimony it does require legislation before the technology can be used outside accredited DNA laboratories. Video analytics offers great promise and we are seeing significant progress.”

 

A conversation with Josef Iroko, who  joined Ghana’s National Identification Authority (NIA) in 2010 as the first in-house counsel and Administrative/ Recording Secretary to the NIA Governing Board. He also serves as the Secretary to all the Board Committees. Josef discusses his experiences and thoughts on national security and biometrics.

What are some of the legal challenges surrounding biometric collection that you experience?
“The challenges include compliance with the requirements of statute and the collection of biometrics by some other agencies whose core mandate is not identification.”

What technology and innovation is being integrated to ensure NDIA is meeting compliance requirements?
“The NIA is revamping its Data centre to meet international standards. In terms of innovation, it is integrating iris capabilities and tactile elements into the collection and card issuance process and also ensuring that the portrait or picture quality meets ICAO and other international requirements and standards.”

How else does Ghana National Identity Authority plan to use national biometric identification cards for government support operations?
“The Authority is striving to ensure the realization of the reason for setting it up- creating, maintaining, providing and promoting the use of national biometric identity cards to advance economic, political and social activities in Ghana.”

How does NDIA use biometrics to support law enforcement agencies’ operations?
“The Authority has always collaborated with the Police, the Immigration Service, the Economic and Organized Crime Office and the Financial Intelligence Centre (user agencies) for crime detection and prevention via the use of the National Identity Register for verification and authentication purposes."

 

Lee Bowes assists U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in developing strategies that focus on more person-centric aspects of identity management and data usage. Below, he gives his perspective on the biometrics division, which over just this year collected biometrics on 3.8million individuals across 138 domestic sites and many international locations.

Can you explain your assistance with the USCIS in developing a more person-centric focused strategy, how have you gone about this, and what are its benefits?
“The majority of my work with biometrics in USCIS has been operational in nature. We collect over 3 million new sets of biometrics every year, and my role has been ensuring that this information is collected, used, and stored correctly. Being in-tune with the daily operations, and being responsible for correcting any problems that arise, has given me insight into the areas where improvement is needed.

Treating biometrics as person-centric information, rather than transactional information, is really not overly difficult to explain. The key is to get people to think of treating data as it exists in the real physical world, and not as it exists in IT systems. The efforts I’ve been leading have focused on developing systems and processes around the “real world” concept. The largest part about advocating and leading these changes is educating the various stakeholders of the status quo. Moving toward person-centric processing requires a large amount of up-front work to address the legal and policy implications of changing the current business process. Many users and decision-makers have only a thinly-sliced view of the whole biometric picture, but once the larger realm of biometrics systems and capabilities is disseminated, the benefits become quite apparent.

For USCIS, the benefits are multiple. Person-centric processing hinges on the concept of establishing an identity at the beginning of the immigration lifecycle, and utilizing that same identity through the remainder of interactions. This includes identity verification with each encounter with an immigration applicant, which reduces or eliminates imposter fraud risk to both USCIS and the applicant. Verification is also more efficient than (re)collection, which benefits both USCIS and the applicant in terms of time and money.”

What are some key challenges facing the Biometrics Division in the USCIS?
“One challenge is bringing great ideas and new capabilities into operation quickly. While we may be able to quickly solve technical challenges, each change has to be examined to determine impact on regulation, policy, privacy, and legacy operations." From a data and identity management perspective, we face a challenge in relating non-biometric events (document issuance, appointments, name-based background checks, etc) with biometric identities. While account numbers and the like are (in theory) singular to a person, they are easily mistyped. Many other biographic identifiers change or are provided differently (hyphenated names, middle initials, address units), making comprehensive identity management difficult to implement in the midst of legacy systems and data.”

What do you believe can be done to improve the process of collection, storage, and dissemination of biometric data, that isn’t being done?
“I think collection and storage is done quite well in USCIS and DHS in general, but we have much room for improvement in dissemination and access. Dissemination of biometric data is relatively streamlined for components utilizing the DHS-IDENT database; however, contextual data surrounding the biometric identity is a different story. Part of this reason is that contextual data (for example: immigration status, privacy flags, travel information) largely resides in legacy systems hosted by the responsible component. These legacy systems are not designed to interface in the real-time, service-oriented architecture that new systems are built upon. This means interfaces are stove-piped, or worse, rely on manual data uploads – which results in data latency and integrity issues. One form of mitigation to dissemination issues is cross-component access to various systems. However, this too is a challenge given the multitude of authentication mechanisms (mainframe, database, active directory, ICAM). Without a more central or shared management of system access, DHS employees will be scattered across varying levels of systems access, which causes discrepancies in data knowledge.”

The FBI has said it is looking for a phone application capable of mobile biometrics, how do you see this improving the process, and where would it be used the most?
“For USCIS, I see mobile biometrics as a substantial benefit to the application process. USCIS Transformation is adding the capability for applicants to create an online account from which they can submit applications and maintain personal information. While electronic authentication and identity-proofing is quite effective in managing an online identity, there is a “gap” that occurs between online identity creation and the physical, biometric identity establishment. Mobile biometric collection could assist in tying biometrics to online events, which could then serve to verify the same identity acting online as the identity appearing in USCIS offices.”

 

Simon Wilcox, Program Manager for Automaton of the Passenger Journey at Heathrow Airport, discusses what the next generation of passenger automation looks like, how passenger automation is going to improve security, how biometrics fits into security and passenger automation, where he sees most of the investments going concerning biometric technology within airports, and the top challenges experienced in automation development.

What does Heathrow Airport’s next generation of passenger automation look like?
“Working collaboratively with the airline community at Heathrow as well as UK Government we intend to develop a solution focused on the entire end to end passenger journey across departures, arrivals and connections. At the heart of any solution will be the passenger. We will take a passenger centric approach i.e. we don’t want to be driven by equipment or technology but focused deploying automation that will simplify and enhance the passenger journey. Automation offers the opportunity to look again at the passenger proposition and we want to provide safe, secure and enjoyable experience for all passengers, whether you’re a business or leisure traveler, or you’re travelling alone or with your family. Our automation strategy is to deliver an affordable airport operation, with an end to end journey which is personal, simple and reliable.”

How does biometrics fit into security and passenger automation?
“We are focusing on passenger identification rather than pure biometrics. Biometrics may be the technology we use in the end but for us it’s about identifying the passenger and finding the right method to achieving this. We already use facial biometrics on our domestic flights and we see facial biometrics being part of our long term roadmap but we aren’t starting with the technology. We want to use technology to improve the passenger experience rather than investing in technology development parse.”

How is passenger automation going to improve security?
“Automation of systems and exchanging data behind the scenes offers the opportunity for a more consistent and reliable journey. A key area will be enhanced data integrity and sharing of appropriate data across agencies to provide the passenger with a smoother journey.

Today, as an airport, we don’t always know who you are unless you have booked a service with the airport directly such as car parking. Having the systems in place to share more passenger information in advance will not only allow us to offer a personalised service but this will also allow for a more secure journey. This will also offer the possibility in the future for risk based security to be deployed.

Key to enabling a more secure journey will be the exchanging of data and information across agencies, and for each of those agencies to trust the data. As an organization Heathrow doesn’t wish to hold passenger data but we’d like to be able to access it appropriately to provide the right passenger experience. Data ownership is a hot topic and we want to work with the airline industry and government agencies to find a solution to this.”

What are the top challenges you experience in automation development?
“For me the key is to put the passenger first often it feels like the technology capability is driving the agenda. There is a need to maintain the focus on the passenger which we believe can be achieved through taking a process driven approach in the early stages of development. We can’t underestimate the challenge of bringing governments, airlines and airports together and developing a solution which can work for all. An obvious challenge could be gaining regulatory approval to change from current standards / practices which have been operating successfully for many years. That said as we have them in the development of the solution I’m increasingly confident in achieving this. A key challenge has been, and no doubt will continue to be, is developing a compelling business case which delivers value and benefit for all parties. I’m pleased to say I’ve been able to develop one which I believe can achieve benefit for Heathrow, airlines and importantly passengers. A phrase I have continued to use is that automation isn’t about the deployment of equipment but it’s the opportunity to transform the passenger journey. It’s about people and process than the equipment, systems or facilities."

Where do you see most of the investments going concerning biometric technology within airports?
“I see as much investment in the management of data, and in particular ensuring robust controls to comply with privacy laws than the technology itself. There is a significant journey for us to travel on automation and in particular the use of biometrics which will require collaboratively working from Governments, airlines, and regulators. I’m pleased to say I’ve seen a huge amount of cooperation between these parties since getting involved in automation. I’d like to see some early investment on understanding the impact to the end to end journey and in particular exploring how the passengers experience could be enhanced through the deployment of automation/ biometrics. I’d also like to see an investment in developing off-airport biometrics/passenger identification solutions to reduce processing at the airport.”

 

Shkelzen Sopjani was appointed by the President and Prime Minister of the Republic of Kosovo as Inspector General of Kosovo Intelligence Agency on February 2015. Mr. Sopjani is PhD.Can. at Prishtina University, Faculty of Law, in the field of International Law and Relations. Shklezen discusses his experiences, challenges, solutions, and more regarding national security and biometrics.

In your experience, what have you learned is the most crucial aspect of accelerating the use of biometrics in Kosovo to support national and regional security?
“There are several important aspects of the use of biometrics in Kosovo to support national and regional security. Initially, there were many issues in identifying individuals, especially asylum seekers coming in and through Kosovo, as many did not present any ID or presented fraudulent documents. In addition, as many fraudulent documents were put in use, it was even harder to identify wanted or potential subjects posing threat to our national security. However, with the application of SEEK 2 devices there were many benefits by law enforcement authorities in Kosovo, especially by identifying wanted criminals and also identifying persons affiliated with terrorist organizations.”

What is the agency’s biggest challenge?
“Our Agency's biggest challenge is to effectively and efficiently cope with latest security challenges, especially nexuses related to several challenges (e.x. nexus between organized crime and terrorism).
In addition, keeping up with new technology and developments is a constant challenge, while dark web remains another big challenge for our agency.”

What guidance/advice would you offer to intelligence agencies for best practices?
“Main advice to our counterparts is SHARING OF INFORMATION. It is crucial to have closer cooperation and more information sharing, since the bad guys on the other end, have no issues what so ever in doing so. This has proved crucial in preventing deadly terrorist attacks and saving many lives in Kosovo and the region, experiences that we are happy to share during our time in D.C.”

What IT solutions and infrastructure is needed to enhance your operations and information sharing?
“We are constantly looking to apply new technology; however, we need to enhance our biometric capabilities, especially tools that allow for automatic exchange and comparison of information between our various national databases as well as international ones.”


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