Detecting The Threat

hen Jim Furnish stands next to the radioactive cesium, his hip starts to tickle. On his belt, where most people clip wireless pagers or cellular phones, Furnish wears a black detector roughly the size of a calculator that vibrates whenever he gets close to radioactive material. Furnish is a Customs Service inspector at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif., and he says the most surprising things can set the detector off.

Smoke alarms, for example, contain radioactive chemicals that make the detector very excited, he tells me. And then, of course, there's the scanner that Furnish and his colleagues use to inspect 20-foot-long shipping containers. It uses cesium to produce a powerful gamma ray that enables inspectors to see through the thick steel walls of the containers, the way doctors use X-rays to see bones through skin. So Furnish stays clear of the scanner when possible, but hovers next to the containers, serving as a human Geiger counter. The thing that he least wants to find in those containers would set his detector to buzzing wildly: a nuclear bomb.

It's fitting that Furnish works about 30 miles from Hollywood, because his job is straight out of an action film. He'd probably blush if compared to a screen icon, but he would agree that his life has become a real drama since Sept. 11. For almost a year now, Furnish and his fellow inspectors have been scanning and prodding about 100 shipping containers a day with gamma rays, fiber- optic cameras and chemical swipe kits, because Customs officials fear that terrorists will try to use one of the 5 million containers that arrive in U. S. ports every year as a carrier pigeon for a weapon of mass destruction.

No one wants that to happen less than Furnish. On the morning I visited him at the L.A. side of the port, he showed me Customs' main defensive weapon, a white pickup truck rigged with a 15-foot steel boom that juts out from the cab, parallel to the ground like a stiff arm. At the end of the boom hangs a white metal box that houses the cesium that sets off Furnish's detector if he gets too close. Inspectors position a container under the boom, place the radioactive source box on one side, and slowly drive forward, taking a picture of the container's innards as they go. Inside the truck, another inspector, Jerry Gomez, sits in an extra-wide back seat in front of a desktop computer. If a bomb is hidden in a container, it's Gomez's job to find it.

The containers Gomez scans have been singled out for inspection by Customs agents using a software program that correlates the container's port of origin, the recipient of its cargo and whether the shipping company is a first-time importer to the United States. About 2 percent of all containers are pulled aside each year after being processed through this threat matrix.

A flatbed truck pulls a container between Gomez's truck and his gamma beam. Gomez pulls out his radio and gives an order to another inspector on the dock: "Light the candle." He turns to me and says, "We're about to get hot." Instantly and silently, the gamma ray beam pierces the container. The truck inches forward, scanning the length of the container, and eight seconds later, an image has been painted across Gomez's monitor. An outline of vague shapes, alternating between dark and light, the image is indistinguishable until Gomez adjusts the contrast. Suddenly, the true picture is revealed: Tires. Piles and piles of rubber tires.

If there were anything in that container that didn't look round or tire-like, Gomez would order a closer look. Instead, he clears the container to its destination. Customs inspectors have found drugs, money and stowaways inside these boxes over the years, but they've yet to find a weapon, nuclear or otherwise, or the materials to make one. But Gomez believes the day is coming. "I'm confident that we will find something," he says. "I know it."

Customs inspectors like Furnish and Gomez are links in a long, overlapping chain of law enforcement officers, disease specialists, criminal investigators and intelligence analysts, who for years before Sept. 11 counted terrorist attacks among their list of worries, but never placed them at the top. Now, their lives have changed, as has their mission.

While the Bush administration struggles to come up with a precise definition of homeland security, and a plan for how to achieve it, an army of front-line personnel has set up trenches in airports, shipyards, border crossings and hospitals. They've armed themselves with a vast arsenal of technological weapons. Customs inspectors' gamma beams and radiation alarms, which 4,000 of them wear today, are but some of those armaments, which range from the bleeding edge of innovation to the decidedly low-tech.

But while the war on terror continues to evolve and the enemy remains elusive, one thing is certain: Technology is the backbone of the nation's homeland security, and the soldiers who use it are girding for a fight.

-President Bush in his
State of the Union address in January.

While sophisticated technologies are worthless in the hands of clumsy users, everyday toolbox items can become finely tuned detective instruments in the hands of a brilliant inspector. One such person is Ray Pardo, a senior Customs inspector. Far outside his home base in Newark, N.J., the busiest seaport on the East Coast, Pardo has developed an iconic reputation for foiling smugglers who take enormous pains to hide contraband material. It seems there's almost no smuggling trick that Pardo can't beat. So of course, Customs officials want him on the front lines of the new war.

Pardo has created a cadre of home-grown technologies to find hidden items on his own, while private corporations with teams of engineers have failed to bring their own anti-smuggling gadgets to market.

Consider one technology firm that has tried unsuccessfully for years to market to the government an acoustic identification device, a machine that uses sound waves to locate concealed objects. The objects resonate when struck with the waves, creating unique audio signatures. Bricks of cocaine might sound might one way, bricks of explosives another.

But while the company has spent untold sums on research, development and marketing, Pardo has already developed a similar tool in his workshop using a compressed-air hammer and a stethoscope. Banging about with his contraption, he has uncovered cocaine stashes buried deep inside giant rolls of paper. With a quick adjustment of the device, Pardo says he could find metal bomb components the same way. Pardo's toolshed ingenuity has earned him the nickname "MacGyver" among his colleagues after the fictitious television adventurer famous for fashioning radios from paper clips and making boomerangs out of bubble gum. Others have affectionately nicknamed Pardo "Inspector Gadget." But for all his natural talent and the devoted following he's attracted, Pardo recoils when labeled a genius, even when standing in the makeshift museum inspectors have set up as a tribute to some of his biggest busts.

Perhaps Pardo sloughs off the accolades because he knows other people face more daunting challenges. Pardo can spend days devising a strategy to outwit a terrorist, but other agents and inspectors don't have the luxury of time. They're staring down potential terrorists every moment, quite literally looking them in the face.

-Immigration and Naturalization Service
Commissioner James Ziglar in a speech in March

There is one kind of technology that, more than any other, could significantly improve the INS' ability to keep potential terrorists out of the country, L.A. Port Director Thomas Graber tells me: biometrics.

Biometrics is the identification of a person by his or her unique characteristics, such as a fingerprint or the shape of the retina. At the INS, the use of biometric technology is in its infancy. The agency has tried to initiate a biometrics regime at the Mexican border, but officials have yet to install machines to read fingerprints on cards issued to thousands of Mexican citizens. An agency spokeswoman says the INS will soon deploy machines at some ports of entry along the United States' southern border.

Inspectors at the L.A. airport scan most passports through an electronic reader that decodes passenger information embedded in the document. They match the name on the passport against a passenger manifest from the airline, and they also compare the name for matches in INS databases of wanted immigration offenders. The holes in that system are huge.

For one thing, Graber says, passports can be falsified. Only biometrics can truly identify someone. For example, if passports required fingerprints, it would be simple to determine whether a fingerprint belonged to the person holding the passport. Also, not all names on various terrorist watch lists kept by some agencies are fed into the INS system. In June, news reports revealed that two of the suspected Sept. 11 hijackers, who the CIA knew were terrorists, weren't put on any watch list until a few weeks before the attack. As Graber walks down the long line of inspection booths, he is greeted with smiles and handshakes from people he sees every day. He's candid about his agency's shortcomings, but he's also a firm believer in the power of his people to overcome their situation, as they have before.

Three years ago, inspectors were so bogged down filling out and filing immigration forms by hand that one enterprising employee built a software program in his spare time to catalog such records automatically. INS officials applauded his creation, called Case Track, and gave Graber permission to export the system to 12 other airports under a pilot program.

If Graber could have his wish, every inspector would be able to scan a passport, immediately pull up several biometric identifiers and send a digital fingerprint taken at the booth to the FBI's criminal database to look for an instant match. The INS and the FBI are inching toward that day, having begun last year to link up their respective fingerprint databanks of immigration violators and convicted criminals. But that project was supposed to have begun two years ago.

Until the technology revolution begins at INS, Graber patiently waits, but some of his colleagues are anxious. As one inspector tells me, they want all the help they can get: "We need the supercomputers here."

- Dr. Eric Noji, associate director,
Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program,
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Still, a number of federal officials involved in homeland security efforts say they want tools that can take seemingly meaningless information and place it in the context of a larger picture; the hope is that computers could help predict attacks before they occur. The government is years away from implementing such sophisticated systems on a wide scale. But if agency leaders want to see where some of these tools are just starting to be tested, they might look to the investigators who are on the lookout for the most frightening kind of attack of all.

On the second floor of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, which sits on a drab and lifeless stretch of Figueroa Street in the downtown business district, a team of epidemiologists combs through emergency room reports, lab results and physicians' diagnoses looking for the possibility that terrorists have unleashed an outbreak of smallpox, anthrax, salmonella or some other deadly pathogen. The signals they watch for aren't always obvious. Disease experts note that the reactions to a bioterrorist attack would probably first appear as flu-like symptoms in a small group of people. A single patient complaining to his doctor of sudden diarrhea and headaches means nothing. Doctors treat such cases all the time. But 10 cases, all in the same emergency room, could indicate an outbreak has begun.

The art of monitoring reports of symptoms over a vast geographic area is known as syndromic surveillance. It's a specialized offshoot of public health science that is being tapped in efforts to counter biological warfare. For the past three years, scientists in Los Angeles and other cities, as well as at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, have steadily increased their use of technology to create a vast surveillance network, an eye in the sky that could alert individual physicians to a larger threat brewing around them.

The Los Angeles County bioterrorism team, with some grants from the CDC, has developed a series of online symptom collection systems that they're now integrating into what will eventually become a Web-based communications device for doctors, health care workers and emergency responders during an attack.

They call it the Health Alert System Training and Education Network, or HASTEN. On the day I visited with the chief of the team, Dr. Laurene Mascola, a half dozen employees were using the system's precursor-which collects patient diagnoses from hospitals and doctors' offices-to track an outbreak of salmonella linked to tainted Mexican cantaloupe. Such small outbreaks are easy to monitor and contain, Mascola says. But she knows fighting a bioterror attack would be a nightmare.

Public hysteria is one of the biggest problems epidemiologists would have to contend with. Los Angeles epidemiologists got a glimpse of it during last October's anthrax attacks, which occurred on the other side of the country. Mascola recalls trying to fill a tetracycline prescription for a family member and being told by her pharmacist that all supplies of the drug had been snatched up by Los Angelinos terrified they'd been exposed to anthrax spores in the mail. And federal health officials, fearing a run on the anthrax- busting antibiotic Cipro, threatened to revoke the manufacturer's patent and let the government manufacture the drug.

The HASTEN system would help stem pandemonium at least by keeping public health officials apprised of an outbreak's progress, so that they, too, don't give in to panic. Doctors and other health workers would report symptoms into the main database. Then, when signals of an outbreak were spotted, alerts would automatically be e-mailed to epidemiologists or sent by wireless phones and handheld computers. County health officials already get such messages from other online systems.

The CDC uses a system like HASTEN that was developed by a team of technology firms in Northern Virginia. Known as the Lightweight Epidemiological Advanced Detection and Emergency Response System (LEADERS), the Web-based surveillance program was used by CDC disease experts in Manhattan emergency rooms immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. It was also deployed in Arizona at the last World Series and in Los Angeles during the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

There are two big shortcomings in any syndromic surveillance system, according to a former CDC bioterrorism expert who asked to remain anonymous. First, diseases are discovered only after they've occurred. Surveillance isn't about prevention as much as containment. Second, hospitals report symptoms using different terminology. CDC epidemiologists in New York on Sept. 11 entered data into LEADERS on their own using a set of common terms, the expert says. That avoided confusion, but it also kept the epidemiologists from doing their investigative work. They were too busy entering data to talk to many patients.

Rather than relying on the CDC to operate the surveillance system, the expert suggests that local teams be trained to use the technology and spot problems at the local level, as health officials are doing in Los Angeles. Failing that, the system needs to be simple to use. When the CDC installed LEADERS in Los Angeles during the Democratic convention, emergency room physicians used touch-screen monitors and answered simple questions with yes and no answers, says Dr. Eric Noji, the associate director of CDC's Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program and one of the world's foremost experts in "disaster medicine." Noji says health officials have advanced in the bioterror war by developing rapid testing kits that can confirm a disease in a matter of days, instead of weeks. But "other than awareness and maybe a little more application of technology, we're not a tremendous amount ahead of where we were on Sept. 11," he says. Noji says a top priority now is to create a national biodefense system, a network of sensors placed in highly trafficked public areas, such as subways, that would "detect a chemical weapon or a biological weapon before anybody has gotten it on their skin or body." There is technology do to that, he says, but it has to be enhanced. "[It's] at the Wright Brothers level compared with a B-1 stealth bomber," he says. The proposed Homeland Security Department would lead the effort to develop such a system. Noji says it will take about 10 years.

A layered regime, perhaps of syndromic surveillance, a sensor network and testing to quickly determine what's making people sick, could serve as a model for an effective strategy to fight bioterrorism, with advanced technology as its underpinning. But, Noji cautions, no system functions without perceptive and capable people to run it. "More important than any technology-even if you've got supercomputers-the most important link in the chain is the alert clinician."

-Homeland security director Tom Ridge
in an interview with Government Executive

Compounding the problem, the government's share of funding for the research and development of new products has been eclipsed by venture capital funding in the private sector. And many niche technology firms, whose products might help secure the homeland, refuse to sign government contracts because the agreements often restrict their ability to sell to the commercial market.

Technology itself can't prevent terrorism. People are the key ingredient. Without human intelligence and communication on the front end, technology is worthless. Artificial intelligence still is the stuff of science fiction. Groundbreaking work on neural networks has so far been carried out only in limited, discrete ways, such as looking for patterns of credit card transactions to detect potential fraud. The technology isn't ready for homeland security duty, many experts believe.

The lasting effect of new homeland security technologies will likely be to improve government's ability to function well in areas that have nothing to do with preventing terrorism. Stronger health surveillance, for example, will help doctors better control naturally occurring outbreaks of disease, an effect that some local health officials are already seeing as they employ new monitoring systems. Biometric devices at border crossings will speed the flow of immigrant traffic more often than they will catch terrorists trying to enter the country. But when it comes to thwarting terrorists, one industry executive says, the best technology can do is "even the odds."

It's hard to find anyone, especially on the front lines, who thinks that would be a bad thing.