Security department looks to corporate mergers for cues

Hoping to glean some valuable private-sector insights as they begin consolidating 22 federal agencies into the new Homeland Security Department, Bush administration officials have spent the past three months meeting with key players in several high-profile corporate mergers, a top White House technology expert said Tuesday.

"One of the common themes we got out of all those meetings was that they all had fairly large integration teams," Lee Holcomb, the Office of Homeland Security's director of infostructure, said during a homeland security conference sponsored by E-Gov.

Executives who helped orchestrate the mergers of Exxon and Mobil, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, and several other recent corporate marriages also emphasized the importance of "day one" communications capabilities, according to Holcomb. "Communications was essential," he said. " 'Communications' was repeated in every one of these talks."

Holcomb said that on Jan. 25-the department's official start date-the department's 170,000 employees will be assigned new e-mail addresses with a ".dhs" suffix. Even though many of those employees still will be in separate agency buildings, Holcomb said having a common e-mail suffix would help them to immediately "view themselves as one."

Other priorities include portals for internal and external communications, an expansion of secure Internet capabilities for sensitive law enforcement communications, and secure video-conferencing capabilities, he said. "We want to provide the ability to videoconference with any of the state governors in the event of a catastrophic event," Holcomb said.

Another top communications priority will be expanding wireless capabilities, particularly for federal, state and local law enforcement officials. "There will be a focus on wireless," Holcomb said. "We think there's a crying need to move more aggressively in this area."

Holcomb noted that many "first responders" to catastrophic events, such as local police and fire officials, are using communications equipment that is not interoperable with other technologies. "In many cases, police officers are operating with analog radios in their cruisers," he said. "It's clear that one of our challenges is to improve wireless communications for our first responders."

Other top-priority technologies include data-mining capabilities, enhanced authentication systems and biometrics, and modeling and simulation systems, according to Holcomb. "We certainly will be building on those technologies, to the extent that we can," he said.

Holcomb said homeland security officials also are working to consolidate various federal watch lists of known or suspected terrorists. He said that so far administration officials have found 14 watch lists and that more than 50 information streams feed those databases.

"The goal is to bring these lists together in a way that all the information about terrorists can be shared among all the players," Holcomb said.