IP: Homeland-security research: Mission impossible?

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

>      
> 05 September 2002
> Nature 419, 10 - 11 (2002); doi:10.1038/419010a
> 
> 
> Homeland-security research: Mission impossible?
> A new Department of Homeland Security is to be given the task of defending the
> United States against further terrorist attacks. Geoff Brumfiel outlines the
> challenges facing its research wing.
> 
> One year ago, on a crisp and gloriously sunny morning, the United States'
> sense of domestic invulnerability was shattered. Grief, shock and anger over
> the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have since been joined
> by anxiety about the nation's ability to prevent future outrages. This has
> been fuelled by media criticism of intelligence agencies' failure to warn of
> al-Qaeda's assault, and of the government's handling of the subsequent anthrax
> mailings - for which a perpetrator has yet to be identified.
> 
> In an attempt to reassure a troubled public, President George W. Bush unveiled
> plans on 6 June to upgrade the existing Office of Homeland Security, created
> in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, to a full department of the
> federal government. Research is an integral part of the plan. "Our scientific
> community is serving on the front lines of this war," Bush told researchers in
> a speech at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois in July. "You all know
> better than anybody, when we research and we set priorities, this great nation
> can achieve any objective."
> 
> With bills to establish the Department of Homeland Security still being
> considered by the Congress, the details remain unclear. But the department is
> likely to have a budget of $32 billion a year, including several hundred
> million for research. It will also help to manage the much larger sum
> requested for biodefence research under the National Institutes of Health
> (NIH).
> 
> Counter-terrorism experts agree that science will be key to addressing the
> threat. But they warn that the department's research wing faces some major
> challenges. First, it must interact with the department's operational
> divisions, many of which will be plucked from other agencies with no strong
> scientific culture. Second, it must coordinate its own activities with other
> agencies and departments whose research efforts feed into the
> homeland-security agenda. Above all, it must respond to a nebulous threat.
> "Everybody moving into this department will require exceptional talents,"
> observes Parney Albright, assistant director for homeland and national
> security at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
> 
> A tricky target
> Scientific research has long been central to US national security policy.
> Throughout the cold war, US researchers strove to develop better weapons and
> intelligence-gathering technologies than their Soviet counterparts. But when
> confronting terrorism, where the threats are diverse and hard to assess, it is
> not so easy to set research priorities. "It's going to be more complex than
> building a rocket or a nuclear weapon," says Page Stoutland, deputy division
> leader for counter-terrorism at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
> California.
> 
> The main concern is the possibility of terrorists gaining weapons of mass
> destruction. These include a long list of potential chemical and biological
> weapons - and, even if nuclear weapons are beyond their grasp, terrorists
> might be able to put radioactive material into a 'dirty' conventional bomb.
> One key challenge for the department's research wing will be to develop
> technologies to detect any attack rapidly, determine its source and respond
> quickly to mitigate its effects.
> 
> According to counter-terrorism experts, the threat from biological weapons is
> a top priority for research. There are clear vulnerabilities to be addressed,
> and the promise of developing the means to mitigate attacks. Last year's
> anthrax mailings, for instance, might have killed many more than their five
> victims, had the bacterium used been resistant to antibiotics. Although
> anthrax cannot spread from person to person, other potential bioweapons - the
> smallpox virus, for example - are communicable. In these cases, the ability to
> identify rapidly when an attack has occurred, to deploy vaccines, and to
> isolate and treat infected people will be crucial.
> 
> But an enormous amount of work remains to be done. "The development of new
> vaccines, antiviral drugs and antitoxins is in a pretty sorry state," says
> Steven Block, a biophysicist at Stanford University in California who is a
> member of the JASONs, a group of scientists that advises the US government on
> issues such as bioweapons. Block believes that basic research into disease
> pathology and immune responses will help to counter a broad range of threats.
> It may be possible, for example, to develop generic vaccine technologies that
> could quickly be applied against any agent - even one genetically modified to
> increase its potency.
> 
> "This research's utility goes beyond the next bioweapon attack," agrees Claire
> Fraser, who heads The Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland,
> which has sequenced the anthrax bacterium's genome and helped to analyse the
> strain used in the postal attacks. "Understanding the biology of infective
> agents, improving diagnostics and determining what makes a great vaccine will
> have a big impact on treating more run-of-the-mill diseases," she says.
> 
> But the need to set priorities in biodefence research illustrates the
> difficulties facing the homeland-security department. Initially, Bush proposed
> transferring the $1.75 billion requested for the NIH for biodefence research
> in 2003 to the new department (see Nature 417, 675; 2002). But the money is
> now expected to remain within the NIH, with the homeland-security department
> having joint management responsibility. The NIH will award grants and the new
> department will help to set priorities. But how this will work has yet to be
> decided, as have the department's links with other bodies working in the
> field, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
> 
> Divided by defence
> Tony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious
> Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, which will run the NIH's biodefence programme,
> is optimistic about relations with the new department. "We feel that we are
> well-positioned at the NIH to do the kinds of research that would provide the
> Department of Homeland Security with what it needs," he says. But Washington
> insiders and senior scientists warn that joint-management arrangements are
> fraught with difficulty. "At this point, I'm sceptical whether it's going to
> put us in a position where things are handled more efficiently than they are
> now," says Fraser.
> 
> The fact that biodefence research will yield results applicable to infectious
> diseases in general also raises thorny questions about the dissemination of
> results of interest both to researchers and terrorists. Against this
> background, bodies that represent biologists remain suspicious of the new
> department's involvement. "We really think the research is dual-purpose and
> that the NIH would be in the best position to set priorities," says Janet
> Shoemaker, the American Society for Microbiology's director of public affairs.
> 
> Another major task for the department's researchers will be developing
> techniques to identify terrorists before they commit atrocities. "Once a
> terrorist moves towards his target, half the battle is already lost," says
> Magnus Ranstorp of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political
> Violence at the University of St Andrews, UK. He stresses the importance of
> developing analytical tools to glean information about terrorist activities
> from the Internet and other communications networks, and from databases such
> as those held by financial institutions.
> 
> Won Kim, president of Cyber Database Solutions in Austin, Texas, says that
> this will involve research to modify the 'data mining' programs used by banks
> and other companies to probe their records. "From databases of, say, bank
> transactions and passport controls, this technology can discover unusual
> patterns that could lead to terrorists," he says.
> 
> Refining these tools to comb the vast reaches of cyberspace will be no small
> task, says David Farber, a computer and information scientist at the
> University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The challenge, he says, is to
> develop software that can exceed the capabilities of human analysts in
> spotting suspicious patterns among reams of data. "It's probably one of the
> hardest problems in computer science," says Farber.
> 
> Here again, the new department's relations with other agencies may present
> difficulties. Ideally, researchers developing data-mining tools would have
> access to raw data gathered by the CIA and the FBI. But the proposals
> currently before Congress do not call for these data to be made available.
> "There are great sensitivities among existing intelligence agencies," observes
> William Happer, a physicist at Princeton University in New Jersey who has
> served on numerous panels advising on civilian and military research.
> 
> Lateral thinking
> Relations between research and operational divisions will also require
> attention. The department is to incorporate a diverse range of existing
> agencies - including the Coast Guard, the Customs Service and the Immigration
> and Naturalization Service - many of which have no strong tradition of
> interacting with in-house researchers to assess their technological needs.
> 
> Even the structure of the department's research arm remains hazy, for now.
> Various strategies have been discussed, including launching new research
> centres at universities and establishing homeland-security divisions within
> existing national laboratories. Senator Joseph Lieberman (Democrat,
> Connecticut), whose staff were working on proposals to establish a
> homeland-security department before Bush adopted the idea, also favours
> launching a counterpart to DARPA to explore long-term, innovative projects.
> 
> But all of the proposals include the appointment of an undersecretary to run
> the new department's own research programme and to coordinate with other
> agencies to ensure the relevance of research across the federal government to
> the security agenda. The person chosen will require formidable talents.
> "Whoever runs this needs to be a pretty skilled Washington in-fighter," says
> Happer.
> 
> He or she will also need to move quickly. The legislation establishing the
> department could be finalized as early as this month, and an immense weight of
> public expectation will be brought to bear from day one. Says Albright: "As
> soon as that department unlocks its front doors, the American public is going
> to expect that we are prepared."
> 
> 
> 
> GEOFF BRUMFIEL
> Geoff Brumfiel is Nature's Washington physical sciences correspondent.
> 

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