Information Technology for Counterterrorism Immediate Actions and Future Possibilities (2003) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-9
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. Building on that report as a point of departure, the panel of experts responsible for the IT material in Making the Nation Safer was reconvened as the Committee on the Role of Information Technology in Responding to Terrorism in order to develop the present report.
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THE ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN SOCIETY AND IN COUNTERTERRORISM Information technology is essential to virtually all of the nation's critical infrastructures, from the air-traffic-control system to the aircraft themselves, from the electric-power grid to the financial and banking systems, and, obviously, from the Internet to communications systems. In sum, this reliance of all of the nation's critical infrastructures on IT makes any of them vulnerable to a terrorist attack on their computer or telecommunications systems.
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· For the federal government: Position critical federal information systems as models for good security practices. Remedy the failure of the market to account adequately for information security so that appropriate market pro-security mechanisms develop.
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The technology discussed here is relevant to fighting cybercrime and to conducting efforts in defensive information warfare. Research in information and network security can be grouped in four areas: authentication, detection, containment, and recovery; a fifth set of topics such as dealing with buggy code is broadly applicable.
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C3I for emergency response to terrorist attacks poses challenges that differ from natural disasters: the number of responding agencies from local, state, and federal governments increases the degree of complexity, while the additional security or law-enforcement presence that is required may interfere with rescue and recovery operations. C3I systems for emergency responders face many challenges: · Regarding ad hoc interoperability, different emergency responders must be able to communicate with each other and other agencies, and poor interoperability among responding agencies is a well-known problem.
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In addition, new research is needed to normalize and combine data collected from multiple sources to improve data interoperability. And, new techniques for data visualization will be useful in exploiting human capabilities for pattern recognition.
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· Sensors, used to detect danger in the environment, are most effective when they are linked in a distributed sensor network, a problem that continues to pose interesting research problems. · Modeling and simulation can play important roles throughout crisismanagement activities by making predictions about how events might unfold and by testing alternative operational choices.
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Research Implications Associated with Human and Organizational Factors To better integrate the insights of social science into operational IT systems, research is relevant in at least four different areas: · Formulating of system development methods that are more amenable to the incorporation of domain knowledge and social science expertise; · Translating social science research findings into guidelines and methods that are readily applied by the technical community; · Developing reliable security measures that do not interfere with work processes of legitimate employees; and · Understanding the IT issues related to the disparate organizational cultures of agencies that will be fused under the Department of Homeland Security.
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Yet the free and open dissemination of information has potential costs, as terrorists may obtain information that they can use against us. The committee believes (or at least hopes)
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