Security Technology Needs Human Guidance

Jun 12, 2007 3:08 PM

Diverse, accurate methods for detecting bomb material and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are entering the marketplace, but even when fully automated or integrated with each other, these technologies offer little protection without personnel trained to think like the adversary, say industry and research experts.

"The advances we're seeing in detection technologies are impressive, and it's an area where people are trying to fully automate the process, but, at the end of the day, security is human-based," says Amotz Brandes, a former Israeli soldier and currently director and managing partner of Chameleon Associates, Canoga Park, Calif., a security consulting firm.

"Automation and integration of these technologies? That's great -- go for it. But in most cases it doesn't work [to prevent a security breach or event] without the human dimension and a shift in thinking toward the possible incident as opposed to the historic one," he told Defense News.

Brandes and other experts addressed a one-day conference of government and industry security officials to review the latest techniques for detecting bombs and their perpetrators.

"A lot of new technologies have been coming onto the market and we need to look at them," says Yves de Mesmaeker, secretary-general of the European Corporate Security Association.

The technologies reviewed during the conference, according to Defense News, ranged from the mundane, such as systems for scanning the undersides of vehicles, to the exotic, such as an analysis of human convection plumes -- the small cloud of heat a body releases -- to new uses for older technology like X-rays and microwaves. For instance, GE Security has developed a stand-off vapor-based trace detector that gets around the civil rights problem of taking direct-contact samples from people.
"Vapor detection is designed to move [the sampling problem] away from the person toward fingerprints, items and clothing," says James Copeman-Bryant, GE Security's technical services director in Europe for Homeland protection.

His company's new Ion Track detection station extracts and vaporizes minute particles from a human convection plume, and uses spectrometry to determine their composition -- all within a few seconds per scanned person. Due to its high sensitivity and ability to detect both positive and negative ions, the procedure analyzes a wide range of vaporized explosive materials, "about 95 percent of what's out there," he told Defense News.

Asked by de Mesmaeker what the remaining 5 percent was, Copeman-Bryant says it included material such as gun pellets or smokeless powder. "But a terrorist would have to carry a lot of that stuff to bring down an airplane or border post," he says.

Other new IED- and explosive-detection systems combine advanced computer power with conventional technologies to produce similar rates of accuracy.

SecuScan, manufactured by Signalbau Huber of Munich, scans the underside of moving vehicles to produce images with detail down to 5 mm. Paired with license-plate data generated by partner TopGuard of Eindhoven, Germany, it compares a returning vehicle's newly scanned image with its previous one to detect alterations. SecuScan is deployed in Afghanistan and sites across Europe.

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