Sidebar | DHS hoping the past is not prologue
While pursuing successful projects, the Homeland Security Department is aware of the risks, as its history is littered with projects that have failed or struggled mightily. Among them:
Online extra | DHS needs to win over some employees
Homeland Security Department employees as a whole hold relatively low opinions of their department's performance in several respects, according to an Office of Personnel Management survey.
DHS Special Report | Coast Guard Fine-Tunes Its Harbor Watch
Under the cloak of night, a vessel quietly floated in the channel waters at the entrance to the busy cargo, cruise and petroleum seaport of Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
DHS Special Report | FEMA maps out a better response
While withstanding a storm of criticism for its response to recent large-scale natural disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has continued to make substantial investments in its geospatial and flood-mapping operations. In the long term, geospatial technology should help FEMA become more effective in its core missions of disaster response and hazard mitigation, officials said.
DHS Special Report | Watch-list data converges at Terrorist Screening Center
Although Donna Bucella prefers to stay out of the limelight, her job doesn't allow it. As director of the Terrorist Screening Center, Bucella oversees one of the most important data sets in the Bush administration's war on terror'the consolidated Terrorist Screening Database.
DHS Special Report | Agencies Look for a Match on Fingerprint Systems
The FBI and Homeland Security Department are closing in on a significant milestone that will get the agencies' fingerprint image systems a step closer to their ultimate goal of communicating seamlessly.
DHS Special Report | Who's Who at the Border
The Homeland Security Department has quietly put together a wide-reaching net of screening and targeting programs, working not only within its several internal organizations'such as Customs and Border Protection, the Coast Guard and Citizenship and Immigration Services'but with other agencies such as the Justice and State departments.
DHS Special Report | Secret Service stays on the trail of funny money
When it comes to IT-enabled crime, counterfeiters have gained some helpful tools. But standing in the way of wannabe counterfeiters is the Secret Service, which is using other technological advances to thwart and catch them.
DHS Special Report | Forward Motion
Even as the Homeland Security Department has stumbled through project failures, stalled during leadership vacuums and withstood withering criticism, DHS has delivered some projects that serve as exemplars of technology management and are improving prospects for better project performance.
The database of databases
The Internet and IP-based networks have gone a long way toward removing barriers between agencies. To further a spirit of cooperation, agencies are also beginningto share information from disparate databases by sending some of that data to common data warehouses, where it can be merged, queried and analyzed.
GCN Lab Review | For better security, touch your printer
Security is more than just passwords on your desktop. Every agency knows physical security is just as important. However, within a department there is normally not much to protect documents from users already in the building. And that can cause trouble.
GCN Lab Review | A scanner for all reasons
When we first received the tiny, 17-ounce DocketPort DS485-90 scanner from Ambir Technology, we were skeptical. We've seen small-scale scanners before,and the performance level claimed by this device'six pages per minute induplex mode at 600 dots per inch'seemed a bit much.
GCN Lab Review | Tape drives, meet disks
It seems network administrators and computer users alike are constantly in need of more storage. And while most users are encouraged to save to the network in order to take advantage of the LAN's backup system, it is not always feasible or efficient to do so, much as administrators may wish otherwise.
Tech Briefs
Nuance Communications Inc. has released version 11 of its PaperPort scanning and document management software. The upgrade features a new compression method that cuts the size of multicolored Portable Document Format files by eight times or more.
GCN Insider | Desktop intelligence
Back in our cub reporting days, we once met a city council president who had whatlooked to be the best low-maintenance way of organizing data.
Modern Relics
The National Institute of Standards and Technology hosted a workshop onlong-term knowledge retention, looking for answers to the questions of what digital data should be saved and how it should be saved.
And Another Thing
Texas' latest plan to shore up its border with Mexico involves, in one respect, turning it into a sort of 1,200-mile Neighborhood Watch program, via the Web.
The Community
Some federal employees passing through Washington's L'Enfant Plazaon their way to work earlier this month got some payback for their commute,as part of a promotion by the public-private Telework Exchange.
The Packet Rat | AJAX Craze Could Lead to Dirty Business
'It's like a bad horror-movie monster,' The Rat recently ranted as he reviewedrequirements for another application development project. 'Just when you think you've killed it, it comes back again!' 'What, 'American Idol'?' asked his wife. 'No, no ... though that's true, too,' he replied. 'No, I'm talking about this dynamic HTML offalthey're calling AJAX."
Location-aware services: one more thing to worry about
A new generation of location-based services threatens to open up a whole new can of worms in the debate over privacy.
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