On Database Technology for US Homeland Security.
Won Bae Kim · The Journal of Object Technology · 2002
In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the US government has initiated a wide array of measures to forestall replay of such attacks.One such measure is to encourage development and adoption of information technology to detect and apprehend suspects and security risks, and to manage emergencies should such an attack elude prevention.One element of information technology that is indispensable, particularly in preventing terrorism, is database technology.For the purpose of this article, database technology is defined broadly as software and methodologies for modeling and storing large volumes of data of arbitrary types and structures and responding to queries and update requests against the data.Then database technology goes well beyond relational database technology to encompass technologies for storing and searching multimedia data (e.g., images, audio, speech, graphics, animation, video), geospatial data, temporal (time series) data, free-form text files, semistructured data such as HTML and XML data, automatically discovering data in data (i.e., data mining), etc.Understandably, technologies such as data mining, multimedia data search, speech understanding, document feature extraction, etc. are attracting keen interest as elements of technological solutions to enhancing US homeland security.For example, data mining may be used to automatically detect unusual patterns in the movement of terrorists through different cities and countries (five countries on the list of terrorists-harboring states in two weeks) or the movement of funds through chains of banks across countries.Multimedia technology, such as face recognition or image matching technology, may be used to identify people and automobiles photographed in airports, monuments, power plants, etc.Text mining technology may be used to automatically summarize free-form textual documents for indexing, classification, and subsequent search to help piece together paper trail left by terrorists and their supporters.Document feature extraction technology can be used to identify emails and other documents that contain certain keywords or combinations of keywords to alert authorities to potential terror and other criminal activities.Large-scale government systems for email and other communications snooping, such as the US National Security Agency's Echelon and US Federal Bureau of Investigation's Carnivore, are in operation.All these high-tech solutions are clearly of