New Horizons
Although NIMA still maintains its secretive nature, the events of 9-11 gave the seven-year-old agency increased visibility and an expanded mission that touches state and local governments, according to Joe Drummey, chief of NIMA's Homeland Security Division. "We started out like many federal agencies at the time after 9-11 ... with a complete refocus of our activities," Drummey said. "My focus prior to 9-11 was Latin America, primarily." He said the decision was made to re-package the strengths that NIMA had historically brought to international activities and apply them to the homeland security mission. Now, at the request of a federal agency such as the FBI, FEMA, or The Department of Homeland Security the agency can lend its expertise to projects that impact cities throughout the country.
"For the last 18 months we have been working aggressively on two fronts, the first being the data environment," Drummey said. "We found, after 9-11 as we tried to scramble to pull some information together about New York and about Washington, that we were terribly lacking in domestic data. We really knew that --but it was not our business prior to 9-11."
After the Critical Infrastructure Board released its findings last summer, NIMA also found that it lacked data on some of the 13 infrastructure priorities outlined by the board. This, along with a new mission to map 133 "top priority U.S. cities," led to the organization significantly expanding its activities. Most of the key cities were identified in the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici that evaluated cities according to a number of factors. NIMA added 13 state capitols that were not included in the study. . San Diego, site of the most recent Super Bowl, was among the cities, as was Salt Lake City, host of the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Building Inventory
Although the agency did have substantial data on transportation routes and topography from the USGS National Map, Drummey said some information relevant to homeland security was missing. "Important data, but it's kind of foundation data." He said. "The National Map didn't include, however, the very, very detailed high resolution data that's necessary to help some of the homeland security missions today."
As NIMA compiles this robust database, state and local governments will benefit. "It's expensive data -- data that most cities don't have the money to purchase," he said. "We share that data free of charge." Drummey added that when NIMA acquires data with a public domain license, the data is shared to the maximum extent possible, working with partners such as USGS to disseminate the information. He observed that cities such as San Diego, Boston and Chicago are "well along the way," while many others lack an integrated digital environment.
At conclusion of the multi-state project, NIMA plans to have integrated data for all the targeted cities that will show, not only critical infrastructure, but also interrelated data. For example, a nuclear plant could be viewed in relationship to the surrounding terrain, evacuation routes, nearby hospitals and communities likely to be affected by an act of terrorism or an accident.
Given the agency's access to sensitive and classified information, only limited public information will be available on the open Internet. Access to other data will require various levels of security from simple passwords to encryption with PKI technology. "There is some information that is on open Internet gateways, but actually very little. Principally, it's ... it's because we are in the intelligence community and historically we haven't had a lot of need to do information dissemination at the unclassified level," Drummey explained. "So, we don't have a system's backbone to do a lot of that yet. We are moving down the road to allow us to have more data accessible through the Geospatial One Stop ... that will come in the future but we are certainly not there yet. Most of our sharing of data is done though secret and top secret levels."
New Concerns
Drummey said the agency is struggling with how to protect sensitive data in a sharing environment. "We really haven't had a situation where we've had the best available high currency, high accuracy, high resolution data about critical infrastructures over the U.S. all in one place, integrated together," he said. "When that all becomes available ... that certainly makes the data sensitive."
NIMA also provides security analysis and support for law enforcement agencies charged with protecting dignitaries. Mark Riccio, chief of domestic operations, said the agency integrates a variety of GIS tools including LIDAR, satellite imagery and Landsat technology to build 3-dimensional images of a city. These Virtual Analytic Environments (VAE) are ideal for establishing line-of-sight to, say, a motorcade route. It displays the tops of buildings, alleyways and other locations where a potential sniper might be hiding.
"It allows law enforcement to prepare and know where the motorcade can and cannot, be seen," Riccio said, describing the process as "bringing the cops to the desktop."
NIMA's expanding role in homeland security is accompanied by at least two important changes. Compiling data layers on U.S. cities means the agency is dancing on the slippery slope of privacy issues. NIMA now has to be vigilant about avoiding anything that could be viewed as "spying on U.S. citizens," according to David Burpee, the agency's director of public affairs. "That is a line we are not authorized to cross," he said.
At the same time, NIMA officials are asking Congress to authorize a name change to reflect the agency's new role in supporting the intelligence community. The proposed National Geospatial Intelligence Agency would be known as NGA, joining the federal family of three-letter agencies. A decision about the name change is expected when the current Defense Authorization Bill is signed.
Photo: Mark Riccio, NIMA chief of domestic operations
