According to Gary Kennedy, terrorism liaison officer for the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, information collected about critical infrastructure includes addresses, points of contact, which sector the site belongs to, and other specifics depending on the sector. For example, if the infrastructure falls into the chemical sector, the assessment would include what chemicals are stored at the site.
Kennedy said the federal government uses the information in a preincident fashion — knowing which key resources sectors are located in what regions and who should be contacted if there’s a threat to the region. C/ACAMS is a Web-based portal that provides a way for state and local governments to implement the National Infrastructure Protection Plan.
Local law enforcement agencies can use the state’s database to determine if they’ll be dealing with chemicals or any other special circumstances when being called to any critical infrastructure or key resources for emergency response.
Phoenix Utilizes Digital Pens
Phoenix received an approximately $20,000 grant to purchase five digital pens and the accompanying software from Capturx Forms for Microsoft Excel and Capturx for ESRI’s ArcGIS. Capturx enables the forms and maps to be printed with a special signature that allows the pen to track what form is being used and which box on the form is being written in. The pens write in ink and contain cameras that track what’s being written and store the information until it’s connected to a computer. Kennedy said once the pen is docked, the information is pulled into the digital forms and saved on the computers.
According to Kennedy, between six and 12 terrorism liaison officers attend each vulnerability assessment. Before using the digital pens, they would each take notes and after the assessment would have to transcribe their notes into the computer. It could take weeks to get all of the officers’ information transcribed into the computer, he said.
Now the system has been streamlined so officers don’t have to transcribe the handwritten material into the computer. “Normally the way we use it is we have one pen that goes out with each team and that team will transcribe their notes or tell their notes to that person and they can save time because now they don’t have to collect all their notes,” he said. “I have one person who’s writing all these notes down and filling out these forms that are printed for them. And then when they’re done, that one person has the information from everyone on the team, and they can come in, pop that pen into their computer and it will update their form digitally.”
The digital pens are saving about five to six hours per threat vulnerability assessment, he said. Phoenix completes about 100 assessments per year, and with the timesaving from the pen, Kennedy said he hopes to increase that number to about 140 annually. However, Kennedy added that 85 percent of the nation’s critical infrastructure is privately owned, so coordinating with the private sector to complete the assessments is another aspect that people must keep in mind.
“This helps us to do more because we can do them faster,” Kennedy said. “I can collect the data much more quickly using these pens, so it saves me time and I don’t have to have as many people sitting down and transcribing their notes into the computer.”
He hopes to automate the information importing process with C/ACAMS in the future. Currently once the pens upload the information, Kennedy manually plugs the proper information into the C/ACAMS forms. He said Phoenix is working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to automatically have the information imported into C/ACAMS from the pens in the future.
