Homeland Security Office Asks For Tech Help
from the crying-wolf-problems dept
The Office of Homeland Security is resorting to begging companies to be more secure with their technology. The problem is that they’ve cried wolf so many times about threats, and most companies do a quick cost-benefit equation and realize the likelihood of them being targeted is slim, while the costs of doing a last bit of security is high… and thus, choose to ignore the pleadings from the government. At the same time, they’re throwing open their doors (and wallets) for any technology that can be used for homeland security. They’re apparently looking for people to build handheld scanners that will detect anything from chemical weapons to guns. Funny, I get spam emails every day offering those types of solutions. Perhaps we point the spammers to the Office of Homeland Security, and let them sort it out together.
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Substance Detection
I recently saw a presentation by a company called Detect-X, located in Atlanta. They claim to have developed a chip with an on-die ccd capable of detecting drugs and explosives via spectrographic emisions of such substances (when fluoresced by a light source). They say hand-held units are in development, and it only takes a matter of milliseconds to detect if a person has drugs, explosives, etc… on them. Interestingly, they said they would have to disable (or raise the threshold for) detection of cocaine, as the substance can be found on a significant amount of US currency.