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GCN Home > 07/09/07 web stories

Rx for IT security: RFP?

Cybereye

By William Jackson

The head of the Homeland Security Department’s research and development activities was chastised by a House subcommittee last month for not bringing better organization to the department’s Science and Technology Directorate.

Yes, things have improved from the “chaos” that characterized the directorate when Undersecretary Jay M. Cohen arrived, conceded Rep. James R. Langevin (D-R.I.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity and Science and Technology. But Langevin also said that Cohen has not done enough to establish a strategic direction for his R&D efforts or metrics for measuring performance.

Cohen said in his defense that, upon assuming the position last August, “my first focus was getting my own house in order.”

Part of that house is the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, charged with promoting commercial development of the information technology security tools needed by the department. HSARPA focuses on what it calls “high-risk, high-payoff” projects that will produce new systems rather than advancements in current technology — revolutionary rather than evolutionary improvements. Because the projects are seen as high-risk, the government lends a hand in funding and directing them.

But it seems that the private sector is relying a little too much on government assistance to meet the basic goals of HSARPA’s IT security initiatives. I am not suggesting that government should not cooperate with industry to help define the technology it needs. But there already is a ready market for the types of products HSARPA is promoting.

HSARPA shares similarities, in both name and mission, with DARPA, its Defense Department counterpart. Both solicit partnerships with industry to produce new technologies or products that might not be feasible or attractive for industry to develop on its own.

But, “HSARPA is different from DARPA,” Cohen told the subcommittee. DARPA focuses on long-range basic research projects whose payoff may come well down the road, if at all. The Internet was one of those projects, developed long before there was any demand for an Internet. “DARPA does what they do independent of their customers,” Cohen said. “I don’t have that luxury.”

More news on related topics: IT Security, Homeland Security, IT Management



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