Homeland Security Funds Advanced Cyber-Security Projects

American border agents have spent the past week sharing information with their Canadian counterparts – using their Blackberries. But the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t even allow its employees’ laptops to have wireless access when employees travel. Why is the department letting this happen?

According to an article by J. Nicholas Hoover on the Security Pipeline website, the project was all as part of a secure messaging project, just one of many technology projects funded by the DHS’s Advanced Research Projects Agency’s cyber-security arm. 

Hoover says the ARPA, a colleague of the Internet-inventing Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, “is planning for implementation of secure hand-held devices with text, audio and video,” as well as spam prevention, he says.

Not only that, Hoover says, but there are other ARPA projects in the works. Still, with only a $16.7 million budget for 2006, the agency now “leverages internal expertise with that of academia and industry to get research done and have products commercialized and implemented as quickly as possible,” Hoover says.

“We're very focused on working with venture capitalists and commercial interests to make sure implementation happens,” Douglas Maughan, the cyber-security group’s program director, told Hoover.

To read the full article, click here: http://www.securitypipeline.com/desktop/173600629