Ever since September 11, 2001, homeland security has become a major concern worldwide. Today’s security environment is much different from the past and far more complicated and dynamic. Terrorists are intermingled with and almost indistinguishable from the local civilian population. One author of this paper, Popp, suggests that applying innovative quantitative and computational social science methods would be helpful for investigating human social phenomena. By applying information technology, we may extract information from available data to identify and prevent possible attacks.

To achieve the objectives, Cybenko, another of the paper’s authors, states that understanding the behavior of effective organizations as forward and inverse problems will be the major research topic in the next few decades. Good models, theories, and tools are very much needed. For example, trusted systems based on conditional predictions about the behavior of people or objects are now widely used. However, false negatives and false positives of trusted systems may present threats to security or to system functionality according to Taipale, another of the authors. Although probability-based trusted systems may or may not be the best design, surveillance systems using databases from daily life can play important roles for risk management. As much as we want our homeland secure, we do not want to live in a police state. Methods for privacy-preserving surveillance are proposed in this paper by Sweeney. At the end of the paper, co-author Rosenzweig characterizes the traditional privacy policies as command-and-control, reactive, and noticeably independent of technology. He proposes approaches to privacy protection that are process-based, results-oriented, and technology-driven.

Studying the links between information technology and homeland security has become of great interest in recent years. This paper addresses the issues of homeland security, from policy making to technical mechanisms. The authors emphasize more preventive techniques, such as access control, detecting and tracking, and authorization and authentication. However, they do not sufficiently address the issue of infrastructure resilience through mechanisms for fault-tolerance and effective response-and-recovery strategies. Clearly, this field has more unsolved problems than it has answers. This paper is definitely a worthwhile read for anyone interested in homeland security and information technology.