SPECIAL REPORTTechnology vs. Terrorism

Public Spaces

Although office buildings and public areas now routinely employ video surveillance and crash barriers, local building codes and the high cost of refitting sites have slowed progress in terror-proofing. â€If you designed every building against the threat of an attack, we couldn´t afford to build anymore,†concedes former congressman Richard Swett, a member of the panel selecting the design team to rebuild the World Trade Center. Still, building technology today already seems light-years beyond pre-9/11 days. Plans for the rebuilt towers, Swett notes, include blast-proof windows and building materials, sensor systems, radio repeaters to ensure that rescue workers on the upper floors can communicate with colleagues on the ground, and â€smart systems†that allow a building to automatically isolate contaminated areas.

As for the rescue crews that must enter a disaster site, they will most
likely be outfitted with high-tech protective gear including the LifeShirt, invented by Vivometrics in Ventura, California, and Accenture Labs in Chicago. The vest-like top monitors 30 physiological signs, uses GPS technology to track rescuers´ movements, and streams all that real-time data to a command center where dozens of first responders can be tracked simultaneously.

The Internet

A cyberattack on the country´s financial networks or power and telecommunications grids could make other means of protecting our physical assets moot. In response, computer scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, have developed a program called Mozart to detect would-be spies and intruders on Web sites. The software, now used by the Department of Energy, employs search tools that drill into Web sites to discover and catalogue sensitive information that could compromise national security. Developers describe it as a â€Google-esque†tool and predict that it will be available to the military and other government agencies by year´s end. Next on the agenda: what´s called Intrinsically Secure Computing-basically, a master plan to help computers â€understand when they´re under attack and take measures to
protect themselves,†explains Bryan McMillan, PNNL´s technical manager for cyber-security. Broad deployment of the plan is still at least 10 years away.

Such over-the-horizon concepts and the billions spent on them will never amount to 100 percent protection. â€The biggest performance gains in technology result from improving the performance of humans,†cautions Chris Latimer, an engineer at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The simple truth is that no amount of hardware will ever substitute for the kind of intelligent human decision-making needed to guard us should, for instance, an iris scan fail or a smart sensor play dumb.

The future of secure travel hinges on seamless, instant communication-and 24/7 autonomous surveillance. For a look at the technologies that will soon safeguard your travel plans, launch the photo gallery.