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Real Time Industry Response to Border Chief Jason Owens' Border Patrol Mission Needs

• Homeland Security & Defense Forum

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In today’s program we hear a real-time industry response to Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens’ 2024 border challenges and priorities.  

This episode features :

Mark Olson from Peraton, 

Ben Gianni, of GDIT, 

Red Hat’s Michael Hardee

William Mayer, of SAIC and 

Bogdan Frusina, from Dejero

This program was recorded at the Annual HSDF Border Security Symposium on December 12th, 2023.

Unlock the future of border security as we engage with the minds shaping the technological frontier for Border Patrol agents. Mark Olsen, Ben Gianni, Michael Hardy, William Mayer, and Bogdan Fersina, alongside Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens, confront the challenges and lay out the priorities for 2024. They bring a wealth of expertise to the table, dissecting the need for cutting-edge connectivity solutions, like 5G and low earth orbit satellites, in the inhospitable terrains where agents operate. Delve into a discussion that doesn’t just skim the surface; it tackles how robust data architecture and the crafting of resource-aware applications can make or break the safety and efficacy of those who guard our borders.

The stakes are high, and so is our commitment to investigating solutions that make a difference. This episode is about taking those critical steps towards a future where Border Patrol agents are empowered with the right tools and information, seamlessly delivered through innovative networks and interagency cooperation. With mesh networks and metadata taking center stage, we dissect the need for unified standards and efficient data usage that will not just meet but exceed the evolving demands of field operations. Join us for a conversation that is as much about the technology as it is about the tireless agents who depend on it, and stay tuned for more content that is as enriching as it is essential.

Follow HSDF THE PODCAST and never miss latest insider talk on government technology, innovation, and security. Visit the HSDF YouTube channel to view hours of insightful policy discussion. For more information about the Homeland Security & Defense Forum (HSDF), visit hsdf.org.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to HSDF the podcast, a collection of policy discussions on government technology and Homeland Security brought to you by the Homeland Security and Defense Forum. In today's program, we hear a real-time industry response to Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens' 2024 Border Challenges and Priorities. This episode features Mark Olsen from Peroton, ben Gianni of GDIT Red Hats, michael Hardy, william Mayer of SAIC and Bogdan Fersina from DeGiro. This program was recorded at the annual HSDF Border Security Symposium on December 12, 2023.

Speaker 2:

All right, with this distinguished panel, there is no doubt in my mind we will have all the answers to the cheap ad for within the next 20 minutes, so let's start moving forward. I think everybody heard the same thing, but let me begin here and, by the way, answer in whatever sequence you want. If nobody's answering, I'll start pointing out. But the one most important thing that I heard today was the officer's safety and officer requirements to get them the information that they need. So voice video data at the edge. How do we do that? What are the challenges? What does industry need to be doing?

Speaker 3:

Oh, no Again. Listen to the chief and you hear the. I mean the multitude of threat vectors that are out there and what they're talking about, as hearing about the evolving dynamic of what they're doing today on the border versus what that mission is going to look like. As I think the chief said, take back the border, that toolset that those agents need in front of them one to keep them safe, two, to make sure that they're actually being efficient in processing, and you heard about the process times that they're taking today. So, frankly, what is industry and some of the things that we are looking at and how to tackle is bringing that, and you'll hear about it later today.

Speaker 3:

But as we think about the data that CBP collects today and the volume of data that they have, how do you actually make sure? One, you've got the right architecture behind that data, You've got a network structure that's going to be able to transmit that data in the right, meaningful manner through the applications that are their mission apps. So how do you bring those mission applications to that end agent with the right device you see all right mobile device, or what happens, but how do you actually then draw that connectivity? Frankly, it's you know it does start with the backbone that does drive that and at some of the connectivity issues that they're facing today. So how, in industry, do we think about solving those connectivity issues, making sure, great, you've got the right data, you've got the right application. Unfortunately, you can't get it there, or you say so.

Speaker 3:

I think. I think, frankly, how we're going to approach that, how we're looking at that full spectrum of solution set. But it does start with making sure you've got the right communications for the right mission. That's out there and where you're located, whether it's the urban location or the rural areas in the austere, austere, austere areas that they're operating in. So I think that's one of the things that we need to take on and challenge. Whether I get 5G bubbles, whether it's your LOEs from a low earth orbit perspective, how do you make that cost effective? But how do you integrate that into your solution set? That's out there, and those are some of the things that we're looking at.

Speaker 2:

So let me go to Bogdav very quickly, because I think I know an area here that that I know he and I have talked about before front hall, back hall, bandwidth security, 5G bubbles, things that nature. How do we encapsulate that into a requirement that we can need, that industry participants can play in?

Speaker 4:

In two sentences, as well as two yes sir, yeah of course.

Speaker 4:

Obviously, it's a very complex environment out there, right, it's the night environment, semi-night environment, so fully like not like urban centers, and the challenges. You don't know where a Border Patrol officer will be at any point in time, while you do know the migrant routes, as we were discussing, we will not necessarily know those in the future. So the challenge is you've got a multitude of technologies, as was mentioned, leo's, you've got 5G bubbles, you've got fiber in some places, you've got public cellular infrastructure that can be leveraged, but you have to think in terms of everything has to be used at once. There's no, you don't know what you're going to get and you don't know where you're going to get it. And it's a matter of cost as well, right, so you cannot have infinite costs. So how can you deploy such tools out there in a way of providing bandwidth to the edge for the backhaul so that the fronthaul can exist? So, for example, if you put a 5G bubble, that's all fine and dandy, but if it doesn't have a backhaul to go back to a network, it doesn't matter. You can build the most complex application. If you can't reach it, it doesn't matter. If you cannot call back for backup, you have your life at risk. These are very basic things that a lot of people just assume and exist and it works and it doesn't.

Speaker 4:

And I guess the most important thing is first of all, I would suggest the developers of all industry organizations should really think of the limitations that the officers live with. They live on battery, so they have limited power. They live in very limited bandwidth environments, so they do not have a lot of capacity. So live within a couple hundred kilobits at best or less. If you want a couple megabits, that's fine, but it's just a lot more harder to get in a lot of places. And yeah, things are getting better and technology is advancing, but physics is limiting you to what you can do. And then the other side of it is AI, which is well, security and AI those are two separate things. They're extremely important. So AI will make life easier, but to bring AI to the edge without backhaul it's not possible. I mean, it is possible but not efficient. It is not going to do what it needs to do and what the promise of it is. So until we have a connected infrastructure throughout the southern border, I don't think we will win at this easily.

Speaker 4:

Now, connected infrastructure does not mean going, spending tens of billions of dollars and trying to recreate what everybody else has been trying to recreate. It means utilizing what currently exists and plucking the holes is the best way to do it. Or, as the chief said earlier, fix the leak if that's possible. And in this case it is possible because you can take certain areas and create a private 5G infrastructure for that particular area, with the backhaul, with the SATCOM or Fiber or whatever it may be, and allow it to go and figure out ways of creating breadcrumbs to extend it if necessary. And these are all possible today. It just has to be unified, it has to be planned, it has to be worked together as an industry to be able to achieve that, and that requires a lot of minds being at the same table, and it's the only way to truly really achieve this, like from an industry perspective.

Speaker 4:

And then the last part was security. The moment you're adding connectivity, you're adding threats, you're adding multiple attack vectors to this world which didn't exist before. The other challenge out of it is we talked about how advanced some of the cartels are. Yeah, they can run jamming drones, they can do all kinds of things to interfere with wireless spectrum, all kinds of different things, and those are all threats that weren't really necessary before, as much they were there but not as impactful. The moment you start automating things, the officer does less Like sorry, they do more than before, but they do less on the technology side because the technology does it for them and they become more dependent on that technology. So now you have to protect it from being interfered with and attacked from all the different attack vectors, which I think it's a task on its own. Let's put it that way, ok.

Speaker 2:

So, ben, one of the things that's been touched on now with at least two speakers and I certainly raised it is what I refer to as leading indicators, because we don't know where the next attack vector is going to be getting the data to tell industry where we should prepare to go next. Can we do that? Give so how?

Speaker 5:

We can do that. David, you and the chief laid out the problem statement really well. I thought Getting the data is really about information superiority and information dominance really, but tying that with operational superiority and operational dominance. I think getting that data is to some extent, to take it where you get it. But the minute you get it whether that's the tactical edge or midstream or back at control centers getting that data and securing the data and securing the channels. You talk about officer safety is being able to put that in a hardened capability lightweight, responsive to officers and agents in terms of you don't have to do much to get the data that they're looking for. That information is precious and information is what protects and informs the operational aspect of it. I really see this as a C4ISR communications operating capability putting properly trained technology models, artificial intelligence-wise, at the edge to be able to combine with whatever else data. We can get there to that point where the agent's operating to be able to inform the action. I think that's what's going to take.

Speaker 5:

I think industry is innovating, tech is innovating. It's getting smaller, it's getting cheaper, it's getting infinitely more deployable, more integratable. I think the innovation in terms of architecture, as was mentioned, and the ability to put systems together that are responsive to all of the above to protect against adversaries. If you combine the ability to operate with 5G and backhaul, that you can get right in a hardened tactical edge. That includes the elements of identity management and zero trust capability, because the adversaries are going to go attack these things right. We need to know who's in that network-right and be able to keep them out and get that thing to be survivable.

Speaker 5:

I think those are the known innovations around both technology and operations which will lead to the information that agents need to do the job that the chief laid out. The government is doing a really good job. If the requirements information coming to industry is half as elegant and succinct as the chief laid out, I trust we're on a good path there. To be honest with you, that was extremely well laid out. That's what industry is seeking, right. Is that clear, concise requirements information that you suggested? If that could be packaged in every encounter with industry that eloquently and succinctly, I think we're going to check here.

Speaker 2:

Mike, I'm going to go to you next Listening to Ben capture. The way that he put it was inform the actions, great way to capture. This is not a question to you, mike, but if you want to take it, that's great. How do we get there? How do we get industry, every player in here to impart that piece of valuable knowledge that's going to give us that whole array to meet those requirements. Mike, if you want to take that or if you want to add on to the challenges that we've articulated, yeah, no, actually I'll take that.

Speaker 6:

Requirements is a very powerful word. That's been my job as a consultant and as an architect and across my career is gathering requirements. Listening to the mission On our prep call yesterday, one of the things that came up is the workflow of our border agents, because we have all the capabilities we need. Technology is in a very advanced place. Think about what we've been doing over the last 10 years, all the efficiencies that we've been driving in the data center and now in the cloud, and how we've been shrinking our application footprint, going from servers to containers to now serverless workflows. We've taken technology and made it smaller, while our capacity has expanded.

Speaker 6:

Think about all the compute that has lived inside of our data centers, the size of servers that we can provision out within our data centers but yet we can run our application workloads on really small compute. If we can take that embrace open standards, open communication. Move away from this black box development that has hindered the mission to where industry, sis and the government are working together to form solutions that are going to best serve the border agents through listening and gathering those requirements to ensure that they're able to be effective in their job and have speed in processing. One of the things that jumped out is 120 countries, and think of all the millions of people that we're seeing. None of us like waiting in line at the grocery store. Imagine waiting in line at a border checkpoint and the pressure on that officer doing the processing and their outnumbered Yep.

Speaker 7:

So go ahead Just to jump in, and well done, sir. I think the communication piece which he hit on is really critical.

Speaker 7:

So it is industry and we are working in competition, but we also need to put our heads together and work together and not lose that insight. I was a Borbache agent that recently retired, so I do have that in my toolbox, but not to lose insight into what we're looking at in the field and that we're talking to the Borbache agents and keeping that communication of what they need. It's a vastly different Borbitrol that Chief Aguilar led, that the Chief Owens inherited. It's 100% different now. So just and it changes sort of overnight you have flows of migrants moving. You know areas of operation. You have flows that start up that really didn't exist before.

Speaker 7:

You have, you know, a fentanyl problem set that we weren't talking about a few years ago. You have Borbitrol arresting, you know terrorist watchlist individuals. You know at record and historic numbers, that has never existed you know prior. So it just changes overnight. So I think the communication piece, above everything, to make sure that we're communicating with our partner and giving them exactly what they need and be willing to come out and meet with them and test with them and get down to the field and bringing our workers down there as well, is huge so that everybody can sort of see the problem set. Okay.

Speaker 4:

And I really think to summarize this because I mean there's some very good points that you got brought up and limit aware application development is going to be a very important thing if we could standardize.

Speaker 4:

And what I mean by that is the further you go out in a denied environment, the more limited resources you have.

Speaker 4:

Sometimes you have the same amount of compute in all environments because you're limited by the computer you've put in your vehicle.

Speaker 4:

But being aware of how much capacity I've got, what kind of throughput I have, and implement that into a standard that the application is aware of, through current existing APIs and technologies that exist, to be able to pull network information out, pull resource information out of how much CPU there's left, how much RAM there's left, storage etc.

Speaker 4:

Is going to be key to actually kind of standardize some of these deployments out in the field to handle the different types of workflows that the Border Patrol agents are doing. And I'm very open to having that discussion with anybody who is willing to actually have a real conversation on how do we create an open standard around resource aware applications, because that we can then go to our developers and make it very clear that they have to live within the environments. They're being told it is Because if you have 200 kilobits and using 500, it's not going to work. And trust you me, the Border Patrol agent will have no clue, she or him, what to do in that environment, because they can't. There's nothing they can do. The only thing they can fix that is the application itself.

Speaker 2:

So, megan, we're going to have a lot more time next time because we're already running out of time, but we still have about four minutes or so. Open question to the group here the volume, the velocity, the velocity, the validity and the value. More importantly, of all this data that is being captured, how do we get it to that end user as quickly as possible in a disconnected, degraded or contested environment, to where that officer, the chief's point, is going to be as safe as possible and as efficient as he or she can be? That's one part of the question. The other is whose responsibility is this in your minds, to ask for these requirements? I think it was Mike that said requirements are very powerful word. That's it. Now that industry hears the chief of the United States Board of Patrol say this is what I need, to come together in some form or fashion and build what he's asking for, or is it his responsibility to articulate those requirements that drives that Outcome that we're looking for?

Speaker 5:

Chief, I would say in this world, objectives are Always more important than requirements. Yeah, requirements get stale. They have a shelf life, if you will, or a half life before they're no longer accurate and no longer temporal. And so Understanding the objectives you know from an industry standpoint is always better right to respond to, to meet them, as opposed to being a slave to a requirement which, but by no one's intention you know, gets a get stale with you know, with time or activity that happens in this, in this quarter, security environment. So I would say that that is when we think about that interaction between government industry. I think objectives based or outcomes based right is so much more important than you know specific requirements, although there's a role for those right. Once the objectives are in your at the moment, right, then you generate the requirements that you're satisfying and his industry can do that right with the objectives laid out.

Speaker 5:

On the question about data In the artificial intelligence world, mesh networks or something relatively new, depending on your frame of reference and it's you know, give me the data that I need to know about, the data that is in raw form that you might have. But I don't need all that, I just need the piece of it that informs me on the action on the mesh network. You know, with metadata for those are in the data analytics world and the artificial intelligence world you know that's so precious and so valuable that we can abstract what we know about raw data but give the agent what they desperately need, given the constraints and resources that they have comms and computing storage so okay, anybody else to add anything?

Speaker 2:

so now I've got some more questions.

Speaker 3:

I mean one of the and to kind of build on, I guess, what Ben was saying here, that that data side of it, whether it's internal within CBP or if it's the genesis of it, is external within the agencies that are also out there doing ISR type dynamics how do you actually get that interagency connection going on to? Again, you've got a data architecture, a data governance model that CBP might follow. That might be totally different. How do you get that level of engagement there and in industry right? How do we think about bringing those types of data components together, just from what we're sitting and where we're when we're engaging with those agencies? Because you think longer term especially some of the other agencies that are out there that those longer term trends on what are those adversaries going to be doing at the border and what are they going to bring to the border.

Speaker 3:

Some of that data set is actually being gathered another agency. How do you actually bring those things into that? I think that's that back to your point, though. How do you bring it in, though in a structured manner but actually does allow that you know whether it's at the tactical edge side of it or in the intelligence side of it within CBP. How do you actually synthesize that data to make it meaningful that end user? I think it's important as well. So keeping that governance policy, some consistency and interchangeability across agencies, is something that needs to be worked on and and we as an industry can help From just where we're sitting and working with various industries or various agencies, how we're seeing those policies come together and help connect the dots. I've had that conversation a couple different times across the agencies, so whilst there.

Speaker 4:

Okay and I think. So. Objectives is a very good way to define it. The way you defined it is that you need to understand objectives and timeframes, that I think they're gonna be really important where money goes behind it to do the implementation of that objective, to make it happen, which ultimately defines requirements, etc. However, the one interesting thing is we're living in in a world, at a time, which is probably going to be the most disruptive Impact that we've had in the last 50 years. With artificial intelligence, we've we've never had this amount of disruption amongst the workforce and and what is actually capable to be done.

Speaker 4:

So the question comes in who's thinking about that? Who's gonna be the forefront of that? How is industry and government gonna work together on implementing those objectives across this crazy wave of disruption that's about to happen the next five years, and, and it's not small, I'll guarantee you that. So the question comes in what? What is the best way to participate? What's the best way to have the conversation? Open or closed doors? Whatever it needs to be in certain environments has to be both, I'm sure of it, and either way, we need to take the facts that are happening and and and the way the communications architectures being deployed.

Speaker 4:

Ai as a combination of the two, is it really changes the way everything is done? It really is in a very impactful way. So I really believe that more conversation on this is more is important, and less and and and really having the bright minds of Right. I mean there's a lot of very powerful industry here with a lot of very intelligent people that are very smart. They're gonna come up with the next thing, and part of that is important to work on those objectives Related to the disruption that's about to happen. I think very good.

Speaker 2:

So just a quick recap more conversations needed absolutely to is going to be unified standards, I believe is the way it was put it looking at outcomes and objectives as we move forward on this and Identifying how best to use the data in order to make it safer, more efficient for those agents out there. The conversations needed I will, on behalf of HSDF, I will commit that we will Do more of these conversations as we go forward, because I think they're very valuable. Gentlemen, thank you very much for your participation, appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

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