HSDF THE PODCAST

Edge Computing and Tactical Communications to Support CBP and the Border Patrol PT1

• Homeland Security & Defense Forum • Season 3 • Episode 9

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Industry is collaborating with government to rapidly deploying new technologies and deliver new capabilities to the border.  Part of the technical challenge on the border is the harsh border environment and the need for hybrid connectivity, enhanced tactical communications, and edge computing.  Learn how CBP and industry are working together to fill the gaps and meet the requirements.

Featuring: 
Luke McCormack, Former CIO, DHS (moderator), 
Xan Schmickel, Chief Architect, Office of Information and Technology, CBP, 
Bogdan Frusina, Founder, Dejero, 
Mark Olson, Vice President, Homeland Security, Peraton, 
Erick Reese, Innovation Team, CBP, and 
Michael Hardee, Chief Architect, Law Enforcement & Justice, Red Hat

This discussion took place at 2023 HSDF Border Security Symposium in Washington DC on December 12, 2023.


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Announcer:

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 this first of a two-part series, learn about the technology challenges on the border, such as the need for hybrid connectivity, enhanced tactical communications and edge computing, and hear how industry is working with CBP to rapidly deliver advanced technologies and new capabilities to border agents, featuring Luke McCormick, former DHS Xan Schmickel from CBP's Office of Information and Technology, Bogdan Frusina, founder of Dejero, Mark Olson, homeland security lead at Peraton, Erick Reese from the CBP Innovation Team and Michael Hardy, Red Hat's chief architect for law enforcement and justice. This discussion took place at the annual HSDF Border Security Symposium in Washington DC on December 12, 2023.

Luke McCormack:

I'm going to start with. Let's start with the Invent Team. I can't resist. I would like you, eric, to describe first what is the Invent Team. What does the Invent Team do for a living? We'll start there and then we'll get into how they do it, how they interact with people, et cetera. But let's start with that.

Erick Reese:

I'll get 50 minutes for that conversation.

Luke McCormack:

And you need to do that in about three minutes. Please Got it.

Erick Reese:

Well, thank you. Well, first and foremost, it is a privilege and honor to be here, truly humbling with the level of experience and speakers that are present at this event. So I just want to start off with that. But to begin so, I work with the CBP Innovation Team under the office of the commissioner. We were founded back in 2018.

Erick Reese:

Our charter and mission it really mandate is to identify, adapt and deliver innovative commercial technologies to the field for the sole purpose of making our personnel more safe and more effective. I think that's really been the theme that you've been hearing throughout today is how our frontline personnel and workforce can be more effective in a contested, constrained resource, constrained environment, in a harsh environment and I think we'll get into the connectivity here in a little bit but also one that just requires an imperative to innovate, and our team has the ability to interface with industry in some unique and diverse ways. We have various mechanisms that allow us to reach out and see what's out there. We have problem sets that we collect. We've heard discussions earlier today about requirements and how we form requirements and how those can help us drive towards, you know, identifying problems.

Erick Reese:

There's a lot of unique problems out there. A lot of them are hard to solve and so we need solutions. We need ability to interface with industry. We need industry to interface with each other as well and to listen to the operator, to listen to the agents that are in the ground. That is the ground truth.

Erick Reese:

We know that, because we're working with emerging technologies, that risk is inherent with that. We're 100% willing to move forward in ways that you know. There may be noble failures, we may learn from industry and how certain capabilities end up being successful or not, but we look at rapid delivery. We're looking at zero to 18 months to push a technology or push a capability out to the field. Our model is iterate and improve. So I think it's important for industry to understand that your technologies and capabilities, they're not perfect, they're not going to be out there and it's not going to be the perfect solution right away. Right, you need to hear feedback from the operator, from the agents that are using it, letting you know how its utility is impacting operations and impacting the day-to-day life of of our frontline workforce.

Luke McCormack:

Okay, Erick, I appreciate that. Xan, let me go to you, Chief Architect. What does the architect organization do? How does that fit into the picture here? Where do they fall into play in regards to ultimately getting some capability out to the field?

Xan Schmickel:

Yes, so architecture is very helpful.

Luke McCormack:

I'm sorry, that's okay. You just sort of look towards it and it'll magically appear. All right, that sounds good.

Xan Schmickel:

So what I do is really trying to make sure that the technology that Invent brings in and anyone that wanted to insert new technology into CBP is really aligned with the CBP IT governance model and also aligned with our enterprise architecture.

Xan Schmickel:

So that's the point is to make sure that we have a way to maintain and manage the technology that is coming into CBP. So, in the sense, how does it fit together? We have a technical reference model. We also have a technical insertion request model that we will vet the technology and we will work with the requester to make sure that the technology is fitting their need and also it's not going to create vulnerability or security issues within the enterprise. So that technology is really also helping the mission. It's not just like because I'd like to use this technology and then I will insert it into the CBP. Really, the alignment with enterprise architecture is very important so that we don't end up with a lot of technologies that only be used one time but then we have to continuously patch and then make sure that it doesn't create vulnerabilities for CBP.

Luke McCormack:

We drill a lot of holes in the ground and have a maintenance nightmare. So let me get industry's perspective here. Mark, I'm going to start with you. We heard the chief earlier. We heard several of the panel members earlier. We're hearing the panel members now. Undoubtedly you're thinking, wow, I've got this technology, it's in the lab, I can deploy this. What's your thoughts here on what you're hearing in regards to the requirements out there, the gaps in the capabilities and where industry can fit into that and insert themselves?

Mark Olson:

Yeah, again, clearly, the collaboration side of the equation I mean working with Eric's organization, understanding the architecture that's in place that you need to work with.

Mark Olson:

I think one of the things that, as you're looking at it and we talked about it earlier what are the outcomes that are out there that you're actually looking to drive towards to meet the requirements that are in place today, I think from an industry perspective, I'm always looking at how can I challenge my own organizations to think about those outcomes and then think about, from at least in this equation here, with what the existing tool sets are that are in place, how do you maximize, how can you optimize within that structure that's in place, with innovation that comes through in that and, frankly, where do we put our investments in there?

Mark Olson:

But then how do we connect with CBP to have that conversation and make sure those investments are actually targeting a need and objective at the end of the day, Requirements we've talked about those requirements, We've messaged that, but frankly there's still an objective that it's still trying to meet as we come out of those. I think for us it's that collaborative approach across industry and as sitting here with other industry experts, and how do we actually bring a partnership community to that dialogue. It's not just a single thread. Right, we don't all have the answers, but how do we get the right industry partners together to actually solve gap dynamics that you're talking about and putting forward? So we try to push through that narrative and that dialogue to try to tackle those objectives.

Luke McCormack:

So, Erick, you kind of explained what Invent is. Can you talk to us a little bit more about what is the process that you use to, let's say, for example, address some of the very clear requirements that we're hearing from the operators? Right, and we talked in our prep about hey, we want to make sure we're thinking about the operator first, the officer first, the agent first. How does what you're doing in that rapid prototype address those needs? Sooner rather than later, presumably?

Erick Reese:

Yeah, absolutely so. You know, when we look at problem identification and problem sets, so we have three.

Luke McCormack:

And, if I may, maybe get, if it's in the Petri dish, we'll say get specific about. Hey, what is going on with TACCOM? What is going on with computing on the edge inside INVENT, right?

Erick Reese:

Yeah for sure. So I mean let's use a real scenario, right. I mean we're looking at the border environment very harsh, very austere, very remote, limited infrastructure, if any, in some locations, limited LTE com available, and so, you know, we all agents out in the field are carrying around. We've seen a couple of folks already today mention their phone, right, so we have a lot of personnel that are carrying around this device to help them with situational awareness. That situational awareness, though, is no, they don't have full use of it when we don't have connectivity, and so, when we are looking at industry, we're looking at a hybrid. You know, we're looking at a hybrid approach of different type of solutions that can integrate with our existing systems, as well as reduced cognitive load, reduced cognitive load on agents. We don't want personnel or CBP workforce carrying around a bunch of different devices.

Erick Reese:

So form factor and all that, that's just a use case, right applicability, but our process in doing that is working with some strategic partners to let them know these are our problem sets. We have an agreement with them. They actually do tech scouting for us. They reach out, they have a great interface with industry. From there, we're able to have some very meaningful connections and look to see does this capability really align with our mission? And then we move forward with a project life cycle that would include, in simple terms, pre-deployment, deployment, post-deployment, and that really incorporates the iterate and improve cycle. That really is driven by the frontline personnel right, their feedback, their use of it.

Luke McCormack:

So hopefully that. So you probably have at least 50 companies here. They've been listening to a plethora of problems being identified. If they wanted to interact with the tech scouting team, I guess I'll call it that. How do they do that? What's that process? Is that a one way where the scouts go out and scout and hopefully they get discovered? Or can they say hey, listen, I heard the chief and we solve this problem in Israel and we can solve it here, right, how does that happen?

Erick Reese:

Yeah, so there's several methods that we use for industry specifically, we may send out a request for proposal and we utilize other transaction authorities quite often as well. What's that?

Luke McCormack:

Just so people understand what that means.

Erick Reese:

It's an ability for us to push the solicitation which would go out to industry. That solicitation would detail the focus area that we really want to drive towards and the use case. From there we can interact with industry. Industry can also interact with each other. It's a non-far-based mechanism that really drives innovation for us. I think it's a great opportunity for industry to be able to connect with others and that offers opportunity for integration both between vendors and industry, as well as within CBP.

Luke McCormack:

Bogdan, have you ever been tech scouted? Nope, you're listening to all of this. You had a lot of very thoughtful comments earlier, thoughts on how can the Invent team be leveraged, or how is it being leveraged, or are there other ways to address some of these challenges? In particular, let's just talk about straight-up basic communications. It seems to me it was very obvious that in order to get that force multiplier 10x in regards to using AI you've got to have connectivity to do it in large part. Talk to me.

Bogdan Frusina:

Well, first of all, I think it starts with architecture. The way you got to look at it is define an architecture, because communication is the fundamental of infrastructure that's required in order for us to be able to deploy any application or any intelligence or human assist to the field. Without comms, we can't do it. The challenge with comms is always, especially in these denied and semi-denied environments, is that there is no vendor, one vendor that can do it all, based on size, power, coverage, bandwidth requirements, etc.

Bogdan Frusina:

A lot of restrictions, it's a lot of restrictions. And the other challenge, as it was just mentioned from Eric, is like you don't want five devices on a person's backpack in addition to what they got to carry and they got to deal with. You don't want a lot more functionality that they need to worry about, you need the stuff to just work seamless. So I think the most important thing is defined at architecture how do you create and you know, I mean we've been involved with the HS for quite a bit now and one of the things that we do is comms right. So it's a bit of a challenge to talk about high level. But, like in a high level perspective is how do you bring the connectivity to the officer in the field in any environment they're in, and leverage the public existing infrastructure, public existing technologies, while also be able to put in private infrastructure as necessary to supplement the holes and the gaps that currently exist, to do that affordably. The Inven team would be able to help out by defining that as a problem set first of all and then second of all, not just the generic comms. It's more like hey, this is sort of an architecture that we're looking at deploying and, but more importantly, also working with the internal enterprise team to make sure that that all fits in and is able to be deployed, because the practicality is not the same thing as the theory and there's a lot of companies out there that have like, especially like.

Bogdan Frusina:

I've learned this we started out with an idea and a process and a thought that we had in the public domain and we showed up in the DHS world and it's totally different and there's a process to learn that not everybody is like you got to adapt to this. So I think it's an important process where the Inven team could help with industry to help them through that approval process. Security infrastructure requirements, you know, minimizing attack vectors, because the moment you're putting connectivity into the field, you've got to have security. So it adds a lot more areas that you didn't have before. Sir.

Luke McCormack:

Xan, you talked about the technical reference model and he just brought up several different items that really need to be considered. I'm sure that you, your team, works very close with the INVENT team when they're working on these rapid prototypes, but I'm just thinking about the industry here, the community. Is it your organization that accounts for making sure that, as something is moving its way some technology is moving its way towards a technical reference model, that all those things that are being described here are being accounted for? Is that how that process works?

Xan Schmickel:

Yes, pretty much. You know we have a process for technical insertions and from the insertion it goes all the way into our technical reference model. But in reviewing every single thing we have to be very careful about what we're inserting into the technical reference model and we really have to run that technology with different evaluation criteria, particularly on the security side. And then we look at the industry to help us understand is this technology, for example, on the dock web or is it part of some foreign countries exploitation lists and things like that? So we really hope that you know putting the technology for the CBP use, for the agents use, but we also want to make sure that the technology is also safe and not causing any vulnerability issues when the agent or the field officers are using the technology. So security for me in the evaluation is a very important criteria.

Luke McCormack:

So all of those things are being accounted for as it makes its way into technology assertion. Mike, I know that Red Hat is doing an incredible amount of stuff as far as edge computing, etc. No question that they're doing it in very primitive areas. Perhaps they're doing it up in on the ISS, who knows where they're doing it? Tell us a little bit about what you're hearing and potentially the solutions that may or may not be out there to run edge computing in a primitive environment.

Michael Hardee:

Yeah, sure, so I'm going to repeat myself from a little bit from my comments earlier, but the capabilities exist, right, and the need for edge computing has been driven by demand, right, so we've moved from the data center to the cloud and now we're all the way out to the mission edge.

Michael Hardee:

And the mission requires enterprise capabilities, right, and one of the things that came up today in a conversation out back is every portion of the edge or the border, rather, whether you're thinking about Mexico, whether you're thinking about Alaska like I hadn't even considered Alaska today and then Canada is. This isn't a one size fits all solution, right, and that's where open source, community, open standards comes into play, because we have to develop a malleable solution to this problem. Right, we need platforms that we can then build capabilities on top of where all the development happens out in the open. Okay, so our entire portfolio has been refactored to meet the mission, whether it's our container platform, whether it's redhead enterprise Linux, which is running on the space station, and also Microsoft Kubernetes, which is going to be available on the edge to be able to run on small form factor compute. So all the capabilities here. But now we as industry need to need to come together vendors and SIs to help our customer develop an open, standard solution to serve the mission, to deliver the capability that the mission requires.

Announcer:

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