U.S. high-tech arsenal aims to thwart terror

WASHINGTON — In a government building in Herndon, Va., the U.S. Transportation Security Administration is building a computer system intended to anchor the next generation of information sharing and analysis to thwart the truck bomb threat.

Meanwhile, scientists at America's national laboratories and defense research centers are developing scanning and detection equipment and such countermeasures as vehicle-disabling devices and bomb jammers, which can block or delay someone using a cell phone or other remote gadget from detonating an explosive.

The effort, analysts say, is to leverage America's strengths — its technology, wealth, organizational power and educated citizenry — to blunt terrorists' advantages.

The Transportation Security Operations Center is creating a cyberspace system that will collect and analyze tips from 400,000 truck drivers, toll collectors, construction workers and rest-area crews.

In cooperation with the private sector, the system builds on the trucking industry's six-year-old national call-in line and tracking center. The Highway Watch program will feed a clearinghouse of government information on the transportation industry, becoming "the center of the matrix," in the words of Chet Lunner, assistant TSA administrator for maritime and land security.

Combined with law enforcement, media and other information sources, TSA leaders hope, in effect, to sweep straw from throughout the nation into a giant haystack and search for the sharp points.

"This information never existed in one spot before," Lunner said. "For the first time, we are getting a nationwide, systemwide look at the situation . . . in close to real time."

New technology is also coming on line, much of it classified. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent at such places as the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which combines Department of Energy, Homeland Security and other funding to leverage techniques used to track and detect nuclear weapons, said Nancy Jo Nicholas, nuclear nonproliferation manager for Los Alamos.

Military, business, diplomatic and political leaders are purchasing bomb jammers. Such devices cost from hundreds to millions of dollars, and newer models are small enough to fit into a briefcase or backpack.

Pakistani intelligence said one helped thwart a December assassination attempt against President Pervez Musharraf. Others are being supplied to some U.S. military convoys in Iraq.