Robert Beck, an EPA contractor with Weston Solutions, led a 200-person contingent to the region on a Saturday afternoon. Their mission: Quickly locate the toxic remains of the shuttle’s equipment.
Back in 2003, contractors like Beck had to report to a disaster response site and sign into a log sheet to allow senior government management to track their arrivals and departures. “Our staffing people spent a lot time tracking the arrival and departure of our team members,” the EPA contractor said.
In a couple of years, the need for first responders to log their credentials with a pen and a piece of paper every day could be easily replaced by the government smart card. According to Jim Lowder, MDI Security Systems’ chief technology officer and vice president of engineering, a smart card could be programmed to track when a first responder like Beck arrived on a disaster scene.
“The smart card of the future could not only alert a senior manager when a person with critical skills arrived on his database, but it could also provide their full resume of skills and expertise,” said Lowder.
“Imagine that two people have to work together for the first time in a crisis situation,” he added. “There’s no time to go over a person’s qualifications in a formal interview. A smart card could lay out critical skill sets for a disaster’s leadership team, so they can assign them to duties commensurate with their skill sets.”
For Beck, one of the biggest problems for his team during the Columbia disaster was finding qualified first responders who had experience using Global Positioning Systems.
Tony Robinson, the Region 6 Director for FEMA, said credentials like this would have helped his team identify the professional capabilities in this disaster. However, he noted during a recent speech at the Fiesta Informacion convention that there was a need for security credentials during the cleanup efforts that followed Hurricane Katrina and Rita.
“This was the first time that we had first responders shot at during their duties,” he said. “There will be a higher security need in the future for a common access card.”
Within the next couple of years, every government employee could also carry similar credentials with comparable capabilities. When President George Bush signed Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, it mandated the establishment of a standard identification credential for each government and contract worker. Within the next five to ten years, some government marketing security firms anticipate that as many 40 million people will carry a card with these unique credentials.
HSPD-12 will bring together logical and physical access control functions that will benefit the government and its customers. However, it also raises some new challenges.