New in Mass Transit Protection: 

    The National Institute of Justice and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority have developed a Chemical/Biological Emergency Management System for the Washington, DC Metro Area subway. 

    This is part of the Department of Energy’s DOE PROTECT (Program for Response Options and Enhancements for Chemical/Biological Terrorism) program, which combines advanced DOE and commercial technologies to provide facility management with early warning of a Biological/Chemical attack. The system will increase the speed of evacuation with emergency alarms, video coverage, and announcements. 

    This emergency management system will be deployed November 2001. The technology will be tested in Washington, DC, and the lessons learned during the deployment will be exported to other metropolitan subway systems throughout the nation 

          Source: The National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center 
 

New in Airport Security: 

     The FAA has announced that is will began using Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) as a part of their beefed up security program. Thetechnology uses regular video images that scan 200 points on a person’s face and then compares them to a database of known criminals, terrorists or suspects. Images from the database matches the person’s face most closely with that which appears on the video screen and law enforcement can compare the stored photos to the person believed to be in the airport. 

    The advanced technology picks up the contours of the face, the shape of the nose, hollows of the cheeks, and the curvature of the eyesockets.  The information then gets transformed into a digital string of about 800 bytes long. This becomes the unique signature of your face.Boston’s Logan International Airport will use this technology on a trial basis starting November 2001 

          Source:  Federal Aviation News and the Los Angeles Times 
 
 

Pentagon Technologies To Combat Terrorism:

     The Pentagon is identifying the right mix of new technologies required to confront a  biological attack on America. The Department of Defense’s combat terrorist technology task force, a twelve-member panel formed on September 19, 2001, is analyzing hundreds of new technologies in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. 

     The task force is charged with accelerating the new technologies that the military will need to prevent, detect and respond to an attack usingchemical, biological or explosions. The Pentagon will not comment on how the new technologies will work. 

          Source:  Aviation Week and Space Technology 

     I have found that there are a lot of new technologies in the war on terrorism, but many agencies are not talking, I would guess that one newtechnology is keeping silent.