The Emerging Front

Southern California may emerge as an important center for the unfolding national mission. With this issue of LA VOX, larta begins profiling regional companies involved in various "mission-critical" areas. Between aiding disaster and recovery operations and tracking heavily encrypted and dangerous communication over networks, these two larta poster children are typical of a new breed of company, born in the throes of "defense conversion" and suddenly more relevant to national security again.

Tragedy and Coincidence: e-Team

At the end of August 2001, eTeam, a Canoga Park-based emergency management software company, had wrapped up one of their most grueling negotiations. Their client was the city of New York.

After 15 long months, eTeam had finalized a purchase order with its Emergency Operation Command Center, for what they called "lesser incidents," which occurred on a frequent basis throughout Manhattan. One of the terms of the contract was that the servers would be sent to eTeam's California offices for software deployment and sent back to New York by September 17th. The Emergency Operation Command Center servers would be located at its headquarters--in Building 7, World Trade Center.

But as team members at eTeam watched the Event on September 11 unfold, they realized that everything they had built since 1989 had met its ultimate mission. All of the R&D that DARPA commissioned from the company for network command and control systems; all of the work that, by the mid 90's resulted in "the first ever wireless, tactical, Internet-based, command and control system," faced its greatest challenge - and its once-in-a-lifetime opportunity - when the World Trade Center became a scene of catastrophic emergency. The need of the moment, the absolute calling of the hour - a mission which would only grow in intensity - was emergency response and management. And Building 7 became eTeam's ground zero.

"We knew that Tower Number 7 was probably not going to make it, and in fact Number 7 was the third building that went down," says Matt Walton, eTeam's CEO and co-founder. "We contacted them and told them we would put up the New York databases on our own servers, and that we would be operational. Now we are saying, and with legitimate pride, that in less than 12 hours, we had the city up. They weren't ready to connect until Friday, but when they did, they connected with a T3 line in their 200 workstations. They tied into our ASP servers and they've been running off of them ever since."

These workstations represented dozens of agencies, all of them completely unaware of eTeam's solution prior to the attacks: federal, state and local agencies (including their client, the City of New York, and the FBI), non-profit organizations like the Red Cross and Salvation Army, and critical infrastructure providers like Verizon and Time Warner (telecom and broadcast, respectively).

eTeam's "solution" allows a coordinated emergency management of, and response to, a disaster or event. Integrating GIS and GPS with handheld computing devices such as PDA's and desktop workstations, the system allows for seamless and transparent resource allocation and communication between multiple agencies and individuals, and immediately refines what can be a distressingly confused operation. Simplicity is its hallmark, so that the 1,400 New Yorkers who were introduced to the technology after September 11 became fully operational after less than 15 minutes of training. "It's been a rather important validation of what we had spent five years building," says Walton, understating the huge implications of what he has built.

The company grew (as an incipient part of a predecessor called Illusion Engineering) in the shadow of military work (to simulate in virtual space logistical coordination of battlefield situations). The Northridge earthquake in 1994 was a turning point, convincing Walton and his colleagues as to the importance of this application outside the military. The irony is that the eTeam suite may become very important for a diffuse security and military command structure in light of the unprecedented national security mission the U.S. is forced to develop.

In 1997, eTeam received a CalTIP grant through larta, using the proceeds to support the demonstration of an emergency response system for the City of Los Angeles. Given the landscape of city government, with 47 different departments and the fear around Y2K disruptions, Walton was selling pro-active management of a potential disaster. That effort was successful and in May of 1999, Los Angeles ran another successful citywide exercise for the Y2K celebrations. The federal Department of Transportation, home of the FAA, became a client shortly thereafter.

Since that time, eTeam has steadily added to its roster of customers, including the city of Houston and the states of Louisiana and Arizona. More significant to the New York experience, however, the eTeam software was selected for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah. Walton's missionary passion is hard to resist, and it seems clear that his constant mantra of "management" and "response" will be on every municipality's lips forever.

Tracking the Codes: Vidius

North Hollywood-based Vidius has kept busy assisting the the RIAA with its efforts to trace swapping of copyrighted songs. Vidius' network security technology tracks the sharing of licensed material over decentralized, peer to peer networks like Gnutella and Fastrack, (unlike Napster which is a centralized, server-based system). Vidius' technology was primarily developed for detecting and penetrating heavily encrypted files that would normally provide a cloak of anonymity to the participants, thus helping the recording industry stay on top of the increasingly dispersed and sophisticated means of file sharing as they unfold.

Vidius' interest in law enforcement applications began recently when the company established contact with the FBI earlier this year, proposing the use of their technology to track the distribution and sales of child pornography over networks. During a meeting last May with congressional members in Los Angeles, the company also indicated that these channels were being utilized by terrorist networks and that the technology could serve to track that activity. After September 11, company CEO Derek Broes says, "it just became obvious that it was necessary."

"Law enforcement has been using steganography and encryption technology for years," says Broes. (steganography allows for the hiding of data within graphic files.) The new challenge is the widespread use of peer-to-peer networks and the ease with which information gets transferred. Peer-to-peer networks, based as they are on "open source" standards, are ubiquitous and easily assembled. And while mass distribution networks are designed for widespread trading of, say, music files, he adds, " it's not that difficult for someone within the open source community or someone that has an engineering background to develop their own peer to peer network that is only distributed to select people." While each such network has different motives, given the distribution and the customization and selectivity associated with them, a special group like terrorists could easily adopt and operate through the cracks. The challenge, Broes adds, it to monitor and track the activity, its frequency and how information is being transferred.

"You have to keep in mind that these terrorist groups are not just guys in robes out in the desert. They are incredibly sophisticated and the ones that are residing here are utilizing stentography. So even when you do find the information you don't necessarily know whether it's good or bad. It might appear as a picture of Mickey Mouse but that picture might contain information."

Vidius' own history bears mention. The company started as a "defense conversion" offshoot of military research in Israel. It found its calling within the entertainment industry's own urgent need to get ahead of fast-moving technology enabled by the Internet, in order to protect its own considerable assets.

Broes thought it somewhat ironic that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld echoed a line out of their business plan when being questioned by the press about the effectiveness of the bombings in Afghanistan. There is "no silver bullet, no single thing that's going to win this effort for the coalition," Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld's frequently cited comment is exactly, Broes says, how Vidius describes the problem with tracking hidden information over mass distribution, peer to peer, networks--because of their decentralization, there's no silver bullet that can fix the problem.

"Tracking (involves) basically listening to protocols and sitting at strategic points in the world, and listening for specific languages, and that's obviously a far more complicated process," says Broes. "We're at the very beginning stages…of finding out new ways to locate these rogue protocol networks and being able to monitor them. It's not a process that we are going to solve by Vidius popping in and saying, 'we're here to save the day.' It evolves on a weekly basis and will require far more than just Vidius."