HOMELAND SECURITY: FOUR ENGINEERING CHALLENGES

According to Dr. Stephen J. Lukasik, former vice president of Xerox, the RAND Corporation, Northrop and TRW, protecting the U.S. homeland requires a comprehensive security system that can respond to four challenges: "identifying targets in terms of their attractiveness to attackers; preventing the introduction into the United States of materiel not easily available to attackers in the United States; finding individual terrorists in their normal commercial and governmental transactions; and identifying the organizations that provide them financial, personnel and operational support."

Engineers can develop ways to respond to these challenges, says Lukasik. However, they cannot successfully do so unless many broad political, legal, bureaucratic and international issues are resolved.

Lukasik is currently a management consultant to the CEO of Science Applications International Corporation, where his recent work has been on the vulnerabilities of industrialized societies to terrorist attack, nuclear smuggling, and the identification and interdiction of terrorist attacks through data mining. In addition to his work at several corporations, he has served as deputy director and then director of the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), chief scientist of the Federal Communications Commission, and on advisory committees of the federal government, several universities, and the National Research Council. He is the author of numerous papers and reports dealing with national strategies for cyber defense and for international approaches to the protection of information systems against cyber crime and cyber terrorism.