The fence that thinks for itself

Matt Bradley

• Last Updated: June 09. 2008 9:02PM UAE / June 9. 2008 5:02PM GMT

The US began installing a 700-mile hi-tech section of fence along its border with Mexico last year. Sandy Huffaker / AFP

In the middle of the desert, a man approaches a border fence, places his hand on the wire mesh and starts to climb.

What he does not see is that the vibrations he has made on this “smart fence” have triggered several cameras that are now recording his every move, identifying his facial features, matching them to existing police and intelligence databases, establishing complex connections with other previously identified intelligence assets and alerting the police and border control services.

This is done almost immediately and without human help.

The technology has been produced by Asia Global Technologies (AGT), one of the world’s fastest-growing international security companies, and was unveiled in a presentation at the International Security National and Resilience exhibition this year in Dubai.

“We’re trying to break this paradigm where there are people who do intelligence and people who do security,” said Gary Lenz, a senior representative for AGT.

The UAE’s border system, AGT officials said, exceeded the capabilities of traditional security by adding an intelligence element that roped in data and information from multiple sources. By synthesising and interpreting information before threats materialise, the system presented “clear and actionable intelligence in real time” to law enforcement officials. “The idea is to have a fully automated system that takes the load off the operator to tell them things they need to know, not just things that are rolling around the border,” Mr Lenz said.

The AGT presentation cited the bombings of April 1995 in Oklahoma City and July 2005 in London as examples of the frailties of “traditional” security techniques. Despite investigators finding images of the suspects and licence plate numbers caught on camera, those photos came too late to prevent the crimes and save lives.

The problem, said AGT, is that the sheer volume of intelligence information can confuse and stymie law enforcement officials – what it calls “paralysis by analysis”.

To meet this challenge, AGT’s Mastermind intelligence system uses sophisticated computing power to present what the company calls a “unified situational awareness picture”.

“Human intelligence is key,” said John Scolaro, the vice president of Universal Dynamics (UDI), one of AGT’s subsidiaries. “You can’t really replace human intelligence and that’s still a part of many security master plans. What integration does is try to reduce – not necessarily eliminate, but reduce – human intervention requirements to assess a situation and react.”

The challenge, said AGT, was programming the security sensors and other equipment to distinguish between small woodland creatures and an invading infantry unit. Getting it wrong would be expensive, time-consuming and potentially dangerous.

The answer lies in sophisticated computing algorithms that are capable of accurately identifying an act of aggression while suppressing benign observations so that human security forces respond to the right problem with the right amount of force.

AGT has won two government contracts to use its Mastermind system to integrate the country’s existing, traditional security apparatus. The border “smart fences” are now in place throughout the UAE except for large tracts along the country’s mountainous border with Oman. Other projects include securing about 15 on- and offshore oil drilling facilities, mostly in Al Gharbia.

UDI’s contracts, said Mr Scolaro, represented a new emphasis in the Gulf on top-notch security systems to repel regional threats and protect assets. Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, is UDI’s second-largest client after the US government.

“The UAE and other countries that have increased their assets and have spent billions of dollars on building an infrastructure now seek to protect those assets. So we’re seeing a lot more attention paid to the borders,” said Mr Scolaro, who added that UDI had been working with the UAE for less than two years.

The kind of “smart” integrated technology used on the country’s borders may soon make a more glamorous debut in the capital. The Emirates Palace hotel, one of the capital’s most distinguished landmarks, recently signed a partnership deal with DuosTech, a Florida-based purveyor of hi-tech security systems. Gianni Arcaini, the chief executive of DuosTech, described the same human weaknesses in hotel security that UDI and AGT identified at border posts.

“Smart systems essentially replace the human observer of a video scene with analytical software that examines the video and instantly detects any breach of a set of rules,” Mr Arcaini said. “This relieves security personnel from the burden of closely observing video feeds from hundreds of cameras and allows them to respond only to effective, actionable events.”

In fact, those flawed human security guards – with their bathroom breaks, daydreams and snack-machine runs – could soon become redundant.

The Middle East’s security market will be worth Dh28.3 billion (US$7.7bn) this year, according to a study commissioned by Reed Exhibitions Middle East, which organised the ISNR exhibition. Reed Exhibitions expects that value to rise to Dh43.3bn by 2013.

While UDI’s contracts are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Mr Scolaro said the shift away from human intelligence to sophisticated computerised systems would save money in the long run.

“One of the highest costs of security are people,” he said. “You used to have a border where you would have a guard walking a dog. You had to have a 24/7 secure facility and guard these checkpoints with multiple shifts. That was a very high cost.”

The system, designed to integrate large amounts of personal information and intelligence data from various state agencies, is unlikely to mitigate privacy concerns. But such concerns, said Mr Scolaro, were less salient in the UAE than in the West.

“This is a government that has regulated more of how the society is influenced and controlled [than in western countries]. So its use of more intrusive technologies to monitor society might not be taken so personally,” he said. “It goes back to security versus convenience and privacy. If you want to detect and identify threats, you have to monitor them. You might monitor the innocent along with the guilty.”

Mr Scolaro said his firm was also looking to India and Africa. Meanwhile, he saw the UAE as a regional leader in security. “The UAE is what we see as the Singapore of the Middle East in terms of security,” he said.

“If anybody can’t afford to compromise on their security, it would be the UAE. They’re the backbone of the Middle East in terms of commerce, finance and now, tourism.”


mbradley@thenational.ae