IM for US security: how it works

By Michael Kanellos

IBM and a consortium of US government agencies in the Washington DC area are creating a wireless emergency network that will allow approximately 40 police, fire and safety agencies to communicate in real time via instant messaging and access one another's databases.

And this is how it works...

The CapWIN network will let law enforcement agencies and others do three things: communicate with one another over a secure instant messaging network; search multiple databases; and permit better coordination between different agencies or officers responding to an emergency.

A police officer arriving at an emergency, for example, could enter a chat area to get a current summary of the situation while others at distant locations could run license plate checks with different state and federal agencies on vehicles leaving the scene.

The network will run on standard PCs, handhelds and mobile phones. On the back end, it will run on clustered IBM eServers that will link to installed servers and databases. The first stage in the project, which will be complete in a year, will revolve around creating and testing the basic network.. Later, functions like voice may be added.

While the World Trade Center attacks intensified the need for cross-agency and cross-jurisdiction communication, the project actually goes back to 1999. That year, a man threatened to jump off the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, which connects Virginia and Maryland.

The standoff lasted seven hour. The police officers at opposite ends of the bridge couldn't speak directly to each other during the crisis because they came from different agencies and ran independent networks.

Michael Kanellos writes for News.com