THE BORDER REPORT

The U.S. Homeland Security Department wants to use the same strategies used to identify UFOs to find weapons of mass destruction in your community.

And that, loyal reader, may be the strangest sentence I have ever written.

Any cellphone will do, I'm told. I just use the iPhone example because it's such a hot commodity these days, spinning rims for the middle class.

Anyway, so here's the latest plan from the Homeland Security Department. Too early to tell if it'll work, but this is what they want to spend/invest your tax dollars on.

Homeland Security has appropriated $3 million for "out of the box" solutions to monitor weapons of mass destruction in the United States. The plan the agency hopes contractors will come up with is a sensor that can be placed inside your cellphone, building a network of 240 million phones, all using biological and chemical sensors to pick up WMDs within the country.

It's called the CELL-ALL Ubiquitous Biological and Chemical Sensing system; the Feds sent out the Request for Proposal last week for ideas.

Now, so far the emphasis is on volunteers agreeing to have the sensor installed in their cellphone and the ability to switch it on and off so there's, at this time, no plan to jamming the cell sensors down our throats.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home network uses the same general idea. The SETI@home program uses your computer's power to download and analyze radio telescope waves. We're not reluctant to participate in the search for UFOs, SETI claims three million computers make up their @home network; so there may not be much opposition to the CELL-ALL program.

Here's the full wording from the Feds request:

6.  Research Opportunity Description

DHS S&T has designated this program as a High Impact Technology Solution (HITS), which is designed to a provide proof-of-concept answers within one to three years that could result in high-payoff technology (revolutionary) breakthrough. DHS S&T is seeking out those innovative, “out-of-box”, possibly disruptive technologies (disrupting the normal evolutionary technological development process).  It is recognized that this project will have considerable technological risk; however it also offers the potential for significant gains in capability. Innovation is critical. Offerors should demonstrate that their efforts are aimed at high-risk/high-payoff technologies that have the potential for making revolutionary rather than incremental improvements to homeland security, including emerging threats and operational challenges. DHS S&T reserves the right to select for award and fund all, some, or none of the Full Proposals received in response to this solicitation.

Today’s biological and chemical sensing networks work effectively to cover limited and specific physical areas and environments with significant cost and overhead.  In order to greatly expand coverage and realize greater WMD protection for the nation, a revolutionary breakthrough that provides for a much larger and lower cost sensing distributed network is required.  For example, if biological and chemical sensors could be effectively integrated into common cell phone devices and made available to the American public on a voluntary basis, the Nation could potentially benefit from a sensor network with more than 240M sensors.  Through this BAA, HSARPA is seeking to accelerate advances in miniaturized biological and chemical sensing (e.g. laboratories on a chip) with integration into common device(s) and a communication systems concept for large scale multi-sensor networks. This proof of concept should be capable of detecting hazardous biological and/or chemical materials with eventual expansion to the detection of explosive and eventually radiological materials (in future collaborations with other organizations). In the first year, proposed work should lead to a minimum of a relevant laboratory demonstration of a proof of concept sensor, device and communications system for Cell-All. Optional second year work may be proposed to build upon success in year one and may include additional field experiments and characterizations.

The proposed concept should develop a miniaturized sensor, device and system that when integrated is capable of addressing the following performance characteristics:

•    Integrated into a common domestic platform, such as a cell phone •    User enabled so that the device can be switched on or off at the discretion of an individual user. •    Low cost and easy to maintain at scale •    Capable of accurately and securely communicating the location, date, time and binary outcome of sample readings •    Capable of receiving and displaying warning information from operations centers •    Demonstrates significant potential to provide accurate readings in a wide variety of environments •    Provides adequate sample collection methods within the host device to enable accurate sensing •    Provides sensing capability for multiple samples and any required methodology to readily refresh consumables •    Provides a reasonable power profile that does not significantly degrade the performance of the host device •    Survives a variety of environmental conditions •    Demonstrates an effective lifetime of more than one year. •    Supported by developmental architectures and development environments that promote low cost experiments, spiral prototyping and wide scale implementation.