Boy, if there’s one thing on this blog I’d like to touch with a 10-foot barge pole, it’s the Iraq war. I can’t wait to step with both feet first into the controversial, nation-dividing conflict that has adversely affected many, many lives. And I would love to do it while everyone’s stirred up over the Presidential election occurring in just over a month.
You know what else I like doing? Kicking hornet nests. Licking flagpoles in winter. Pressing buttons marked “Self Destruct.” Rubbing myself in meat tenderizer and trying to sneak by impound-lot pit bulls. Sticking forks in toasters. Playing with matches. Wearing Yankees caps in Boston. Looking at Chuck Norris funny.
But apparently, network performance is playing a big role in the Iraq war. Whether that’s a good thing depends mostly on how you feel about the Iraq war.
According to Network World story entitled “Biometrics help U.S. soldiers fight terrorism” (and which implies that the Iraq war actually helps fight terrorism, which we’re not going to imply that it does, but in that non-implication we also don’t want to imply that it doesn’t… see? Hornets!) U.S. soldiers in Iraq are using biometrics kits to collect evidence like fingerprints on things such as exploded IEDs and, within 15 minutes, can check via satellite whether that fingerprint matches a prior entry in a database in the U.S, and from there, track down who the print belongs to.
Fifteen minutes may seem like a long time compared to most enterprise applications, but there are huge challenges in this type of system. First, there’s the limited bandwidth and high latency of satellite communication, the nature of biometrics data (high-resolution, high quality images), and the processing time to search through a database of fingerprints. It’s impressive that the turnaround time is that fast.
“Mission critical application” takes on new meaning – remember this biometric data is coming from, and being reported back to, the front lines, not an analyst in the rear echelons.
There have been 28,000 biometric submissions over the past two years from soldiers. The biometric data is also used by the US-VISIT program, which collects digital copies of biometric data from most international visitors to the U.S. The department of homeland security wants to also set this up for people leaving the United States at departure gates as well – and how you feel about that is dependant on your view of U.S. security policy (oh-sweet-mother-of-Thor-and-her-seven-wacky-nephews get-the-hornets-off-me! they-sting-so-much!) It’s a pain in the butt to stand in line at American immigration already (which is probably the least controversial statement I can make).
At any rate, you can see why you would need to manage large amounts of data over a very wide area, with reasonable response times.
Again a blog repeating the 28 thousand collection as fact. The fact is that is all the collections done by SOCOM in two years. The rest of the conventional Army and Marines have collected over two million in the last five years with each file between 700kb and 4Mb. Try handling that much data in 15 minutes. Truth be told only the highest priority match requests from those 28k collections (less than 7%) got the 15 minute treatment. You could never scale their (meaning SOCOM’s)system to meet the demands of the conventional force biometric program. It relies heavily on satellite which would break the bank paying for the higher bandwidth demands.